Her small hand presses the light brown wheat dough as she sits in a chair, her fingers married to kneading. The pressure of her palm makes small imprints in the soft dough that look like tiny veins of tree branches. The kitchen smells of yeast as it lingers in the space. She recognizes that air because it whispers the spices of street vendors outside her childhood home and of her own mother’s poetry.
She is my mother, but I don’t know all of her stories, the ones that she lived as a youth with her parents, two brothers, and two sisters. I look at my mother, as my gaze shifts to my daughter who is playing with beads, trying to string them on a pink shoestring. I can imagine my daughter years from now wondering about her past and asking questions of me about her grandmother.
To capture the current of the moment, my own curiosity prompts a question: “Mom, as a young girl in India, what did you play and who did you hang out with?” She speaks of the almond trees her legs climbed as a little girl near her street and her best friend R., who accompanied her wherever she went, playing hopscotch out of the courtyards outside their homes. They still talk once every two weeks, although over twelve time zones separate them.
Every time I ask my mom a question about her past, I’m surprised. I learn a little more each time. Just last week I learned that my maternal grandmother gave birth to four children who each lived until age two or three and then subsequently died. It’s hard to imagine that grief, the repeated succession of losing one child after another. She channeled her grief into poetry, often scribing lines of lyrical verses on anything that could be considered a writing surface. She, as my mother says, was very beautiful, the flesh of her face beaming as though she carried the pregnancy glow even when she wasn’t harboring a child.
My grandmother died when I was seventeen years old. I spent a handful of summers with her when we visited India. I remember following her around everywhere, her presence giving me immediate comfort. Her ritual always included slicing up Indian fruit called sitapul (sugar-apple) or bananas as I woke in the morning. But our relationship wasn’t dependent on conversations, but of caretaking. She would care for me, my pillow was her lap as she stroked my hair. When she would sleep and when I couldn’t, I remember playing with her skin on her forearm, pushing it back and forth like it was a swing. I didn’t know of the questions to ask then, because I didn’t realize how dependent I was on the answers and of the history she carried with her.
Part of that realization makes me sad, having lost all four of my grandparents, not knowing the riches of their soul. Sometimes I don’t know why I gravitate toward piano music instead of the drums or why Emily Dickinson appeals to me rather than Salman Rushdie, or why I have a disdain for rice, but harbor a secret love affair with the Indian street food pani-puri. I suspect it has something to do with where I came from, the things that I know and don’t, but are shaped even when I am not paying attention.
I’m dependent on my history, the part that is completely lost and the one that lives in my mother. I think we are all dependent on the veins of yesterday.
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Do you think of your veins of yesterday? Do you probe your parents or grandparents of their memories? Do you gravitate toward certain interests even though you may not understand your propensity toward it?
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Welcome! I am a lawyer turned freelance writer, essayist, and editor. On staff at Literary Mama and the co-founder and co-editor of the literary journal, The Sunlight Press, my essays and reported work have appeared in The Washington Post, The Lily, Saveur, Civil Eats, Brain, Child, ESPN and elsewhere. I am currently at work on a memoir on grief and culture and how it provides perspective on life’s ordinary graces. I invite you to appreciate the ordinary with me. I hope my daily practice of seeing the magic in the mundane helps you celebrate and find more of these moments in your life too.
Lovely piece. I find out a tiny bit more each time I speak with my folk…of course I am learning to ask the right questions to find the answers of things I long to hear about. Keep the conversation flowing. It is good for her to talk and for you to listen. We learn much about ourselves through others.
Suzicate,
It’s a great exercise to ask the right questions. I find that the answers to my questions usually open up other doors that I didn’t think ever existed. And the process is cathartic for both of us.
God, your poor grandmother. How could she bear the loss?
I smiled when I read about your aversion to rice. My sister-in-law refuses to eat it any more, because it was such a staple when she was growing up. Every meal…rice.
I have been thinking of you, friend. xoxo
Thanks Kitch for thinking of me. I don’t know how she lived with the loss. She never once mentioned it to me and of course, I never thought to ask my mom about my grandmother’s past while she was alive. I was just too young.
Rudri,
I’ve been thinking along these lines lately. I think it’s a part of missing and longing for my parents and keeping the memories alive. This was lovely, I felt like I was there watching your mother kneading.
Thanks Ayala. My reach into my ancestry’s past is a way that I can feel closer to them. There is a sense in me that I need to know their history in order to define mine.
History, culture, connection, blood … it’s one huge current that carries us forward while also tying us to the past. I love sitting and listening to my paternal grandmother recount her (at times) raucous and wild youthful days. She is the only grandparent I am able to learn from as my paternal grandfather speaks no English and my maternal grandparents have passed away — one when I was an infant. It’s sad to think how much more deeply I’d understand myself if I had all of them to lead the way.
Yes. Kelly. Your last line resonates with me. I want to understand myself better, but feel like I have some huge gaps because I don’t know my ancestor’s past and what shaped them. I will have to learn as much as I can from my mom.
Oh I love this! I recently started digging into my roots via ancestry.com. I see the names and dates and wonder about their stories.
That’s great Andrea. I can’t use vehicles like ancestry.com because many in India didn’t keep birth records…
A rich post honoring heritage in the present through your mother and a poignant yearning for yesteryears. I love hearing stories from my mother and my parents-in-law. With my son, I mostly focus on making memory in the present. When he’s older, I hope to tell him more about the past.
Thanks Belinda. I think our blog posts will serve as lovely places where our children and grandchildren can go to learn more about us. I wish, sometimes, my grandparents kept a “scrapbook” of sorts. I would love to learn the details of their lives.
Such a beautiful piece, Rudri. I cannot imagine losing one child, let alone four. How does one recover from that? I’m glad you have some lovely memories of your grandmother, even if you can’t ask her the questions you’d like.
Cheryl,
I am glad that I have some memories of my grandmother. I find myself asking my mom these questions and am learning new things about my grandparents every time I pose a question.
How did your Grandmother keep going? Amazing. I do feel like I need to know more about my parents when they were little…it’s so fascinating.
I really don’t know how she kept going. She was a lovely lady and always carried kindness in her spirit. I also think it is neat to trace what our parents were like at our current age. It would be neat to compare our similarities and differences.
Great point, Rudri – sometimes we don’t know what drives us but it could possibly be easily explained by either our DNA or a collective consciousness within our own family tree. I love reading about these snippets of your life because we do have many things in common – having our mom with us is one of them. And I will tap into my mother’s past and thus our own history just as you do while I still can so my daughter and I can understand ourselves better.
Justine: I encourage you to tap into your Mom’s past. It is so revealing and for me, personally, it has been so cathartic. My mom loves to talk about her past. It is a way of transporting herself into a time that was less painful and more alive.
Rudri, this was beautiful and exquisite. I love this line, “we are all dependent on the veins of yesterday”. I so believe this, that we are complex beings, with intricate memories in our DNA. Only understood when confirmed with stories from the past. Thank you for your gorgeous words.
Thanks Denise for stopping by. I think there are multiple layers to our DNA. I believe it takes chiseling away at our ancestry’s past to reveal what our own DNA means.
You’ve reminded me to ask these types of questions of my mother and grandmother. Thank you!
Thanks Amy! I know you will find out revelations about yourself by the answers that they offer.
Well as you can probably guess, I know *exactly* what you’re talking about! We carry our ancestors DNA and it most definitely shapes who we are and certainly, learning about how those before us have lived gives us an understanding of both them, and us.
Of course Jayne. I loved your post about the UK census in 1911. I think, as we dig into our past and what our relatives carried in their past, we uncover and understand ourselves a little better.