She stands there, turned to a statue of stone. I have no idea if it is from being so close to taser wielding policemen, whose English she finds hard to comprehend, or from having seen the artefact in front of her in its bulletproof casing. In hindsight I should have known, there are so many things one slowly loses from memory while learning the tightrope walk of belonging to a new culture, yet when you encounter it once again staring at you in the face, you know exactly how natural it used to be in the world you left behind and why it will be an aberration, in the one you belong to now…If at all there is anyone to blame in this fiasco, then it is me, and solely me, 

I should have never left her side, I should have explained to her the rules of the museum, I should have …done a million and thousand things…to avoid this, to spare her this embarrassment…. and to think, that for a little while there, I had actually thought I was winning the tug of war against her inertia…

This is how our bickering and arguments had begun,

What do you want to do today Periatte? 

“Um I don’t know.”  

“Can we go out to dinner?” 

“Noooo!  Why eat outside? I will make you the drumstick Sāmbhar you lowe so much”, 

“After we eat sambar shadam, then should we go watch a movie ?” 

“I don’t understand the language, what’s the use?”

“Maybe we can go to the temple again?”…

“But today there will be no one, no? ” 

“So what about the India grocery store, you seemed to get along well with the owner…” 

“o Harianna, of course he is there! Himself from Mannaragudi no…he still knows all five types of jaggery, he gave us the best one, he also called personally, when the fresh mavadu came in …he is like a family member only…but today is Thursday…he only comes there on Saturdays, and Tuesdays. He himself told me so. very veeery…humbel  man…don’t know how he manages here…”

“Umm…Zoo? “

“Have you ever looked at the eyes of those poor souls…I can’t bear to look only…you want to go see elephants with this big tusks…come to Mannaragudi…not far from there, I will personally tell Sumi’s tata to take you to see a family of 11 elephants….keeping them in cages…what’s the use?”

“Periatte…the zoos here are nothing like that, and I am pretty sure you won’t be able to see penguins in Mannaragudi, even in the forest…”

“Chinnamma…you tell me one thing, would you like to be put in a cage? Where strangers stare at you all day…how can that be study? Even the Jasmine in the backyard won’t flower probperly  if you stare at it all day….you want to know about penguins, you go where they stay …or you ask people who stay there …anna …what does the penguin do when it is hot…that’s it…you don’t have to seberate the penguin from its family no, so you can study it…in Mannargudi….”

“OK! OK! Periattae…I get it …it’s the best place on earth…NOTHING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD can beat it…What now? What do we do in the three days where I have nowhere to go …and no plans that I can obviously make…”

Her face falls proportionately to my rising voice, squeakily she explains ” I was just going to tell you how if you befriend animals in the wild they will come to you anyway…but it’s okay.”

Immediately, it’s my turn to feel contrite about yelling at her, it strikes me suddenly how seamlessly our roles seemed to have reversed, the one who was in charge of teaching me how to tie my shoelaces, how to make the braid with five partings, how to tie the half sari, how to quickly learn 19 times table, was now the one I was trying to teach the ways of my world to… that I had not even one fraction of the patience she had while she was the teacher made me feel more irritated and to shake my head in frustration.

“Why do you need to do so much for me? I am happy I got to see you, spend time with you, see for myself how well  you have done in life…that’s all Chinamma…that is more than enough to make me happy .” We haven’t really said sorry to each other for being rude or adamant, but for now there seems to be a momentary truce.

This has been our morning routine for all the seven days she has spent in my tiny New York apartment. She would stand by the stove and cook up a storm for me, while craftily excusing herself from any long-distance travelling, by citing “you know how my sciatica flares up no”. There was going to be no Niagara falls or Saratoga, Boston, Woodstock tour like I had imagined, but I do have three more days of vacation time remaining and nothing really planned. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I do register that this Periattae is not the same person as in my imagination anymore. It’s the same face, the same voice, but somehow without my having ever realized it, she has become old, she looks shrunken, slower, more cranky than the Periattae I remember. It’s like the one I used to know is now hidden behind a web of wrinkles and getting to her somehow takes longer, I  fight the niggling discomfort that this realization brings and try harder to bring some cheerful happy plans back into the game again…

Periatte is my father’s eldest sister, she was twenty when my grandmother passed away. My father was six. She came to our family to visit for  the last rites of her mother, and never left. After six months of waiting when no one from her in-laws village came to pick her up and take her back, she removed her talli and her bangles and applied for a teacher’s job. She wanted to teach Sangam literature, poems of the nayanmars, incidents that would breathe life into the manimekalai.

