If technology has given us conveniences like mobile phones and folding umbrellas, it has taken away some too. One of them is the joy of travelling by low flying commercial aircraft. In a December morning of bright sunshine, my wife and I changed plane at Chennai and boarded a made-in-India Avro. There were no hatches above seats, all hand luggage was dumped at a corner and secured with a net. The cabin was small, but the windows weren’t.
In Kerala, our plane flew low over a lush green sea, barely metres above the serrated fronds of millions of coconut palms. Through occasional gaps in the foliage, we saw meandering rivulets, red tiled roofs, schools with playgrounds from where children lustily cheered at the aircraft. We also saw steeples-domes-turrets of churches, mosques, and temples with glistening sandy compounds.
Trivandrum—long before the name was formally Indianized to a seven-syllable Thi-ru-va-nan-tha-pu-ram—was a city more beautiful than what I could have imagined. Most of the houses were one-storey bungalows in large compounds full of leafy trees, often guarded by a fierce looking dog. There were hardly any high-rise buildings. The roads were not wide, but were wide enough for the population and the rare personal vehicles, that is, Ambassador cars. There was no trash anywhere. At all times the roads seemed to have been just swept. A beautiful perennial river flowed through the town. It seemed a wizard had turned a picture postcard into a living city!
Back home, when I had landed myself a job in the capital Kerala, I took out an atlas. Putting one prong of a large compass on my hometown Kolkata and the other on Trivandrum, I drew a circle with Kolkata at the centre. The circle included Lahore, the Yangtze River, Nom Pen, and Hanoi, but no part of India except for the tip of Kanyakumari a little of Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
In the distant, beautiful city of Trivandrum, we found a part of a house for rent in Manacaud through an acquaintance. The house owners, Saraswathi Amma and her husband Kunjukrishna Pillai lived in the main building in the same compound with their daughter, son-in-law, and a younger daughter. Saraswathi Amma’s five-year-old grandson Kuttan filled the house with his chirping. His sister Rani was a baby then. Sadly, the family had no dog.
Traditionally, the Nairs of Kerala are a matrilineal community, which explains why Saraswathi Amma’s son-in-law lived with them. Her son Vijayan was with his in-laws, referred to as “wife-house” in a literal translation of a Malayalam compound word. Over time, the practice has been abandoned and Nairs have switched over to the patriarchal structure of kinship and inheritance. This story is about a time when the past overflowed into the present. This story is also about Saraswathi Amma, a materfamilias extraordinary.
For every individual, there are a few strokes of fortune that make their lives worth living. For Arundhati and me, meeting Saraswathi Amma, who we would shortly start calling Amma, was such a blessing. An exceedingly pleasant person, she had a commanding personality beneath her soft exterior. She was the fulcrum around which her family revolved.
Her husband, Kunjukrishna Pillai was a happy-go-lucky ex-army man. His face, criss-crossed with innumerable lines, was always radiant with a cheerful smile. He had seen action in many theatres of war. And as it often happens, varied and trying experience invested him with a calmness and self-assurance that nothing could upset. He soon became a friend and guide to me. I remember when he took me to a Kathakali performance which continued till early morning.
The four walls of our living room were decorated with 43 framed photographs of Saraswathi Amma’s forebears and members of her extended family. I found it rather strange. But as I lived in the house and thought about the pictures, I realized that as someone from a family that had been displaced during the Partition of India and splintered into many tiny units, I didn’t know what he word “family” meant to Indians in general. Perhaps, in a desolate village in what is now another country which I had never seen—I imagined—there was a house with a similar array of snapshots of people with some of whom I bear a striking resemblance.
Although it was not part of the deal, a cup of coffee soon started coming to us every morning. And on Sundays, the breakfast. Soon, we would join Amma’s family for the Sunday breakfast. Other days in the afternoons, Amma would often call Arundhati and they would have their meals together. Human relationships develop in imperceptible silence, like dewdrops falling on a meadow. I thought maybe, one evening on returning from office, I would find the forty-fourth framed photograph on the wall: yours truly and his wife flanked by a beaming Kunjukrishna and a stiff Amma.
It is amazing how I got to have a strong and special personal bond Amma although we had no common language. She was an epitome of affection, which can be expressed without language. Amma expressed it through a gentle glitter in her calm eyes, and in the countless ways she showed how much she cared for us. Rabindranath Tagore wrote,
So many homes you’ve put me in,
Made me know the unknown,
You’ve brought the distant close, my Friend,
And made strangers my own.
On rare occasions in your life, if you are blessed, a stranger may even become a mother.
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The picture of Amma with her granddaughter is courtesy Rani. When we visited Thiruvananthapuram in 2018, our friends KTR and Bhawani drove us to Amma’s home. The house hadn’t changed at all, but it was a sad homecoming for us; Amma and Kunjikrishna had left. But sadness is a coin the other side of which is happiness. We were delighted to meet a young Saraswathi Amma in her granddaughter Rani. The little Rani had grown up into a happy wife of a handsome young man and a mother of two lovely girls.
Blessed be Rani and her family!
Thank you Rani, for this priceless photograph.
Bengaluru / 03 Dec. 22
