iii. My Amma's Patchwork

They burst out like seeds from a crackling, overripe pod into the veranda, with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening

            (Anita Desai, Games at Twilight)

My mom and I argue a lot. Like a lot. Enough to prompt my sister to say:

“At one point, it was like every single day. Morning and evening.”

So, I didn’t expect anything to change once I moved to college last year. But in a way—it did. Now, I’m more grateful for the minutes I can steal away to talk to my mom…in between classes…walking to a seminar or waiting to cross the street…on a particularly slow day in the store I work at—don’t tell my manager that!

So, yeah. When I’m on campus, my mom and I don’t fight that much anymore. When I come home? That’s…a different story.

“At first it used to start with you getting moody and Amma giving you a lecture. You would just murmur and not say anything to her face. And then became both of you shouting at each other. And now, I think it’s died down a bit.”

Our arguments have evolved over the years. Sometimes, it makes me feel more mature—instead of her chiding me for leaving my stinky socks in the middle of the room when I come home from school, we bicker ‘intellectually’ now. Like, whether my mom—having grown up in a rural village in India overrun with monkeys and lacking a steady electricity supply—is too conservative for the liberal landscape of California.

The other day, we were circling this topic, too afraid to touch down on it. It was a sore subject, a pruned thumb sucked too red and too raw. I eventually pushed, bringing up her village and her mother, and she outright snapped.

Eyes glittering dangerously like a snake poised to strike, she exclaimed, “You don’t know anything about my childhood! You don’t know about Ammamma!”

See, I always thought I knew enough about my grandmother: she was the mother of ten children (of which my mother was the youngest); she’d taken a cross-country train trip with me when I was a toddler, and subsequently passed away; my mom looked like her from certain angles.

Also, my mom loved saying how ‘ahead of her time’ Ammamma was. That was the kind of thing I might shrug and roll my eyes about. How could someone who’d lived in a rural village in India and spent her entire life as a mother and housewife be ‘ahead of their time’, I’d think?

“I don’t really know. Because she doesn’t talk about Ammamma that much. Because every time she talks about her, she gets really really emotional. It’s like, ‘she’s my mom, you guys don’t know anything about her!’”

That’s my sister—we were both familiar with Amma’s protectiveness of Ammamma. So that’s what I wanted to understand through our conversations: what was so different about Ammamma, and the village my mother grew up in?

And, well, in the quest to answer these questions, I ended up doing something entirely different than learning about Ammamma and my mother’s village. I learnt about my own mom: things I never knew in the nineteen years of being her daughter. And the deeper I went into these stories, an even funnier thing happened: I began to see myself differently, and re-evaluate my own relationship with my mom.

But—I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s start at the beginning, with a village overrun with red monkeys, and a great grandmother who couldn’t see.

When my mom was seven or eight years old, she spent a lot of time with her grandmother, an elderly, precocious woman whose eyesight and energy had dwindled over the years.

“She’ll be sleeping most of the time—not sleeping sleeping. She’ll be lying down”

Indian afternoons were humid, and that house would sometimes feel like a pressure cooker, bringing my mom’s skin to a slow-boil until she couldn’t ignore the sizzling sweat dripping down her back.

“And there are no ACs. Only one stand fan used to be there, and it depends on the mercy of the electricity board. Sometimes, middle of summer, they’ll take away the electricity. They’ll cut off.”

Naturally, her grandmother found other methods of coping.

“So, what she used to do, she used to make all the kids prepare the sandalwood paste. So she will apply to [her] entire face, because she is not able to bear the heat. [And] one hand she will have her hand fan. [And] that is 24/7 it will go. Even [when] the fan is running, her hand is like that.”

My mom’s face softens slightly.

“I used to go and sleep next to her. And with the other hand she’ll pat, so that kids will sleep. [And she has] such a beautiful smell. No perfume [is] equal to that. Very cozy and warm.”

“So that is my favorite.”

[Music]

“I used to buy bananas for my grandmother. While coming [home], one street, one place, there are no houses. And lots of trees. So you know, definitely the monkeys will be there.”

“So you should be very careful, if they see a little bit of banana, they’ll jump on you. I used to be so scared. I used to look around all the time and if I see a little bit of movement on the trees, I used to run [and] jump into the house.”