The school that particular year had an opening for a Maths Teacher for the seventh grade, she asked them to give her a chance, they agreed and never once had to regret it…In another four years, the cantankerous pundit of the family, my grandfather, passed away from a snake bite.  My father was ten, periattae the oldest living adult became the sole breadwinner in a family of eight siblings…Manimekalai and the prince were never heard of in the dins of the family courtyard ever again.

There is a photo of her somewhere, in my father’s albums, behind  crinkled yellowed tissue paper; where a beautiful periatte stands with my father on her hip on one side and a stick of a half broken sugarcane in her other hand, the siblings  are laughing manically at something the cameraman has said, the image is a momentary glimpse into the world  of  well oiled groomed hair, toothless  smiley faces, scrubbed clean  of grime and snot to pose for the photo, Nothing in that photo matches the stories the family tells me from that time…it’s almost as if those tough times are now an embarrassing family  secret,…what happened to Periattae the youthful woman of 20 is something I have been very curious about…there is this family anecdote  about her, how soon after she started teaching, the  village soon got its first student  who qualified for the seventh grade state scholarship awards for mathematics, as the money for the educational needs of her siblings increased , With a pragmatism Periattae with a started extra tuitions at home, she would come back from her school at 2, rest for an hour and then start the private tuitions till 8. Other than that, did she ever fall in love again, did she ever think of marrying again? was there ever a moment where she regretted not going back to the household that had abandoned her..nothing. No whispered family secrets, no memory of her loneliness…nothing.

This trip has been the result of about five years of coaxing and cajoling. At the back of my mind, I know this is actually another demand I make on her, instead of a gift, that I want to give her. What she would actually like is for any one of us to go and stay with her, in her space, where she makes the thousand minuscule decisions, and we follow suit, but we are all lethargic, we all of us very promptly cite how many times we have asked her to come to stay with us and how adamant and cantankerous she is exactly like her tata…but all of us know that it’s a ruse, any help and care that we offer comes with the rider of her uprooting, “… This she fights openly, tooth and nail,” if all plants could grow anywhere you wanted them to, this world would be a different place no? My soil is Mannaragudi…I am not going anywhere…” is what she had told appa…long back when I had started working on breaking her resolve to come to visit me, I had thought it would be a way of showing my gratitude, my chance of “giving back” …like in the films I had thought we would sit by the poolside, get our hair done, paint nails, get her a facial…and now I do not know while I was fantasizing about all this, why it had brought me so much joy…

In my mind there is so much I want to do with her, I want to take her to the veggie market in Jackson Heights and ask her to remind me once again the difference between Moringa and Ghongura, between the silver and the ash gourd, are they the same?   I want her to tell me again how to look for eggplants without seeds and what to listen to, while knocking on the coconut: to understand whether it will be fresh and sweet or old and rotting…I want to sit her down one day and show her all the albums squirrelled away in the storage and make her recount the names of people, that I used to once know but have now forgotten, I want to know how they are related to us…

Most of all I want to wreak an act of bittersweet revenge by upending an entire bottle of her “cure-all elixir” the humble coconut oil, into her wrinkled scalp her knotty back bowed like a harp and give her the first-ever thorough message it must have ever gotten since she was a child.

But EVEN now she makes it so difficult for me to do anything for her….she with her quick calculation converts the dollar value into rupees and baulks at the very thought that a cup of artisanal coffee will be enough for her to buy groceries in Vaaduwurand, and serve a feast at the Dakhinamurti temple, for a meal of 21 Brahmins on Ekadashi…and also save some for the dakshina. A meal in a gourmet setting is enough of money to ward off the moneylender from Savitri’s door for a year…a ride in Uber is enough of valaaikapu(Godbharai) money for Kumud, and if I ever tell her the ticket value for an opera at the Met…I don’t know how many probable villager’s woes will be invoked, so  I don’t even bring it up.

All through my college, I had seen her sell her gold jewellery one by one so she could help the families growing expenditures….so she could supply ready cash for the increased rent,  my tuition, my transport and stay at the computer college of my choice in Madras.

