Miscellaneous
Still crazy after all these years
I owe everything I am to my granny. I can proudly say that living with her has been a blastAlisha Sijapati
My grandmother drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney back in the day. She’s 90 years old now and she says she has quit her bad habits (more about that later) because she’s now “high on life”, as she likes to put it. Sometimes I wonder how she must have led her life in her heyday. I often ask her how she was brought up and how she turned out the way she did, and the only reply I have always received actually embodies the ethos my generation: “I have always played by my own rules.”
My grandmother lives on her own terms, because according to her, she is a queen—the queen of her household and family.
And the niggling little impediments, like the fact that she limps to get around these days, has never been a problem for her regal ways: her desires are always fulfilled by her children and grandchildren. She’s lucky that way.
And stubborn.
And she loves to talk. There is this one particular incident she keeps telling me about, despite my reminding her that she’s told it to me for the umpteenth time now. She apparently cut her hair really short, on purpose, when she was 18, just because she had no desire to get married. She calls that phase of her life atrocious. She proudly says, “Even when there were so many restrictions and I was constantly surrounded by strict family members, I made my own rules. For all these years I have lived like that, and I am surely not going to change my ways now.”
“I started smoking when I was 15,” she says whenever she wants to regale me with tales of her rebellious ways. “I started puffing on the hookah because initially I was mesmerised by the lovely, guttural sounds that it made when I took a deep drag. I actually taught my sisters to smoke,” recalls Granny, adding, “And later, when I was to get married, I luckily snagged an adorable, educated and understanding husband who had no issues with my habits.”
As the nostalgia kicks in when she is on one of these story-telling binges, she often takes me along with her—oftentimes on the trips she made to foreign cities: Bangkok, London, Paris, Geneva. In her re-imagining of these cities, the places all seem to be suffused in an ethereal glow. I don’t know if that glow is a product of her capacity for absorbing the sensibilities of a place or if they are actually coloured by the fumes of alcohol still hiding in the recesses of her brain. With an excitement that is contagious she tells me how she tasted ‘amrit’, aka Baileys, during a trip to London with her son-in-law two decades ago. “It would be nice to taste some again,” she slyly tells me sometimes, as if I don’t know that she still takes a couple of swigs now and then if my cousins bring a bottle home with them.
“I completely quit drinking and smoking a long time ago,” she says these days. But completely for her does not take into account a couple of swigs of amrit now and then or a couple of drags of cigarette off my cousins. “I don’t mind if you smoke in my room,” she says. “Just don’t cough around me and shorten my life.”
I cannot imagine anything shortening my granny’s life. She lives in the moment. And thus, she says, she is forever young. You should see how she mocks her cousins. “Don’t I look much younger than them?” she says, flaunting her still-flawless skin and showing off her array of skin-creams—which, truth be told—she does apply generously every day.
But she can flip the whole script about age and its effects on her whenever she wants to. When I want some money from her, for instance. That’s when she suddenly ages 40 years.
“Mua, can you give me 200 rupees?” I’ll ask her.
“Kati? 20 rupaiya?” comes the prompt reply.
My friends tell me that my granny and I are more like siblings than grandmother-granddaughter. There’s quite a bit of truth to that observation, as attested by our constant battles in the mornings for the bathroom, the late night squabbles over what to watch on TV and my granny’s endless complaints of what was served for dinner—my granny sometimes seems like the sibling from hell. There are times when I can’t stand her dark humour (I am, after all, the preferred butt of her jokes) and the way she orders me around, but at the end of the day, that’s how my grandmother is.
If I can only be half as cool and live half as long (long may she live), I will have lived a full life.