Author origins: ‘My grandmother and her way of mothering us by telling us stories made me a writer’

When I was a little girl, my grandmother became both my mother and grandmother, less mother, double the regular grandmother. My parents had recently separated and my sister and I were sent to boarding school in the hills of Simla. My grandmother was annoyed with my father, her eldest son, but he was not one to listen to his mother. I heard him tell her that he knew what was best for his daughters and that she had no business holding them back…or something close to that but equally dismissive. My grandmother was not one to be easily deterred. She convinced my grandfather to sacrifice their annual holiday with four other couples and buy a small apartment in Simla instead. “The girls need us now. If we don’t, who will?” I had heard her say in her low voice in Punjabi to her very staid and stoic husband, our Papaji, who mostly looked like he ran things… unless you knew what we did.

My grandmother, the mother

For as long as I knew my grandmother, she wore salwar kurtas in a simply tailored style, fitted around the chest and straight down her sides with slits that went halfway up her thigh. The kurta length was always the same, no matter where fashion took hemlines. The sleeves were always three-quarters, to cover up her psoriasis scars or flaking when the condition was active. She wore leather sandals when I was younger, comfortable, low-heeled, sensible, open-toed shoes but later switched to cloth ballet-like shoes that most Indian women her age favoured. She carefully removed several chin hairs that began sprouting along the way and she always dabbed a little perfume behind her ears and on her wrist. But she wore no makeup, not even lipstick.

Biji, as I called her, had an expressive face, particularly when she was playing the role of mother. She had many grandchildren, most with mothers of their own, but when she took on that persona for us, it sometimes spilt over to the others. She knew which one ate their buggers and which one hadn’t washed their hands before lunch. She knew who had sent a servant to the market to buy samosas just before dinner and who stayed on the roof flying kites when they were supposed to be down before sunset. All she had to do was look at the offending child and shake her head barely perceptibly. No one else knew but the child she was targeting knew immediately and knew why.

Biji was a talker but not an excessive one. She spoke no English but could read and write Punjabi. For some reason, she spoke with only my sister and me in Hindi, a language she never spoke except to a vegetable seller or the Kashmiri shawl man who came in every winter. But for us, she adapted. I have never figured out why she chose to speak in an unfamiliar language rather than teach us how to speak in Punjabi. She had us from the ages of five and eight, after all.

Having lived the life she had, a young woman from a well-educated family that had chosen not to educate their girls but marry them off instead, then travelling from Pakistan to India during partition and restarting life, losing many loved ones along the way, Biji was articulate and observant. She read Punjabi magazines and enjoyed Bollywood movies. Papaji had invested in a movie theatre along with a group of refugees from their village in Pakistan and the couple, along with their friends, dressed up and went to each new movie opening night – never offering that pleasure to their children or grandchildren.

But when she got the two of us added to her roster as children, her responsibility and interest in us grew manifold. That’s when she stopped going to movie night if we were home for vacation. That’s also when she began telling us stories. That time may also have coincided with us reaching an age where we could follow along but I remember it as being closely associated with the time my parents separated and my father got full custody with occasional visitation with my mother, depending on how she was doing.

Biji told us stories about the Sikh Gurus. These usually came quite spontaneously when we followed her up to the room that housed the Guru Granth Sahib. Most Sikh homes purpose-build a small room to house the holy book, which must be awakened at sunrise and closed up at sunset. As Biji mumbled through a few verses from the book, she would stop suddenly and explain to us what the Gurus were teaching through that writing. Later, while we sat with her, waiting for dinner, a community event, she would continue with a few more parables of the Gurus. As soon as my grandfather returned from his evening outing at the theatre or idle chitchat with his friends, a daily occurrence, Biji would stop mid-sentence and supervise dinner, indicating to us with expressions only that story time would continue later, which it did.

A house of stories

I don’t remember the details of the stories that Biji told us but I vividly remember where she told us these stories. I was always half-listening and half-observing everything around me. A popular winter location was the veranda where we sat on wood and cane chairs, a tubelight shone bright above us, attracting moths, mosquitoes, and other bugs. A lizard hovered close by, but not too close, ready to snap an unsuspecting bug into its mouth. I would typically lie upside down on the chair, legs up the back, head hanging off the seat, listening and gazing at the spectacle above me. I’ve never been afraid of lizards and many other creepy crawlies because I’ve always observed them as if I was watching a film with my grandmother’s voice as dialogue.

My grandparents’ Simla home was another prime storytelling location. We would either be home for the weekend from our school or later, when we changed schools, we would be there for most of the summer, reading, walking, and mostly doing absolutely nothing. Biji used that time with us to tell us stories about all her children, including our father, who we learned had a perpetually runny nose when he was young. She told us about him going to the National Defence Academy and she told us what happened when he had run away from there. To substantiate her stories, she had directed us to an attic space back in her Ludhiana home that you could climb using the shelves of a cupboard below it – not for the faint of heart – but of course, I clambered up every chance I got. There, I found letters from my father to his parents begging them to let him return. Clearly, they had declined, which led to his desertion of sorts.

There were things Biji absolutely did not talk about. Our mother and her mental health issues, and details about their move from Pakistan after the Partition, were off limits.

Another venue for storytelling was an unlikely one. My sister and I often slept in a room next to my grandparents’ both in Ludhiana and in Simla. In Ludhiana, we had our own room in my father’s house across the courtyard from my grandparents’. But we moved over at times if that room was being painted and such. After lights out and oblivious to our presence, Biji and Papaji chatted for at least an hour each night, summarising their events of the day. Since we were aware of some of these, we could tell how Biji embellished the way she bargained with the vegetable seller or how the cook had to come running to her for instructions every five minutes – that didn’t happen. Papaji listened and shared some anecdotes of his own and then he patiently listened as Biji rattled off the things he had to attend to the next day.

In Simla, we used to walk down to the Ridge every evening, our thing to do before dinner which Biji had already prepared before the walk. It was a good 45 minutes down, an hour of chit chat or just sitting around and 45 minutes back. Those two walks were when Biji would talk about her life – her childhood, how lucky she was to have married Papaji, a simple man but a good one. While stories of the dreaded Partition move were clearly off the list, some small anecdotes would inevitably slip through.

I was always an avid reader but these times spent with my grandmother and her chosen way to mother us – by telling us stories – paved the way, eventually, to my second career as a novel writer. I am now about the age Biji was when she had to step in as much more than just a grandmother. Her method of relating to her grandchildren through endless stories created in us a sense of belonging, of roots, of understanding, and of a strong belief that we were cared for and loved.

Priya is the author of Ladies’ Tailor (HarperCollins India, 2022). She is currently working on two forthcoming books with Speaking Tiger Books and HarperCollins India, respectively (a historical fiction set during the British period, and the other a nonfiction account of the Sikh Gurus). Her work often looks at history through the lens of everyday lives, resistance, and the quiet forces that shape collective memory.