“What’s it going to do, sitting with me… letting it warm the insides of a safe does not make it hatch like chickens, you know. Spend it wisely, when you come back in the summers get me sandalwood paste and angawastrams  for the Gods”…one of the main reasons I tear my hair after living in close quarters with her for four days but can’t shake the niggle that I owe her big time. 

Yesterday She teared up when I opened the red velvet casing of a box and handed it to her…

“This is for you periattay.” I had had the mekhala and the baajuband made from a Mallu jeweller in Jackson Heights, a very close approximation like the hereditary ones she had lost to the moneylender. She instantly teared up as I had known she would.

“How did you remember the design? Why?  For me? You think I can have use of it?  It’s your time now, grow your hair. oil it, Braid it probperly, wear clothes like a girl, and wear this, there will be a line of suitors that will fall at your feet chinamma…my time is gone…you keep it.”

Thankfully, I consider myself a quick learner, I can grit my teeth at the advice and even then, think of ways to hoodwink her… there IS an antidote to this ingrained selflessness…the trick is to make her believe she is doing something for someone else, rather than for “selfish gains”…it then quickly falls into place …

“I am pretty sure periatte you will find another project to save …exactly like you saved me…were you not the one who kept telling me over and over again that “gold could make you look like a queen, but when the king fails, it can also help the kingdom survive”…keep it…who knows which of your ” new daughters”  may get a new life because of it…

I waited for her sharp mind to conjure another “but” or a wimpy “if” …but in more than three seconds when I did not hear any protest I heaved an inaudible sigh of relief, and snapped the lid shut…”that’s that then” thank you for accepting”. In my minds scorecard it was” Sulu- 1…Periatte – 0.

TODAY had been such a day…last night…through the” ifs” “ buts”  “nos” and “why bothers”, I managed to make sense,(once again) to her  and burst her idea of selflessness when I suggested we go to the museum. “there was an exhibition about  South Asian art and wouldn’t Gayatri her new ward, like some original catalogues…there would be a wheelchair for her, so no long walks, we would be inside, so nothing to worry about cold weather, and we will eat only the food she decides to take with us”…what would have been shot at as…o no …became a yes…albeit a little reluctantly…

So Sullu 2 Periattae 0…

God! I was getting good at this…

So then, because she had agreed…she had been up since 5.00 clock in the morning, pottering about in the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as she could be. Considering the fact that she is almost deaf, it is only her who thinks she is being quiet. I will give her this, she is not familiar with the workings of what I call my kitchen, and it’s a miracle of sorts that’s possible only from the practice of a thousand encounters with the spices concerned: that she can still cook a mean parappu, a pepper rasam and ponni rice in under 20 minutes, with a side of onion pachadi that’s not even considered “cooking”.

At five in the morning then, I am woken up by Subbalaxmi playing from my old recorder, to this sudden bout of self-questioning, that: There a lot of idiosyncrasies that creep in when one is so used to staying only by oneself, am I going to end up like her? Which one of us really stays alone? Her and the entire village which is her family, or me, who bravely believes that this “solitude” is my choice and therefore my most prized possession. Who is the real working woman of the family? Me who is held in high esteem for having made it to a foreign university and who now earns in dollars, or who went back to the village and held a clan together by the sheer grit and the cement of her will?  I am too groggy to even brush off this irrepressible thought, I get up and out of bed already agitated…  generally her specks hang around her neck like a thalli, and are used only in an emergency, similarly… the hearing aid gets used only when she finds the need to talk to someone and needs to hear their response. the venkatesa suprabhatam then, needless to say, is cranked up to such a volume that I find it an easy target to let out my irritation on…very pointedly, I put the hearing aid back in her ear so that the entire 17th street doesn’t wake up to her prayers.

She is profusely contrite about it, immediately, and shoos me back to sleep, with apologies about having disturbed me, but as I huddle back into the comforter, to think about why I am so irritated, … the smells coming from the kitchen somehow manage to lull me into a sense of comfort, so much so that I doze off thinking of home… .of coconut palms and burning incense, steam from copper utensils heating water …

When I wake up, just from the smells I already know that there is upma and payasam with jaggery for breakfast and idlis with drumstick sambar and chutneys to carry …there is lemon rice and tomato chutney if we get late…for the most important rule that periattey laid down after three days of me showing her downtown riches of the many cuisines was this…”for as long as I am here Chinnmma, I will do the cooking, if you don’t like it anymore…you can do your take out shake outs, but for me, I will be ok even if it is thair shadam that I eat at night. You know when one gets old like me…”

Unspeakable conditions, gastrointestinal doom has been already predicted, emotional blackmail has been evoked, but even as I realize that it’s nothing but only resistance to exploring the unfamiliar, I know  I have already, instantly, lost that round of battle.

