“Tell me the story of Ramayana.”
“Again? But you just heard it yesterday. You’ll get tired of hearing it again.”
“I want to hear it again.”
My grandmother, who I call Muthassi, told stories the way she made sweets for us. She could make a special and sugary sweet for me, which she named Nayachevi (dog’s ears in Malayalam), because the shape somewhat resembled dog’s ears. No one had ever heard of it before, and I would like to believe she crafted it by herself. She didn’t quite know how she made them the first time, she vaguely said, “I just mixed a lot of things together, and it turned out like dog’s ears.” It was boiled in sugar, yet it wasn’t overtly syrupy or saccharine. It was just right. No one knew the recipe to her genius, and probably neither did she, but every weekend, I would wolf them down, when I went to visit her.
I gobbled her stories the same way.
Before going to bed, she would sit by my side in the dark and tell me a story. Looking back, my grandmother’s stories were a series of Nayachevis---unusual, in different shapes, yet wholesome and without anything extra, always leaving me wanting more.
At the age of four, I was never tired of hearing the story of Ramayana from Muthassi, and neither was she weary of repeating it to me every night. It was the same story, but her simple words and language brought alive the palaces of Ayodhya, fires, ashes of the war, and the final victory. Yet ironically, she never spoke of the characters as evil or cruel, as they were often painted to be as I later realized. She didn’t talk about it as good versus evil, but stories of people, perhaps some more flawed than others, without ever calling them so. Even in her stories, Muthassi could not utter a reproachful word about anyone.
In her quiet tones, she would tell me matter-of-factly about Kaikeyi’s requests and Manthara’s schemes, Maricha’s deception. She didn’t even change the intonation of her voice or act it out----she didn’t need theatrics to get me invested in the tales. She just told me quietly, as I nodded off to sleep. Perhaps that’s why I know the details of Ramayana more than any other epic, down to the names of the women who existed only as ‘wives’ in the books later. Years later, I remember the stories of Ramayana with a tinge of fondness as a sweet memory, like a Nayachevi, only because of those bedtime stories.
I was not quite interested in Ram and Sita as I was in Lakshmana for some reason, at that age. I would ask questions about him and the other women that we never heard about, Sumitra, Urmila, Mandavi, Shrutha-Kirthi. What happened to them? What were their stories?
While the epic never detailed their stories, Muthassi would still talk about them a little more, just to indulge me further. She knew how to keep my attention as she would say little things like, “Sumitra and Urmila also tried going to the forest to get Rama and Lakshmana back…” I would sit up instantly. She narrated the two endings of Ramayana to me, the one where Sita returned to the earth after being asked again for a trial by fire. I was a bit distraught with this conclusion, as I still wanted to believe in happy endings. So sometimes, I would ask her to just stop at Rama and Sita’s return to Ayodhya.
She obliged, but would laugh, “A story is a story, you can’t change it.”
Later, she told me the stories of the Mahabharata, which were not so linear as the Ramayana. This epic comprised numerous stories within stories, and she would explain each detail to me so that I didn’t get confused. I found a strong fascination in Karna, and asked to hear more about him. His tragic tale was painful to hear, and yet I yearned for Muthassi to tell me more about him, as if hoping that she would have a hand in changing his fate.
“But it’s unfair,” I would say, whenever she told me the story of Karna’s death on the battlefield.
“I know. Life was very cruel to him,” she would agree.
“Was he happy in his afterlife?” I once asked. I had a very hazy idea of what the afterlife was, but I wanted to believe that Karna, who had suffered so much in his life, had a better afterlife at least.
“Yes, he was happier. Everyone’s happy in their afterlife,” she answered.
Satisfied, I would settle back in bed again.
When relatives asked if I had read the books, I would resolutely answer that I hadn’t.
I had my grandmother.
If it were not the epics, my grandmother would tell stories from her own childhood, her playing tennis in sarees, coming first so regularly in class that my great-grandmother stopped considering it news by the time she was ten years old. It was just understood that my grandmother was good at everything, from high school to college. Yet, if I ever told my grandmother this, she would laugh it off and say, “Oh, everyone was good at everything at that age.”
Muthassi would talk of her home in Thiruvilwamala, a place I’ve never seen in my life but I know intimately, owing to her stories. It sounded like a mystical place, a tiny little town that relied on oil lamps at night. The home sounded fascinatingly eerie, but Muthassi managed to make that sound straight out of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost.
It was one of her homes, an inextricable part of her life, a world that she had lived in, which was very different from the hustle-bustle of Delhi with its traffic, loud honking, and pollution. Yet, that didn’t mean Delhi wasn’t her home. She never mentioned that she missed Thiruvilwamala and her tone didn’t have a hint of it either.
