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In Memoriam

My great-aunt passed away recently. I used to call her Judge-ammoomma or Judge-grandma, because her husband was Judge-grandpa, my grandfather's younger brother. She was eighty-nine: she had lived a full life. She used to tell my mother, "Pray for me, so that I die without suffering." And so she did, never having been hospitalised in her entire life for more than a day or two. Anayasena maranam, death without suffering. She was blessed.

When I was a child in Thiruvananthapuram, Judge-ammoomma lived nearby, in the next lane over -- they lived there for 20 years in that vast old house that is now the local post office. We used to go there frequently, my parents, my sister and I. I remember the old lady as she was then: tall and slender, bespectacled, grey-haired, pale-skinned, always dressed in white, always with a kindly expression. I have also never heard her raise her voice all my years.

She was one of those people whom it was impossible not to like -- for she was always solicitous of our welfare; she was unfailingly polite even to the little children; and she remembered everyone's birthdays, and the names of their children, in our huge and far-flung extended family.

And she was mildly eccentric, too -- she had a mania for keeping an exact routine, so accurate that we could set a clock by what she did: her lemon-juice precisely at 11 am, her exercise definitely at 5:30 pm, her dinner on the dot at 8 pm. We used to joke that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust would induce Judge-ammoomma to change her unwavering pattern.

My sister spent a lot of time with my great-aunt, especially when my mother was transferred to a distant town, and my sister was studying for her exams. My parents would leave her with Judge-ammoomma. The old lady would look after her, unfailingly enquiring after her needs, and offering her large amounts of Horlicks and Bournvita to keep her strength up while she studied.

My sister also claims -- she is a keen observer, but has been known to exaggerate on occasion, so I take it with a pinch of salt -- that Judge ammoomma could never remember where she had left her keys; and that she would spend half her time looking for keys or her sandals.

Great-aunt never changed -- for as long as I can remember, she looked the same; even when I visited her shortly before her death she looked almost exactly the same as I remembered her decades ago. Only her memory had begun to go a little --she didn't quite know who I was; and then she enquired if I'd ever been to her daughter's -- my aunt's -- house. I had, many times, over the years.

Judge-ammoomma was such a mild person that the casual observer would never have imagined she was a rebel, someone who had shocked her family and society in general, back in the hide-bound 1920's. For she had broken that great taboo -- of marrying outside the caste.

It would be much easier to imagine my Judge-grandpa in the role of a rebel; after all, he was a tough-minded person, one who retained his lucid and logical intellect well into his eighties. But my delicate great-aunt was there, too, and she must have had a difficult time.

It must have been absolutely shocking for both families that this young couple decided to challenge the norms of the day. My great-uncle was, by family legend, a holy terror in his young days -- he always did exactly as he pleased. So it was not surprising that he would decide to do something out of the ordinary. And in any case, our ancestors were well known for being hotheaded, boisterous and headstrong: rough feudal landowner stock.

But great-aunt's steadfast refusal to marry anyone but great-uncle -- and she had to wait for him for 11 years while he toiled away in the lower courts -- must have simply astonished everyone. For I have met many members of her family, and they are all courtly, genteel, and soft-spoken: a cultured and aristocratic bunch.

But they did marry, and they lived together more or less happily for almost 50 years. They were always a study in contrasts -- my vigorous and argumentative great-uncle, and my otherworldly, ethereal great-aunt. My sister has a theory that Judge-ammoomma deliberately cultivated an air of vague benevolence and tolerance just to be able to deal with great-uncle's demanding self. She may be right.

Judge-ammoomma's family came from Malabar, and they moved to Travancore after the Moplah Rebellion. It was in Kollam that she met my great-uncle, then a junior lawyer working for her uncle's friend. She must have been a beautiful young woman then, and obviously great-uncle was smitten.

Old-timers used to tell many tales about their storybook romance, but my aunt tells me both her parents always maintained a discreet silence about those days. I can imagine great-uncle seeing great-aunt one day as she was on her way back from the temple, resplendent in a gold-bordered mundum-neriyathu, the lovely two-piece Kerala sari, and falling in love with her.

It was a little odd to think of formidable old great-uncle in love. For he was the magisterial, no-nonsense type whose sternness was intimidating. Looking back, I wish I had had the wits to spend more time with him. He and my father spent many hours talking about politics and other manly pursuits. I never talked with him much, partly because I was afraid a kid would bore him.

Now and then I would travel with my great-uncle and my mother when he went to visit his lands in Malabar. He would drop us off at our village in Central Travancore. I loved those trips in his huge black 1950s Chevy, which we called "the palace on wheels" -- it was so stately; it consumed gas in litres per mile, not vice versa. An old chauffeur with cataract trouble took care of the car; he was my friend.

Later, I went to the US, and when I came home on vacation, great-uncle would ask me penetrating questions about life there. He wasn't as tough as I had thought, I realised. I would take pictures of him, and he always refused to smile. But I caught him unawares once, laughing at some joke, and he liked it; him with his balding head and heavy, horn-rimmed glasses.

I should have asked him about his life, the extraordinary cases that he handled as a judge and later as chief justice. Later it occurred to me that he was much like the judge in Yukio Mishima's tetralogy: he was a man who had observed an entire tumultuous age go by. Ah, what stories he could have told me!

But I never did ask him -- what a great character he would have made for my unwritten novel! I did spend a lot of time with Judge-ammoomma, though; on my frequent trips to India on vacation or business, I would visit her. She always took a benign interest in everyone's affairs, and she would tell me proudly of the achievements of various grandchildren or nieces or grandnephews.

However, nothing would interfere with her routine. At the appointed hour, she would say apologetically, "I must go have my dinner now. I must not change my routine, or else it might affect my health." She must have been right -- for she was formidably healthy for such a frail-looking person. She controlled her body through a strict diet -- she was very careful about what she ate, avoiding many foods -- and exercise and a healthy dose of prayer.

Judge-ammoomma became the matriarch of our family -- even though technically in our matrilineal joint families, she would have been considered an outsider -- by the simple expedient of outliving most of her generation. Great-uncle, and his brothers and sisters, all passed away years ago: my grandfather, Police-great-uncle, Gopalan-great-uncle, Janaki-great-aunt, and the great-aunt who died in her youth.

Everyone would come to great-aunt for her blessings, whenever they had a new baby born in the family, or someone got married. My sister brought her infant daughter to our great-aunt; and as she has always done, Judge-ammoomma gave the baby a gift of a hundred and one rupees. I think my niece still has that money in her piggy bank. My cousin tells me great-aunt would give the same amount, always Rs 101, to her grown-up career-women grand-daughters, too.

Judge-ammoomma lived with my aunt in Madras after great-uncle passed away. My aunt told me that perhaps the old lady had a premonition of her coming death: she had been praying a great deal, more than usual and loudly, in the weeks before she died. My aunt spoke with me for hours about her mother, remembering, reminiscing.

My other aunt was unfortunate -- after a lifetime of globetrotting, living in Bombay, the Middle East, New York, she just moved to Madras to be close to her mother. Alas, even before she had set up house, Judge-ammoomma passed away. Ironic, isn't it, the best-laid plans of mice and men, how they gang aft agley?

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