[Music]

My mother’s bathroom roof was shared with the neighbors. Often, monkeys would come up and grab something—a sari, a blouse, a sock—off the clothesline and taunt my mom’s family with it. You’d catch the jeering red face through the bathroom window and know: the game was afoot.

“We will be shouting here with sticks or something. They’ll sign [to] you that I’m going to tear it. If you do anything, I’m going to tear your clothes like this.”

“Then you need to show them either some rice [or] food. That is a strategic thing. You should put that food in the other direction so that when it comes for that food, you need to go and grab that food.”

[Music]

Note: The full audio work will be dropping on Sunday, August 21! Below is a full transcript of the audio, giving you a preview of what is to come!

“There is one scary thing I remember. I was maybe 11 or 12 years old.”

My mom had placed food up on the roof and waited five minutes.

“We thought the monkey left. So I went to take it out because I am the youngest in the neighborhood, and whoever is younger, they’ll go and fetch those things.”

“So the moment I went, what happened? It came like this HISS”

Her nose wrinkles and her eyes scrunch up into zig-zag lines. She opens her mouth and bares her teeth at the camera. It is maybe the single most terrifying expression I’ve ever seen on my mom’s face. And I don’t want to see it again.

“So scary! Then what happened? I jumped! From the bathroom roof to down!”

Except she had discounted one vital piece of information in her hastily-cobbled-together escape plan.

“There is a nail on the roof”

“Oh my God, really?”

“My full long skirt got cut.”

“What? Like it swirled around you? Like a tornado?”

“No, it ripped! [laughing]”

“Oh! Oh God! [laughing] You got pantsed!”

My sister and I’s favorite story is about one particular run-in that my mom had with a monkey.

It goes like this: my great-grandmother—my mom’s grandmother—couldn’t see very well.

“She cannot see really clearly what is there unless it is right next to her. So, she will just touch their hand. And she’ll be like ‘oh, this is so and so.’ Based on the footsteps, ‘oh, somebody came like this.’”

And well, you wouldn’t know it by looking at my sister or me, but my mom used to have really red hair.

“Uh copper color—not red—copper color. So not bright red.”

While my mom is telling me this, I’m sitting in an office filled with books. As she starts describing the monkeys in her village, she points to a beige tome behind me.

“They have a—what do you call—not light brown. Beige color. Red at the back.”

My great-grandmother, in her later years, would eat a single banana each day. She would eat half in the mornings, and then wrap it back up and tuck it under her pillow before her afternoon naps.

“Even the monkeys know there will be some banana. So, if nobody is there, they will come inside slowly and they’ll go under the bed and just pick up the banana.”

“That day, because I’m a baby, they left me to play somewhere. Basically, I crawled under the bed. Because I’m a baby, I’m guessing I may have [not been] fully clothed or whatever.”

“So, from afar, my grandma saw a red color.”

“Oh! Immediately she’s like, ‘Oh there is a monkey!’”

“Oh my god! That’s so scary!”

“Yeah. And slowly I came out. Luckily they didn’t hit me…with a stick, or something, thinking that I’m a monkey.”

But after half an hour of monkey stories like this, the thing that struck me the most wasn’t even how many close-calls my mom had had. No, it was this:

“You know? They will hit their kids if they are doing something. Yeah, like motikayya [head thump]!”

Motikayyas are kind of like those playful thwacks on the head you’ll see in TV shows and movies like the Three Stooges—slapstick comedy that my father is especially fond of. When I was younger, my parents would smack me gently as a warning.

What my mom was really trying to tell me was that monkey families operated in the same ways as humans: children piggybacked on their parents, sometimes mothers would do lice checks. It was this sort of universal operating software that came preloaded into primates and humans.

Or maybe, it was just that we tried to see ourselves in them, to project our own lives the same way I was trying to do by learning more about Amma’s childhood.

Either way, the resemblance was uncanny. Monkey or not, when children were being naughty…

“They’ll hit on their head. One good bang!”

There’s this scene from this one Bollywood movie my sister and I would watch over and over again, as˜ kids. The movie is called ‘Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham’, which translates literally to ‘Sometimes Happy Sometimes Sad’—it’s more poetic in Hindi, I swear!

