Strawberries on a saree and Mataji, my grandmother
In a writer’s group last week, the prompt that was shared took me back to where I come from. The prompt was: the dress you left behind. The facilitator elaborated that writers could replace the word ‘dress’ with any item of clothing — shirt, saree, jeans, undies, salwar, tie, jacket, cap, etc.
There was only one thought that came to me. Strawberries on a saree and Mataji, my Nani. I opened a new document and began to type.
You didn’t leave anything behind. You left. You had to. It was your time to die.
Your daughters were bereft because none of them got enough of you. They knew that you didn’t get what life owed you. Since no one could change the course of events, no one could lessen your grief, loss and trauma, it was okay that you passed on when you did. Your grown children were mourning the life you did not get to live, celebrating the one they had with you.
I am your granddaughter.
The family joke that connects me to you, dear Mataji, is that once you saw my doll on your bed and said, “Neeru ko hatao, mujhe letna hai.” Move Neeru from here, I want to lie down in my bed. It was not me, but a curly haired doll that my father had shipped for me from USA. He was away for a year and my mother was staying with you along with my four-year-old brother and me as a toddler.
This joke was repeated so many times that I remember it in many voices. Mataji mistook a doll for me. I must have been playing in your bed, Nani. We must have been close.
I was seven when you died. My mother left from Kolkata with my younger brother by train to attend your funeral. Her suitcase was stolen on the train from the ladies’ compartment at night. Back home in Kolkata, I was recovering from chicken pox. Papa would go to work leaving me alone at home — the house keys with our neighbour who came to check on me at lunch time.
We don’t realise how eventful our ordinary lives are till we begin to write them down. The details of the love and chaos are endless. Things happen to us all the time.
My mother’s early childhood at her parents’ home in Lahore was interrupted by the violence and sudden disruption caused by the partition of India in 1947. She became a four-year-old child in a refugee family. Mataji was expecting a new baby when she crossed over to the Indian side of Punjab with her young family. Her life was gripped by fear, loss and uncertainty. She had left her beloved animals — cows, goats and dogs — behind. She held on to her children even as news came in constantly of violence perpetrated on friends and relatives.
Thirty years later, Mataji’s daughter was beginning to grieve the loss of her parents when she was looted again, this time by robbers on a train.
Nani, your daughter Sudha returned home to us in Kolkata with a white saree that you left behind. It had bright red strawberries embroidered on it. It was not cotton. It must have been imported fabric. From Karol Bagh, maybe, where your sons sometimes took the extended family on shopping expeditions in the family Ambassador car.
Over the years, my mother cut up your saree to make window curtains and fabric covers for precious things, like our Panasonic 3-in-1 tape recorder-cum-record player. She used a part of it in a dress she tailored for me. I saw my Nani everywhere in my home. This was my connection to the women who I had come from.
I knew strawberries from the children’s picture books and the novels I was reading in my growing-up years. I was fascinated with berries as fruits, never missing a chance to eat jamun and phalse in the short season when these would become available with street hawkers. There were no strawberries in the markets at that time.
In my mid-20s, my mother and I travelled together to meet my brother in New York. Standing on a sidewalk in Manhattan, wearing new shoes and jeans, I imagined I had walked into a JD Salinger novel. A Langston Hughes poem. I looked at steam escaping from manhole covers and felt like I had walked on to the set of a Hollywood film.
At a fruit stall, I saw a real strawberry for the first time in my life. Finally, the elusive heart-shaped, dotted red berry that I had drawn and coloured so many times as a child. As I bit into the fruit, the juice of the strawberry spilled through my fingers and stained the saree that was my memory of you. You were there with us, Mataji, my Nani.
We had come a long way together, drawing strength, love and resilience from each other. Connected by the strawberries on the saree you left behind.
— The writer is a filmmaker & author
natasha.badhwar@gmail.com