So, at 7.30 while I am still groggy and sipping my coffee and glancing through the NYT for more options suitable to take her to, she is by the mirror…this is such a familiar routine…I am transformed back to Mannargudi..

The swiftness with which the pallu gets thrown over the shoulder, and gets pulled by the other hand, the exact angle the comb makes as she ties her now completely white hair at the base of the neck, the size of the knot that was once full now resembles a dried out areca nut, the way one wrist quickly turns and twists the strands and passes it to the other hand, remains the same. The diamond studs have melted the piercings and the earlobes hang down with their weight from where they never come out, exactly like the two nose pins. She swiftly glances behind her to see if the pallu at her ankles has turned or scrunched up, stamps it down with the left heel, and she is done. Only this time in keeping with the changing temperatures of a different continent, the dressing is going to take a minute longer, she struggles with a down coat half her weight and then the feather on the cap of this get up. An “English” style purple woollen bonnet which she is pretty proud of as she has woven it herself out of a catalogue someone brought for her from Madras.. no mean feat this considering that she is almost blind.

The purple bonnet makes me angry, why I do not know, it matches nothing in her wardrobe, or the coat I purchased for her with care. I haven’t had the courage to tell her not to wear it. After a lot of gumption, I had asked her gently if she would like to try on some of mine? Which I immediately regretted, for now, there is an additional tennis cap that goes  over the purple bonnet because “she needs to “keep  respect of my wishes”, The other logic behind it being— “it matches the tennis shoes she wears under her sari.”

As I said I am a quick learner and know when to cut my losses…tennis shoes sticking out of a saree and a purple bonnet with a tennis hat is a better deal if we can get out, than not getting out at all. Nothing in this usualness of our bickerings and companionship ever prepared me for what the day would eventually turn out to be like.

It is already too late by the time I turn back from reading the plaque under the bodhisattvas that have caught my eye. Two guards are running towards periaate, one with his taser drawn, the other searching for his walkie talkie. What I see makes me still instantly, my adrenaline kicking in instantly.. Periaate is behind the glass cube of a Nataraja statue, crouched on the floor on all fours, with an open container of payasam in front of her, as if she is searching for something. Two security guards are almost ready to catch her and haul her out physically if need be one relaying urgent coded messages on the wireless, the other making sure his taser is pointing in the right direction.

“MA’AM , you need to get up right now, and you need to get away from the  glass case NOW.”

“WHAT Do you think you are doing madam?”

Periatte straightens but does not get up from the floor and holds out the Payasam in both her hands.

“This is God, my god. our God no? I was offering prasadam no not prasadam , nothing…payasam no…. In this cage, no breathing, no air, everyone everything staring staring all day long… how hungry he must be. I only offer naivedyam! you can taste…milk and rice and jaggery …nothing else” …at the perplexed expressions of the officers she looks at me for help  “e chinnamma, come here can you explain please, my English not so good!

I stir from my stunned frozen statue moment. Equal part embarrassed, equal parts proud…

“Officer, sorry for the disturbance. it’s a custom in India…” All the while I am trying to clamp down on the fear that’s rising as very real very scary scenarios of what can happen begin to play in my mind . What if they actually take Periatte to jail, or worse still, what if something had happened to her because the officers thought her to be a terrorist planting a bomb or something.What if they had used the taser first and asked for information later like they are trained to do in the inner city?

Mam MAAM, DO NOT touch the glass case, I want you to get up from where you are and give the container over to us. One of the officers orders her as she stares and nods and stares again not knowing what has actually happened.

But something in the fragility of periattaes frame and wrinkled body probably must have spoken to something in the other officers “human-ness”. After what seemed like hours of tensed frozen silence He bent forward quietly and took hold of her wheelchair, gently directing it towards her, so she could sit.

