Sometimes a person's memory invades your mind at an unguarded moment. And it invades it so intensely that you are left overpowered by a sense of both loss and presence. Today I felt this inexplicable sensation for the dearest person I have lost to death: my maternal grandmother. She passed away 12 years ago, at a contented old age, and the rawness with which her memory came back to me was startling. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she slipped away when I could not be with her and I had to deal with an emptiness I groped physically for a long time. My last memory of her -- as vivid as ever -- is of a woman suddenly weak in body with a strange glow in her eyes hungry for one last sight of her loved ones.
This is not the first time I have felt this sudden emotion in the years after she passed away, but it caught me unawares today after the longest gap in time. I am both shaken and gladdened by the realization that time hasn't really obliterated a dear one. If pain persists, however transfigured, there must be some permanence in life and in love.
Here are two poems I wrote in the memory of my grandmother, with the dates on which I first posted them on my blog:
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2008
Amma
The day you decided to take off,
I failed to glimpse
the golden chariot
and angels’ wings.
No gesture replied,
though I turned round and round
the house trying to clasp
what had seeped neatly into the past
And then the monsoon came
with the winds and the watery clouds.
I have been sure
these five years
that you were
on the other side.
But last night I woke up
to the sound of a voice singing
as tuneless as ever: there was nothing
in it that spoke of distance.
the golden chariot
and angels’ wings.
No gesture replied,
though I turned round and round
the house trying to clasp
what had seeped neatly into the past
And then the monsoon came
with the winds and the watery clouds.
I have been sure
these five years
that you were
on the other side.
But last night I woke up
to the sound of a voice singing
as tuneless as ever: there was nothing
in it that spoke of distance.
SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2009
Twilight
Listening to her gravelly voice rise in song,
I would wait for the sudden drop in pitch
or the change of tune midway.
It is a raga of her own making, we would laugh.
But surer than music-mongers meticulously nailing notes
to lyrics, she performed in magnificent style.
The very walls of the house had grown attuned to her ways.
In youth, her fury could shake and shatter.
Neighbours who thought her a hapless widow
with children she could barely mind
found themselves confronting an army of bony hands
that set stones flying
towards their gilded window-panes.
The story still startles me. What is true of her,
I would wonder searching her gentle features
lost in the winding alleys of her song, oblivious
to the babble of a busy young world.
Or could this be truer, this feeble puffing
of lips that flap infant-like
as she sleeps wrapped in thin blue sheets?
Her limbs look tired and very old – older than the
snowflakes in her hair.
or the change of tune midway.
It is a raga of her own making, we would laugh.
But surer than music-mongers meticulously nailing notes
to lyrics, she performed in magnificent style.
The very walls of the house had grown attuned to her ways.
In youth, her fury could shake and shatter.
Neighbours who thought her a hapless widow
with children she could barely mind
found themselves confronting an army of bony hands
that set stones flying
towards their gilded window-panes.
The story still startles me. What is true of her,
I would wonder searching her gentle features
lost in the winding alleys of her song, oblivious
to the babble of a busy young world.
Or could this be truer, this feeble puffing
of lips that flap infant-like
as she sleeps wrapped in thin blue sheets?
Her limbs look tired and very old – older than the
snowflakes in her hair.
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