It’s funny how I remember my grandmother’s birthday today. I often forgot it when she was alive and I don’t recall ever giving her a gift or a card or doing anything special. But Granny was like that, if you know her too, you wouldn’t do anything special. You would just spend your every waking hour wishing that she would disappear and leave you in peace.
I know this post is going to disturb many of you, if not all. After all who doesn’t love their grandparents? Honestly, I didn’t love my grandmother, my Dad’s mom, the one I was forced to call “Granny.” (Even though I secretly thought she was the Wicked Witch of the East when I was a kid!)

It’s been 12 years since she passed away. Since she succumbed to the big ‘C’ at a tranquil little hospice by the sea in Bombay. It was the day of the solar eclipse and she breathed her last at the exact same moment. Not a day goes by when I don’t remember her, or talk about her to my dad and brother, or tell my husband stories about her. There is no sadness or pain, but boy do I miss her! We sit and talk about all her antics and laugh and laugh and laugh. My dad, brother and me had all these jokes about her and even today, even though we’ve repeated them a million times (like my mom says) we laugh till our sides split.

You have to understand the kind of person my grandmother was. And I can safely say that there was no one and never will be anyone like her in the world. She was mean and petty; always sparking off fights. She was greedy and jealous and always cursed those who had more than her (which was everybody). She poked her nose into everyone’s affairs; steamed open letters, listened in on conversations – the works. She didn’t love anyone, not a single person except herself. Not her husband, not her sons, not her grandchildren and definitely not her daughters-in-law.

Even though she made my life hell while I was growing up, no one knew her the way I did. You could say we were at loggerheads from the day I was born. Literally!
Granny had three sons and she always wanted a daughter. Before my birth, there were two more boys – my brother and cousin. So I was the first girl to come along after ages and everyone was ecstatic except for dear old Granny. My dad says that when he called her from the hospital (I was born at 1:55 am) to give her the news he said, “Mummy it’s a girl!” She was so jealous even after all those years that she slammed the phone down! I still laugh when I hear that story.

I remember this one time when she came to my school and complained to my teachers that I was using bad language! It’s usually the other way round, teachers complain to parents but this crazy woman, because I wasn’t listening to her or something, marches over and tells my teacher about the bad language, which by the way I picked up from her!
I think the reason I don’t trust people’s affections easily has a lot to do with Granny. She used to give me stuff when I was a kid and then take it back! One fine day she stopped calling me by my pet name, the one that my entire family continues to call me even today, because she “didn’t like me anymore.” I was 8 years old at the time. Till the day she died she never called me by that name again. Even at that age I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so mean to a child!

I hated my grandmother but her death changed so much. The old house in Goa just isn’t the same anymore. No one lives there anymore, we don’t even spend holidays there like we used to. My uncle used to tell me that Granny actually loved me; she just didn’t know how to show it. She was so full of bitterness all her life that she never had a good thing to say about anyone or anything. I don’t believe that she loved me but I do admit to some connection between us. Strangely enough, she trusted me. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I was the one who spent the most time with her. The last time I went to stay with her in Goa was just after I graduated from college. We knew she had the cancer then and she had just undergone chemotherapy but she seemed lively and upbeat. She cooked for my friend M and me; once she even packed us a picnic lunch. Before I left for Bombay she came up to me with this huge bunch of keys and showed me where each one fits, in all the cupboards and doors of that old house. She kept repeating, “You have to take care of this place after I’m gone. Otherwise I will come back and haunt you!”

I used to remember her more than ever when I lived in Chennai a few years back. My grandmother loved that city, her “Maaddraas” as she called it! She had an uncle who had settled down here years ago and she and her sister had spent a couple of years there when they were kids. She never stopped talking about it and always wanted to go back. Years later, she kept dreaming about her uncle's house and would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. You see, she always dreamed that the house was been robbed! As a kid, I never understood her fascination for Madras. She could have been talking about Greenland for all I cared. Living there all those years later, I still didn't understand it! But I do realise that she had seen the Madras of the pre-independance era, when it was clean and green and oh so propah. She used to study in a convent school with English nuns and students and at home, in her uncle's house, she had butlers and valets and personal maids! I remember her describing her favourite breakfast dishes in Madras (hoppers and string hoppers). I always wondered what those exotic things must be like, till I finally found out she was talking about appams and idiappams! I'm sure she would have been kicked to know that I ended up living there for 6 years and would have definitely come and stayed with me.

There’s so much more I could write about my grandmother but I think this post has become long enough. I have deliberately left out the painful, traumatic stuff because it’s all water under the bridge now. I’d rather continue laughing at all the funny stuff; the way she pronounced certain words, the way she always took down phone messages wrong, the way she made an ass of herself and never admitted it, the way she tried to swindle people, even her own children!
My grandmother could very well have been one of the worst human beings ever but I don’t think anyone else affected my life as much as she did. She was around more than my own mother and whether I like it or not, it changed me. So love her or hate her she was my Granny and in a funny way it was nice to have a feisty woman like her in my family. She would have been 89 today.

Happy Birthday Granny!