Here madam…I think it’s ok, now,  no food allowed inside, but please enjoy the rest of your visit. His voice suddenly changes from a charging officer to that of a small boy’s taking his nana out for a walk. I meet his eyes and silently mouth a thank you. There is  a slight silent gesture where he tips his hat and mouths” it’s ok!” ” I understood”. My eyes well up a bit for no reason.

I want to start carting the wheelchair away to put some distance between the spot and us but realize that periattae isn’t done yet. She was slumped on the wheelchair with all energy gone from her frame as if she had just plunked thereafter a marathon. The officers have put back their tasers and their notebooks and their walkie-talkies and have silently receded in the well-padded caverns of the gallery. but it is as if a magnetic beam is still radiating from the murtis centre and holding perattae in thrall of its force.

“periatte”…I gently touch her shoulder…can we go to the next…”

“chinamma…this is Him…I am sure this is him Chinamma…”

“him who periattae…?”

The god who vanished after the arangetram. I was 16 a little late for the arangetram but you know how our Tata was…I had my first and last performance in the mandapa in front of him….look at the chipped nose the cut hand, we had so many jokes about it when we were kids…how can I ever forget?

He brought me here all the way so I could get his darshan, chinamma the ways of the world are so strange no…

She stands up from the wheelchair and walks towards the murti with payasam in hand as if she is a puppet being pulled on a string….she keeps touching the glass case with reverence, and keeps mumbling to herself,  lost in thought, it is as if she is having a secret conversation with her lover who is behind bars and she is pained at his emaciated state…The moment the thought occurs to me, there is this burst of clarity…perittae never needed to take a lover, the empty garbhagriha where only the chopped feet of the murti remained, had been a  go-to spot to air all and sundry woes and complaints. to make conversations…to yell and scream and cuss and probably be cussed back in return.                      

the god is not just stone chinnamma, he needs to be woken up, put to sleep, fed, dressed, sung to, danced with, one needs to cook food for him, to praise him, to fight with him when he has no answers…tell me who does it help to keep him here like this…are they ever going to understand who he is seeing him here like this? What’s the use?

no suprabhatam, no aarti, no sahasranama, how, I ask you, how  can the god live like this…

Periattae…listen…when I said let’s go to the museum …I didn’t think it would make you sad…

“NO chinnamma…you don’t understand only! Don’t feel sad for me..There IS a reason why you suggested that, there is a reason  I had to come here today, I had to come no…there was a reason, there is always a reason!

Now I can die in peace chinamma…I got his darshan…all these years  for nothing…who would have thought …I was so silly saying no to you first…can you  imagine all these years… just the feet, the feet where he used to be, the one we used to sing and dance to…the leela of him…who can even guess…me coming face to face with him…don’t you see…”

“Periattae …I  am just relieved that the cops did not book you for vandalizing museum property, or charge us both with misdemeanour or something more grave…I would have not known how to raise that kind of money…

She has not heard me; for as I start to roll the wheelchair into the next room, she is just looking back, payasam in hand,  her eyes still glued on the murti.

Periatte…should we continue in the museum, or do you want to go back…are you feeling tired…we can take a break, eat our lunch in the park and then come back…

I can go home now, what else do I need? but make sure we have the catalogues for Gayatri like you had said you would purchase.

and that’s that…as I return the wheelchair, and she stands up with me to walk down the museum stairs, I see a sparkle in her eyes and a smile on her face, the like of which I have never seen even once in the last two weeks…somehow, I feel vindicated, that there was one, event (EVEN IF I WASN’T THE CAUSE) in which I could make her genuinely happy.

While I drive her back home, our entire Tiffin is still uneaten, and my stomach grumbling in rebellion…I have a good inkling of how big the story of her, finally finding the village dakshin mukhi Shiva is going to be; once she reaches mannargudi…and in hindsight, I am once again irritated at myself for not having seen how easy it really was to make her happy…and how wrong my way of thinking had been all along…I have to finally concede, that it wasn’t my plan that brought the twinkle in her eye…

“Periattae …are you tired? …How about some filter coffee? I promise it’s not in a place you won’t like…this is the best filter coffee you will find on this side of Mannargudi…they even put chicory in the blend…”

Lost in thought, with a smile on her face, and a twinkle in her eye…periattaye absentmindedly says:

“sure! yes! filter kapii will do !”