It’s about a guy named Rahul, played by this really famous actor in India, Shah Rukh Khan, who gets banished from his family because he marries a girl his father doesn’t approve of.

In the scene [play noise in background], Shah Rukh Khan’s parents are lured to his city by his younger brother who plans to bring the family together. As soon as the parents’ plane touches down, the mother is hit with the feeling that Rahul is nearby. She has no proof, not a shred of evidence about his whereabouts since they cut off contact. But she is sure of it—you can see the recognition dawn on her face.

[Scene from movie]

This, my mom reassures me, is not how her own reunions with Ammamma would go.

“We used to be [on the] third floor. For Ammamma, she never used to go anywhere. So she used to sit there. There is a road right next—a double road. For her, that is the time pass. She used to just watch the people go, and the street: cars, scooters, buses. And the bus stop is somewhere there.”

[Sound of traffic]

In her imaginary diagram of the window overlooking the street, my mom raises her arms and points to the bus stop.

“She can see the time when I used to come. So, she used to wait there. I used to walk all the way from there.”

Again, my mother gesticulates, tracing with her finger in the air, the distance between her and Ammamma.

“Like that scene from Kabhi Kushi—”

“No, not that much”

Well, there go my hopes of a movie adaptation of this podcast.

[Music]

Still, I can’t help but want something to cling on to—to make this foreign thing seem familiar, a part of my world. Then, when my mom gives me the very thing I want—I don’t believe her.

“That street you know, right? Kalanjali area, that double—now it is not like that.”

In the grainy zoom recording, I can see my eyes narrow in disbelief, one of my eyebrows leaping up. Evidently, my mom catches this too.

“Yeah! That is exactly the place. I told you so many times.”

“Amma, did you really?”

“Hundred and one times. Ask Saranya! [laughing]”

I checked with my sister about this and apparently my mom was right. Well, she wins round one, I guess!

Throughout these interviews, I began to realize how much I didn’t know about my mom. And it wasn’t just things like where she lived, or what her dad—my thathaiyya—was like.

“Some of the father jokes, the dad jokes he used to give.

“Wait really? I didn’t even know that!”

“Yeah. He used to make puns. For example, In Telugu they used to say [Telugu joke]. He used to fight: ‘You are wrong. How can you plant a tree? You can plant only saplings. You can grow trees.’”

“That’s like the jokes Nanna makes!!”

“Yes! That’s why I said dad jokes [laughter fades]”

I had missed bigger things, like what Ammamma’s personality was like. How similar she was to my own Amma. What their relationship was like.

Like, when my mom would come home from college, she would come bearing cloth bags straining at the seams with ripe, juicy fruits, and be met with the sight of her parents playing cards.

“See, it is a small house, one bedroom house. The entrance will be small. The entrance place is there.”

As she tells me, her arms rise again—like a conductor guiding her own invisible symphony—and points to places in this phantom house.

“One bed used to be there. There, thathaiyya used to sleep. And there, one side is Ammamma’s bed.”

She gestures horizontally: they are across from one another. The image rises to my mind, unbidden, of two friends gossiping at summer camp.

“So, if I come early, they both used to sit and play cards. Because he had some problem with the leg. He met with an accident, so he couldn’t move. He won’t talk much.”

“So, she used to sit. Their card game is rummy—making sets. But Ammamma is so bad at it.”

This exasperated my grandfather, who was an adept card player.

“’Why are you playing that one?!’ he used to say.”

“She’s like eh, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Ammamma would only play until Thathaiyya won. Then—

“Ah, okay, okay. She used to mix up the cards! She never showed the cards [laughing].”

My mom’s face crinkles up in amusement.

“Nobody plays with him. I mean, everybody’s busy with their work, and he gets bored. She’s not interested in that, but only for Thathaiyya—for him—she used to play.”

“She’s very crafty, even when she’s young”

My mom’s face softens when she says this, crows feet gathering faintly at the edges of her eyes. Like she’s gently adrift in a memory.

“She used to go and do ‘vathulu’ for the lamp. With cotton you take out that—spin that one, right? Like a candlewick. That requires a lot of skill to make it with the hand. She used to do very fast.”

Sometimes, for special occasions or prayer functions, a huge amount had to be prepared in advance to be lit.

