Many Wodehousian fans would love to have an Aunt Agatha or Aunt Dahlia, or Bertie Wooster or even both. I had my solicitous aunt Anju nearing 100—comparable with Dahlia. However, she was not palpably nervous like the legendary Sachin Tendulkar while batting in late nineties. She lived alone in a single room abutting a bungalow, her guts keeping her in good stead. The governmental pension her husband legated to her took care of her fiscal, frugal needs.
Her place was cramped like an aircraft’s cockpit, all essentials within an arm’s reach like that of a pilot flying solo a Cessna Skyhawk. She had only a gas oven and cylinder. She made fresh batter for idli or dosa and chutney from contraptions belonging to the ‘old stone age’. Her rava upma would make even a diehard anti-upma person sheepishly ask for some. Then more. Her filter coffee would be a fitting ‘chaser’.
Though a vital cog in a huge joint family, she was always under the system’s thumb. After her domineering husband passed away and after shuttling between her sons’ places, she decided to go alone during the last leg of her life, despite objections from the siblings. A metaphor of the term ‘empowerment of women’, she stood like a rock.
The other day when I called on her, she was all smiles at the sight of a favourite. “Did you know today is your birth star day. Have this sweet sonny! You will live for hundred years from today.” I was startled by her memory. I can’t even remember what I ate last night. “I had prepared onion pakodas, your favourite.” I protested, feeling bad for eating snacks prepared by such an old lady. She waved away my protests. “In any case Seenu will be coming today. Do you know he also likes crisp onion pakodas? He is coming here because of a special birthday. He will turn eighty next week.
His son is organising a sadhabishekam, the religious celebration on seeing 1000 crescents. I still remember the day he was born. Do you know I got married when I was 14, a late marriage in those days, and I delivered Seenu in the next 10 months?”
A son inviting his nonagenarian mother, living alone, for his eightieth year religious bash? How blood relations have drifted like an archipelago of islands! “I wouldn’t know if he is coming to invite me or intimate me! O, I forgot! I will have to ask my neighbour to loan a chair for Seenu who can’t sit on the floor,” she said seated on the floor getting ready my plate of piping hot, crispy plantain bhajis.
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