Inspired by my mentee’s submission, I also wrote a piece about my grandmother and visiting her in India as a young woman and speaking up for myself. It is one part of a larger story about the trip.
When I was nineteen, I lived alone with my paternal grandmother in Bangalore. At eighty-six, she couldn’t cook because her gnarled fingers couldn’t curl around pot handles or the oven door. She would forget to wear her dentures; they would sit leering in a glass of water. But at twenty-two, she got her master’s degree in physics and marched with Gandhi.
My mother had to convince me to go there. “She’s getting old,” my mother said. “It would mean a lot to her.”
“But I hate India. There’s nothing to do.”
“Grow up, Nandita.”
My grandmother woke up at six every morning and would walk to the corner store to get steaming plastic cups of sambar, tripping over the cracked stone sidewalk. She would stick her balding head into my room. I would pull the wool blanket over my head and sleep until noon.
During breakfast, she would stare at me from across the table. She would hand me the only fork and plate in the house, then scoop mounds of rice and rasam with her hands into her mouth from a banana leaf. I would crouch behind a newspaper.
The milk there was warm and lumpy. The cereal tasted of plastic. Once I tried to cook scrambled eggs. When my grandmother came home, she retched and made me pray for three hours.
In the kitchen, a brown photograph of my grandfather hung above the table. I never met him, but I inherited his last name, a nose that’s squat like a mound of mud, and big, brown eyes.
There were only two other photographs in her house. One shows my brother and I in 1992. My brother’s hands rest on my shoulders, and tight black curls stick out of my head. In another, my mother is twenty-two, shy on her wedding day, staring at the ground, marigolds in her hair and red kumkum powder streaking her forehead like blood. My father cradles the back of my mother’s neck.
My grandmother never liked my mother. She was beautiful, brushing her hair 100 times before bed. She lived a five-hour train ride away, down broken roads and through sugarcane fields.
Twenty-five years after my parents’ wedding, my grandmother told me, “That mother of yours, she’s silly. It’s good you didn’t inherit that airy little head of hers.”
I stared at my food, wishing I knew enough Kannada to yell. Instead, I nodded.