v. Vestiges of Beauty (Anu Ammakkaiyya)
Now I realize that she must indeed have been very attractive. Vestiges of that beauty remain. The skin is fine and delicate, even if it is crinkled like tissue paper. Her arms are still slim and firm, but the hands, with their branching of veins, seem incongruously large for those delicate arms.
(Shashi Deshpande, Small Remedies)
There are a set of pictures—that will never see the light of day, buried deep in the recesses of my GDrive to remain untouched by human hands for the next thousand years, if everything goes to plan—that were taken at my ammakkaiyya’s [aunt’s] house. You can’t tell that they’re taken there, because, as grainy selfies tend to be, they are low quality and focus on my face. But I can tell from the angle of one that I’m sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, or from the lighting on another that I am on the balcony overlooking a dusty main road that beats out the cacophonous squeal of auto-rickshaws greeting swerving motorcycles and speeding cars.
They’re of me—at ten, at eleven after we’d moved to India, at thirteen, entering freshman year of high school—growing up. In some, I clutch rolls of sticky brown Cadburies in my fists, change for when the shopkeeper below didn’t have enough one-paisa coins. In others, my hair is cluttered with little strips of paper marking my most recent no-heat-curls obsession.
When my aunt was younger, didn’t have to aspire to beauty the way I did with my dime-a-dozen hairstyles. Even now, she just is pretty, in that youthful way that means even at sixty people ask if she is the little sister to my mom (who is ten years her junior). She is quiet, like white noise in a soundtrack that you mistake for complete silence. And the family dotes on her, bossing her around with directives or pointing out her feminine figure in old sepia-tinted photos. When I was a kid, it felt as if she was more the idea of someone—pale face, jet-black plaited hair, skirts and saris and the like—than someone herself.
My fourteen-year-old self was satisfied with this perception. Anu ammakkaiyya is the one out of Amma’s sisters who wouldn’t raise her voice at my American absurdities and wouldn’t point out my fractured Telugu. She makes me chole bhatura or jam-on-toast when I like, or splits her packet of Parle G with me. I can stay up till midnight and she’ll greet me with a sly, inclusive grin and a cup of Bournvita when I stumbled out of the bedroom, bleary-eyed, at noon. Being her niece feels like being on the inside of this great joke, where she is always laughing with (rather than at) you.
I discovered Chetan Bhagat for the first time crammed in the shelves of the third bedroom, between bits and bobs and odds and ends; trinkets of a long-forgotten childhood and cassette tapes of DDLJ or KKHH that kindled my hunger for Bollywood films while simultaneously depriving me of the actual experience because of their obsolete-ness. Alas the somewhat crudely written Two States wasn’t nearly as captivating as the bookshelves themselves. They reminded me of that scene in Inception, where Leonardo di Caprio’s body is tipped into water, and suddenly, in his mindscape, water starts pouring, just gushing through every crack in the wood, every hole in the ceiling. And the water keeps coming, keeps flooding until the entire structure unravels.
Ammakkaiyya’s cabinets often seem on the brink of a collapse like this, burdened by the weight of generations of history. But unlike Cobb’s failed dream-sharing experiment, they hold up. Even as they seem to absorb the artifacts of everyone’s childhoods—the little doo-dads we’d leave behind from our countless visits or the art projects I’d restlessly abandon in the cemented rows—they never complain or shirk the task. In that way they resembl their owner, perhaps. Silent and steady; never resentful for the role of caretaker that has been thrust upon them, upon her.