dear ones,
here is a request asking you to please hold me in your thoughts.
got a call late last night. my cousin, sandeep, calling me from an
international calling booth in kerala, india. called to say our
grandmother had just died the day before. he had been trying to reach
me, but i had been on my way to knoxville from atlanta, and out of
range. talked to my father, who was boarding a plane from bombay to
get to eravankara, kerala, the village where we are from. he explained
that she had a heart attack. he sounded so sad, but he reached out to
calm me. he will participate in the cremation this morning. her
children casting her ashes in the river, her soul will be put to rest.
talked to family members, talked to a friend. i’ve been searching for
flights to durham this morning- need to get home to durham before i
can begin to think about how to get home to kerala. flights out of
knoxville are painfully expensive, though. my dear friend roberto has
intercepted my search. he says, ‘let me drive you to durham’. of
course.
just the day before, roberto had been talking about mama nina, the
cook at highlander center, and how she was endlessly generous and
hard-as-nails, the quintessential appalachian. i said: yes, just like
my grandmother, my ammooma. this morning when i told the news to pam,
the director of highlander, she said: “when we lose a family member,
it changes the terrain we tread on.”
that thought resonates with me. the earth under my feet is trembling,
and even before the earth cracks open, my knees are apt to give.
i feel so lost here, so far from my communit(y/ies). no one knows her
here. here, hardly anyone even knows me enough to understand why this
is so heart-breaking. feels odd to think of taking space for
bereavement when i’ve only worked at highlander for three weeks so
far.
ammooma asked me to write letters to her once i returned to the u.s.:
“nee ennikye cathe erithanam”. why was i so afraid to write to her,
simply because i couldn’t write in malayalam? i told her that i was
illiterate, and she told me that my mother’s malayalam was beautiful
and i should get her to scribe. i held off on asking my mother for
this favor some time because of the emotional complexities of the
request, and when i finally did ask, i discovered that mom had asked a
family friend to scribe for her. ha! i wrote to my grandmother in
english, once, and asked sandeep (he is just a bit older than my
sister anjali, and when we were little, we would play together in my
ammooma’s yard, among the banana plants and fig trees, mangoes,
cashews, jackfruit, cockscomb, drumstick, hibiscus, swinging in the
uunyaal to the clouds) to read it aloud in malayalam for her. but i
was ashamed, then, of my coarse handwriting, and was nervous to write
again.
once the rental car company calls, we will drive into the mountains to
highlander, and then onward, five hours, to durham. i will try and
figure out the money for a flight to thiruvananthapuram? bombay? when
i get there.
love,
manju