The Happy Woman
Summer mornings in the house was an entourage
of sleepy children and hungry cats, punctuated by the clatter of
spoons and plates in the kitchen which ran on a firewood stove.
Ammoomma’s bangles clanged ceaselessly, as she mixed coffee, ground
chili and masala on the stone and grated half a dozen coconuts to last
us a day. This happened every April, when my uncles and aunts happily
deposited their kids at this ancestral home, where they shared my room,
clothes and Ammoomma.
As long as there were enough mangoes in the
large trunk box to last us four weeks, as long as unfortunate baby
turtles entered the rice pots left near the pond, to scrape off the
remains from the bottom, got trapped and offered us endless
entertainment, as long as Ammoomma still laid beside me at night, the
sweat of her day long efforts smelling of smoke, raw onions and the
sandalwood paste trapped in bits within the wrinkles of her forehead — I
did not mind the invaders in my terrain.
Then there was this year when several more
people came, most of them being strangers to me — some sat next to
Ammoomma and wept, some stood watching her silently. Ammoomma was laid
on the portico, balls of cotton stuffed in her nostrils and the
thumbs of the feet tied together with a white strip of cloth. A bunch
of incense sticks near her head gave out thick white fumes, almost as
if her soul was escaping an overused body through a hole in her skull.
She looked serene, promptly branded by everyone as a fortunate woman
who lived mightily for 60 healthy years, and died in her sleep without
suffering, that too on a day when all her dear ones happened to be
near.
The mud etched within the calloused folds of
thick skin of her feet, which could not be scrubbed off with a whole
wad of coconut fiber and its chapped underside with the flesh almost
visible, told another story.
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