An Ode to My Grandmère

Do you remember your grandmother for her culinary skills, or for her sharp, unyielding mind?

My paati (my father's mother) could transform the simplest of ingredients into something unforgettable, her labor quietly sustaining everyone around her. But that is not how I remember her. To me, she was brilliance wrapped in resilience, a woman who thought deeply, questioned instinctively, and lived on her own terms long before such language existed.

She was stopped from going to school but that did not step her from learning. With only fragments of help from her brother, she taught herself to read and write Tamil, patiently, stubbornly, letter by letter. She would go on to read books and quench her thirst for knowledge. 

She grew up with a single father, her mother having passed away in childbirth. Her father never remarried, very rare in that day and age for a man. Instead, he poured his quiet protectiveness into raising her. Perhaps that is where she first learned what it meant to stand apart from what society expected.

As a child, I remember sitting beside her, listening to stories. But they were never just stories. Each one carried a quiet challenge, a seed planted gently but deliberately. Two stories stayed with me, always in conversation with each other. They were narrated to me in a point counterpoint style forcing me to think , understand nuance, question assumptions and look at a same situation from multiple sides. 

1. “Vidhi yai meera mudiyadhu” — one cannot escape fate.
2. “Vidhiyai madhiyaal vella mudiyum” — fate can be overcome by intelligence.

She never resolved the contradiction for me. She left it there, like a riddle, trusting me to grow into its meaning. That was her way never dictating thought, always provoking it.

To the outside world, she remained what many women of her generation were reduced to: a master of the kitchen, a tireless provider of unpaid labor. But beneath that surface lived a woman of startling clarity. She did not perform for approval. She did not bend for the imaginary naalu peru those ever-watching, ever-judging figures in society.

She was, in her own quiet way, a rebel.

Fiercely protective of her daughter, my athai, she drew boundaries before the word ever found its place in modern vocabulary. She encouraged independence and emulated it. She spoke of financial awareness, of self-reliance, of standing one’s ground not through lectures, but through the steady authority of her own life.

Yes grief, (there was so much of it) had a way of shaping her views. She had many children and sadly not all of them lived. She endured losses that could have hardened her, could have turned her inward, could have made her pass that pain down like an heirloom. But she refused to pass on the intergenerational trauma to the next one.

Towards the end, she grew physically small. Time has a way of doing that. But her presence never diminished. Her voice could still thunder across a room, cutting through noise and nonsense alike. There was a command to her effortless, undeniable. She could not be fooled, and she certainly would not tolerate disrespect. She took nothing she did not deserve, and she gave nothing she did not mean.

She was not perfect. No one who lives fully ever is. But this piece is not a remembrance of flaws it is a recognition of force. Of impact. Of a life that quietly refused to be ordinary despite every circumstance that tried to make it so.

Now, as a grown woman, I understand her in ways I never could as a child. I see the architecture of her choices, the discipline behind her independence, the courage it took to think differently in a world that rewarded conformity.

I am glad to be named after you.

And wherever you are now, in whichever life you have taken form again, I hope it is infinitely gentler, infinitely freer than the one you left behind. I hope you are still asking questions. I hope you are still laughing at the rules that never made sense.

And I hope, somehow, you know - 
you were never just remembered.

You were understood.