For my Muthassi, home wasn’t a place. It was the people and the stories they weaved with her.
She told us that there was a room in that old house where the door was never closed, as they believed a restless spirit was wandering around. One day, when my father stayed in the room, he closed it. At night, he felt rather suffocated, almost a strangled feeling, as if there was a pair of hands around his neck. The next morning, when he told my grandmother about it, she asked, “Did you close that door?” He answered that he did. Perhaps that was why, she said. We never tried prying into the scientific reasons behind that story, we just accepted it as it was, as one of the spooky tales in the house that could be told to others.
I used to get scared on hearing this story, and I would ask nervously, “What should I do if a ghost wants to catch me?”
Without batting an eyelid, she just said, “Say your prayers three times, the ghost will go away.” She said it with such certainty that I was sure that it was true.
Muthassi would chuckle the most when reciting stories from my father’s life. I couldn’t help but laugh along with her. While sitting at her sewing machine, she would tell me about the mischief my father and uncle used to wreak at home. My uncle was perhaps the ringleader in the gang of two, and my father would just go along with him, as a rather docile sidekick.
Often, Muthassi recalled one story that would make her laugh uncontrollably. It was the day my uncle and father left the taps in the bathroom, which left the room flooded. “Your grandfather entered the room, and found himself ankle-deep in water,” she would say with a chuckle. Despite severe scoldings, the escapades continued, including one where my uncle, at the age of eight, kept throwing new lampshades on the ground because he liked the noise that they made.
“Such naughty children, I tell you,” she would say, barely hiding her smile. Perhaps, she missed those naughty children, the most.
If my Muthassi’s stories were like Nayachevis, my Amumma’s tales were like the papaya jujubes again another dish that many hadn’t heard of before. Papaya jujubes were sweet little squares, and we would consume them as we talked, sitting on the breezy verandah of our Trivandrum home that doesn’t exist anymore.
The only mistake my Amumma made was that she was sure that she didn’t have any tales to tell. I would keep asking her for stories and she said shyly, “But I don’t have stories. Only your Muthassi has.”
Amumma thought she didn’t tell stories, but she found a way to return to the past in every conversation. Her whole life was a series of tales, from her childhood, marrying my grandfather, watching him becoming the most known doctor in Kerala in the 70’s, to bringing up five children and looking after her sisters, mother and great-grandmother.
As we watched the heavy monsoons and the water washing up on the driveway, she would tell me about my grandfather’s (who we called Papa) patients, the exploits of my mother and her brother when they were children, and my great-grandmother, of whom I had only vague memories.
As we sat and watched the rains from the porch, she would enjoy telling me the stories of my mother.
“What was Amma like as a child?” I would keep asking, while we ate the papaya jujubes.
“A stubborn little girl, she was. So, nothing different,” she would chuckle. My mother was famous for throwing passive-aggressive tantrums. For instance, when my grandfather would sit with all of his five children on the bed, if six-year-old Amma thought that she wasn’t getting much attention, she would sit in a corner.
“Latha, come and sit over here,” Papa would say.
“No, no. I’m fine here. I’m comfortable,” she answered politely.
“Come, Latha.”
“It’s alright, don’t worry. I like sitting here.”
After much coaxing, she would finally relent with a sigh, as if there was something else she would rather much do, but had to keep everyone happy.
There was one story that Amumma particularly relished about my mother. When Amma was around four, she had to start going to a nursery. One day, she triumphantly came home with a note from the teachers. She put it on my Amumma’s lap, “I’ve got a letter! No other child got a letter, only I did,” she said, excited.
My grandmother was rather impressed and decided to read the letter. In it the words were written, “Latha was a very bad girl today. She didn’t listen to anyone.”
Amumma peered at my mother, who felt betrayed. “I was a good girl! I don’t like those women in frocks. I don’t want to go tomorrow,” Amma was upset.
Till date, when Amma makes up her mind to do something, she sticks to it. And so, she didn’t go the next day. After a few days, she returned to the nursery, in a rather sober fashion, but giving everyone the cold shoulder. A year later, she was shifted to another school, thanks to her relief.
I hug these stories close to me now.
I have not had nayachevis and papaya jujubes in sixteen years, but I remember their taste, and the warm feeling that would flood me after eating them. I’m relieved that no one else in our family has tried to make them since, because the taste is preserved in my memories, just like these stories that I grew up with. The recipes remain with my grandmothers, and that’s how it should be.
One day, when I find Muthassi and Amumma again, we’ll sit and eat bowls of them, listen to those old stories, while listening to the sound of the rain. The stories live on.
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