ix. Ghee Pots (Papai Ammakkaiyya)
Even the saris she wore revealed this. Starched cotton saris that demanded much planning and thinking ahead. Not like gauzy chiffons and ready-to-wear poly-silks. Those were for people who changed their minds at least six times every morning before they settled on what to wear
(Anita Nair, Ladies Coupé)
When the god Krishna was a kid, he used to steal butter. Besides the fact that he contained the galaxy within his throat—nestled under his uvula for his mother, Yashoda, to see that one time she asked him to open his mouth—this is my favorite tidbit of gossip about him. He would climb up on all the pots when everyone was asleep. It was like a slickly choreographed symphony, then, what happened next (every book, every Tinkle double digest, every Amar Chitra Kada would tell it the same). CRASH! The bleary blinks of abruptly awoken villagers. The tittering of mothers as they realized what had transpired while they were dreaming. And an image branded onto my eyes: Krishna, as he peered around the shards, eyes sparkling mischievously, like the cat that (almost) got the cream.
So my mom says that when we were younger, my sister used to follow me around and call me by name until my second aunt—Papai ammakkaiyya, roughly five years older than Anu ammakkaiyya—started teasing her, “Savaaani, Savaani”, and then she stopped. According to Ms. Schwartz from the second grade, that’s bullying. But the funny thing is, Papai ammakkaiyya still gets the same look on her face sometimes: lips curled around a laugh, eyebrows raised, eyes glittering. When the neighborhood kids would come play football with my cousin Suchir (her grandson), that’s what she would look like. And they would confuse her for one of the others, kick around the ball in the garden for hours until it got stuck in a tomato plant or chamanti pouo up on the terrace. Then, it was like she would revert back, chasing them out so they scattered like a flock of pigeons, retreating to the bedroom for a steaming bath and evening sari.
But I knew my ammakkaiyya was in there all the same, and so over the years I would stop scowling when she made fun of my shorts or called me her granddaughter. I would glance over in the middle of a joke she was telling, her face flickering between the two—stern mother and goofy ammakkaiyya—until crashing in on itself. It was obvious why all the kids mistook her for their age. In those moments she looked like Krishna peering out mischievously, a laugh gathering at the edges of her face and seeping through her put-on stoicism: like ghee through a cracked pot.