“One lakh of them, imagine. Okay? It needs lot of time—months. So all the ladies in the afternoon time, they will do that together. They used to call my mom. Within ten minutes, she’ll make a hundred or something.”

A hundred? I tried rolling a wick once when I was in India, and made five, then complained about blisters for a week afterwards!

“Even after marriage—“

Here, I have to interject and say that my grandmother got married when she was 12. 12! You know—that age when you’re meant to be a preteen watching Disney channel originals and going to middle school? Any-anyway

“Even after marriage, she used to stitch a lot of things. And it seems she used to stitch frocks with hand, no machine.”

“All her patterns are, like, imaginary. Because there is nothing, no books. It is a village.”

“There’s no Joanne’s, there’s no Michaels!”

“But my Pedananna [Grandpa] used to get surprised. How can you get all this.”

“What kinds of patterns would she make?”

“I mean, latest patterns. These are the latest from Delhi. Delhi is like America for India.”

“Delhi inside India is like America for India [laughing]. I know what you’re saying!”

What she was saying was that Delhi, with its large pattern books and detailed print tutorials, was remote—a faraway land. My family, including my mother’s side, is all from South India, and Delhi is way in the North. So, for her purposes, Delhi could have been the capital of Tennessee: a place her mother wasn’t going to be able to see anytime soon.

“Not just embroidery. She used to lots of crafts with paper, she used to do beautiful flowers and decorate the house.”

“After that, she’s busy naturally. With all the kids, their grandkids, marriages—and she never had time for these types of crafts later.”

My mother is the youngest of ten siblings. And it was once my grandmother had seen her kids start their lives, fly off to distant and remote parts of India, start families and have kids of their own, that she found time for herself.

“And I don’t know from where she had the needle, Ammamma. She started—crochet. Everything she did from memory. She started doing curtains. So for each kid—from one to ten—she made at least one for everybody.”

“There are 101 patterns in one curtain, because whatever she remembered, she put that design there. It is not coherent.”

“So she used to do flowers from memory and leave it just here and there.”

Something about that strikes me—that this woman, after being married off at 12, having kids pretty much her entire adult life, catering to the whims and needs of others constantly, finally finds time for herself.

And all she wants to do with the time she has is make intricate lace flowers and drop them around the house. As though even after it all, her generosity is overflowing and spilling out, like thread unspooling from a tightly wound ball.

“Then I said, you have to teach me that. So she is like, okay.”

“But—as you know—in the beginning, you will be very slow. Everything will fall.”

My mom says that matter-of-factly, peering knowingly at me, because she is aware that I share the same experiences as her: I, like my mom, learnt crochet from my Amma.

“So I used to fight with her. You are so good at it, I’m not good.”

“She is like, you will get it!”

This, too, is a familiar kind of frustration. Both my mom and I are people who want to know something and want to know it now. I feel a small sense of connection, listening my mom talk about her mom, like some kind of intergenerational latch clicks in place.

“I learned that one basically by admiring the way my mom did. Not what she created. Basically, the admiration for her skill. Looking at her hands, how fast and quick.”

[Music]

“But the one thing is, that crochet hook and needle is with me. You know, that one is for my memory. She’s like, you are the only one.”

As in, my mother was the only one who crocheted.

Even though I don’t remember my mom talking much about my grandmother, I remember this detail: how much she treasures Ammamma’s parting gifts to her. When we were younger, and technology was still fresh, she used a freelance printing service to design a phone case using a photo of Ammamma’s lace work overlain upon a sari she embroidered. She used to be really proud of it.

“I stitched on sari, ok, the entire sari. That is a big story.”

See, my mom was still a newbie—and like any beginner, she was ambitious, with no skills to match her dreams. So, she bought a cheap fabric, and took it to a shop where a guy could print designs on it—a kind of template for her to follow.

“I saw one design, I said, ‘ok, you print this one. I am going to stitch.’ Because it’s peacocks. I liked it, and I gave it. I don’t know how it comes.”

When she got it back, she realized she’d made a big mistake.

“It is such a huuuge design. And six meters I have to stitch—and the sari is so much cross. I have to cut it, and it is not straight!”

“What did you do?”

