Ammu Muthashi's Death

When Ammu muthashi died, they tied a bed sheet across the cowshed, so the four cows and the calf wouldn’t see the body being taken out to be cremated. Ammu muthashi was sick for a very long time- though everyone had a different notion of how many months or years exactly. She was bed-ridden for ‘so long’, Amma told me. Dhanya chechi, Ammu muthashi’s granddaughter, was glad that her first son could be blessed by his great-grandmother before she passed. Kochachan was glad that he took a picture of her on his new SLR camera, more than ten years ago. I was there when he took the picture- he made her stand at the doorway of her son’s- his cousin’s- house. That was the last time I had seen Kochachan- relatives have a way of disappearing into obscurity, and when that obscurity is in Louisiana, one doesn’t go looking.

A few days after the death, Kochachan updated his status on Facebook. He posted the picture of Ammu muthashi with a description of a loving aunt. I chuckled, but then, immediately realised that he had a life in rural Kerala before the obscurity of Louisiana gobbled him.

Ammavan was very sad; she was his mother, after all. Amma told me that he kept swabbing her dried lips with a damp cloth, long after she had lost consciousness. Amma had a flair for recalling such minor details with the more-than-adequate amount of dramatics- she could raise and lower her voice, and emphasise certain words, and sway her fingers. Later, when my grandfather died, and when we swabbed his lips with a damp cloth, long after he was dead, I wondered whether my mother would recall this too with an element of drama.

Ammu muthashi’s daughter-in-law loved her. She told me how, on the morning of the death, the rice on the stone stove had boiled over and spilt on to the flames. This was a sign of death- rice boiling over without being cooked properly. She pushed the coconut husks into the same stove as she told me this. My grandmother nodded as she listened to this, and wiped the sweat off her brow. This time, no rice-cooked or uncooked- boiled over. But a month later, Ammu muthashi’s daughter died when a van sped around a corner and hit her one morning when she was delivering milk to the neighbours.

When I told Amma about the story of the rice boiling over, she laughed scornfully and told me not to believe in such tales.

Achan came home after the cremation; he was excited because of the new crematoria. A year ago, he had to cremate his mother the old fashioned-way: with wood and oil and fire. Ammu muthashi was lost in the obscurity of an electric crematorium as impersonal as the guillotine in Kafka’s story. But because there was a receipt, it was possible to trace the remains of Ammu muthashi’s bodies.

I could not go for the cremation, because I was a woman. Electric or not, cremation was a man’s business.

I remember Ammu muthashi in her white mundu tied around her waist and reaching till her ankles. A thin, cotton towel was draped around her translucent white blouse. I loved the feel of her crinkled skin. As a child, I had wondered whether all old people had such skin. As a child, I also thought that when I grow big, old people would become kids, and that it was an endless cycle. But I grew up, and Ammu muthashi did not become a kid again, but I had to help her walk sometimes. And when I did, I discovered that the skin on her back was as crinkly as the skin on her arms. Like my grandfather’s, her hair was a silvery grey. I secretly hoped I would have those genes. I tried to picture her as a young woman, as young as I was then- were her fingers shaped like mine before they were bent with age? Did she love her husband? Did she believe in the story of uncooked rice boiling over?

The last time I had gone to ammavan’s house, she existed only as a framed copy of the photo that was taken on a United States SLR camera. She looked like she always did- an old Nair woman at the doorstep of an old house in a Malappuram village, smiling feebly at her nephew. Her cotton towel was replaced by a clean, white, long veshti.

The bed-sheet had been removed from the cowshed and the cows munched lazily on freshly cut long stalks of grass, while the calf sat in the shade of the areca-nut trees. Edathi was alive and tending to her beloved cows and selling milk. She was washing away the dung from the cowshed floor. I sat on the steps and watched how her back could arch so gracefully as she swept the floor. Dhanya chechi’s son, a toddler then, walked up to the calf, and whispered into her ear, “Ammu, Ammu.”