viEye of the Hurricane

When I told Amma I was writing about her sister, and I had no stories to tell, she said to tell the one about how I tried heatless curls with newspapers, and I looked so funny ammakkaiyya had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. But she couldn’t laugh, my mom said, because you would get so angry if she did.

Why would I tell that story, I asked my mom, and she said because it makes ammakkaiyya look caring.

No, I said. It makes me look like an angry teenage jerk.

And I wasn’t wrong either.

When I was younger, people used to say I had an anger problem—for a girl, of course, because our standards were different somehow. I’d snap at elderly relatives when they asked me to sing for them, or I’d frown and groan, disrupting the bhajan circles or prayers. Most of this I still stand by; the stuff about household hierarchies or excessive religious devotion that I have to say could fill a book. Maybe one day it will.

But there were things that I would say in the heat of the moment, when the blood was pounding in my ears and my hands were clenched in a knuckle-whitening fist, that I regret. After my fights with Amma, I’d sulk in the bedroom until ammakkaiyya’s gently reproachful figure appeared in the doorway. Even at eight, when the bed-wetting years weren’t far enough away to be a fond memory yet, she would talk me through it logically. She didn’t shout in that condescending, quintessentially parental way my mom did, or threaten me like I was a toddler, like some of my aunts. She just prodded me until I confessed to my own guilt, or else calmed me down from my raging, non-verbal state until I was ready to talk.

And for a long time ammakkaiyya was like this: a silly cross between my therapist and a second mother.

The Sri Sisters were model children, the good betas, cream of the crop. Then…they grew up.

That’s how my mom likes to tell it, tongue-in-cheek, giggling mischievously at Anu ammakkaiyya’s daughters when they scowl playfully at her.

There’s Sridevi akka, for whom her pinni (her mother’s younger sister—or my mom) is like a second mother. There’s Srilekha akka, who was my favorite growing up and would give me baths and play with my sister and I when we were younger. There’s Chinni akka, the one who doesn’t hesitate before unleashing a full arsenal of witty quips on you, who told me to call her if I ever got bored in America when I moved back for college.

To talk about my ammakkaiyya is to talk about the Sri Sisters. They’ve lived so many lives by now: as children in a ramshackle one-bedroom apartment in Bombay, where if the youngest daughter took too long to eat dinner, everyone went to bed late that day because the dining table was also the bed was also the living room floor; as teenagers flitting off to different states and to companies where they would meet their spouses and start their own lives; as young women grieving the loss of their father—women who call their mother every day in the evenings, sometimes twice if their kids win possession of the phone briefly; as mothers and wives and working women who still need their amma sometimes to give them advice or watch the grandkids.

Because Anu ammakkaiyya never talks about herself, I grew up knowing her through the residue, the indelible imprint, she’s left on her children. I grew up knowing the ammakkaiyya who would never tire of my questions about the Hindi soap they were all watching—why was the heroine angry at that man, why was everyone so surprised to see that kid, why, why, why—even when one of the sisters forgot to listen to me or struggled to condense the plot. I grew up seeing ammakkaiyya as a stable, guiding force: the eye of the hurricane amid the swirling chaos of arguments about mortgage and raising the grandkids and moving to a new house and, and, and;