“I gave it, so I have to stitch! I think it took me a year to complete that one.”

The secret to her success? Her mother’s incessant nagging!

“Why don’t you stitch that one? Why don’t you finish that one? So I finished.”

This was what she put beneath the last piece of lace her mother had left to her, and photographed to put on her phone case. She has to unearth the memory under layers of history now, when I bring it up.

“Yeah, yeah yeah—I remember! So as a memory, I put those two things together!”

“All of this, I think, is because of my mom. Because she used to tell her daughter-in-laws: Not always kitchen work. Do some creative work. For a housewife, you can do always kitchen, cook, and clean. No that is not life. Do something else also.”

“I think—Amma wasn’t really close to Ammamma, ok?”

“What?!”

“So, when she was first a kid, she had all these other siblings. And obviously Ammamma was busy. And was also old, so didn’t really spend that much time with her. That’s why she says, I was always outside and used to be with my friends all the time.”

“But at the same time she was the youngest. So she also spent the most time with Ammamma alone.”

“Yeah, I think when she started working and stuff they got really close. Because she was much older.”

I’m surprised. I’d never put it together like that, but when my sister lays it out in front of me, it makes sense. But even to my sister, the issue of Amma’s relationship with Ammamma is—cloudy—at best.

“I don’t know! Like I don’t really know Amma and Ammamma’s—[laughing]—like relationship that well.”

[Music]

What my sister really means is that Ammamma’s life revealed itself in the cracks, that our Amma was maybe only beginning to piece it together now, nearly two decades later. So of course she was protective of it—like a jigsaw puzzle that you had just put together that others were trying to rip apart and take for themselves; except that, oh yeah: the stakes were so much higher.

“Why do you think me and Amma are similar in some way to Amma and Ammamma if like—when we were kids, we weren’t like that. Or like, I was—Oh, I guess I wasn’t close to Amma as a kid, right?”

“I think as a kid you weren’t that close. I think once you started high school maybe—cause until then, what I remember is you were with your friends or hanging out with me. I feel like when we were kids it was just you and me. Yeah! I feel like you guys got the closest when you went to college. You guys used to talk everyday.”

“I don’t—do you really think we got closer during college?”

“Yeah! Distance makes the heart grow fonder. [laughing] Basically. Cause I’m not fond of you, so…”

“[laughing] Chee. Then how come I’m not fond of you.”

Yeah—that thing my mom does? Getting all sarcastic and jokey when things are too heavy? It’s definitely a family thing.

[Music]

“Do you think it’s also hard for Amma? Because—like the reason that I think I also grew closer is because I started seeing Amma as a person. And that was jarring for me. But still being someone’s daughter and obviously thinking of them as your mom—it’s kind of like a struggle between seeing them as a fully formed person with their own—just—life and then seeing them as your mom. And do you think that Amma’s still in like, ‘she’s my mom’, and it’s jarring because you also have to see them as a person?”

“I think it’s always hard to differentiate. It’s even with your teachers, like you’ll see them at school, but then you won’t realize they have an actual life outside when you’re really young. It’s like that with your parents too—you forget that they had a whole life before you.”

“Yeah, I think she just sees her as a mom. Because Ammamma probably spent most of her life as a mom, you know?”

“So you’re saying it’s not inaccurate to paint her that way. But she probably got married young, and so she really—her life was her mom. Yeah.”

“…is a mom. Yeah.”

[Music]

When I play this back for myself now, I notice the things I didn’t realize we were saying during our conversation. How my sister’s tone vacillates between certainty and uncertainty. How my words come out hesitating, because even as I was talking, I was questioning my own memories. And then, when my sister and I come to some sort of conclusion, having the weight of it settle on us—what we miss because we don’t talk about our mom like this, together, very often.

Is this what it is like for Amma? To have to pull out the memories and try to distinguish the emotional attachment from the truth? Is there even one truth? And then, to have nine other people who you grew up with who probably see it slightly different from you, who had a piece of your mom that you never had. A kind of patchwork, that shifts every time someone adds a new fragment of cloth—some missing history that is foreign to you—the picture keeps moving.

Is it really so wrong, then, to want to protect your patchwork? The picture that you see, now that the thing that it depicts—this person that you love so deeply and so steadily—is gone?