My Grandmother, Small Nana, Molly Coelho. (From my memoir-in-progress "I Lift up my Eyes to the Hills"

With God's help, I intend to wrap up my memoir of an Indian Catholic Childhood by 1st September, 2013. If you'd indulge me, I'd love to share chapters from it, as they are written, here on my blog, to help me keep on track.  And here's a short chapter about my cute grandmother.      

                                                SMALL NANA

Bombay: city of danger, city of delight.

 Oh, but a cautionary city. When we visited each December, my mother warned us, my grandmother warned us:

“In Bombay, goondas speed up to auto-rickshaws, then lean over to yank dangling earrings.  If the passenger’s ear rips, it rips.  Never wear jewelry in Bombay: This Sindhi, in the latest Blitz, laid her arm, glittering with gold bangles, on the open window of her car.  Men with machetes drove beside her on a dark road, then sped away holding her arm on which those bangles still glittered. 

Ice-lollies sold by pushcart men are made from filthy water scooped from gutters.  ‘How are they to get municipal water in those cardboard and rag squatter shacks, you tell me now?’  Shammi kebabs sold on sidewalks are rotting dead dog, not lamb.  “Lamb, huh!  As if they’d sell lamb!”  Both were forbidden.

Those circus children who soar, spangly and sequined, were, of course, kidnapped.  A chloroform-soaked handkerchief slides across the faces of children who stray, you know, just down the road from their parents.  Sometimes, their legs are sliced mid-thigh, so they look piteous as they beg crouched on their little skateboards, their masters watching in the shadows, eyes narrowed on the take.  This beggar, in The Bombay Herald, died with a lakh of rupees sewn into his mattress; some in rags, and some in bags, and some in velvet gowns.   

If you take a taxi late at night, the cabbie aimlessly zigzags through the city, or if he sees you are a buddhu, drives around in circles, shamelessly grinning at the meter.  Sometimes passengers vanish.  And wash up out of the Arabian Sea, sans watch, sans wallet, throat slit.  Unaccompanied female women are abducted to brothels at Falkland Road--“Did you see those Illustrated Weekly pictures?”--to join the sad prostitutes in their cages.

My grandmother said so.  My mother said so.

“But what are brothels?” we asked.

“Never you mind.”   

                                          * * *

And never mind that Nana never left her rather Catholic suburb of Bandra for big bad Bombay; in fact, rarely left her own home: drunken bus drivers, bogeymen, beggar-men, thieves.  “The drivers these days, maniacs!  Bought their driver’s licence with a bribe; couldn’t be bothered about pedestrians; expect you to run out of their way; how can I run?  It’s no longer safe to cross a street in Bombay,” Nana said with finality. 

                                                * * *

We called my grandmother, Molly, Small Nana, not just because she was as diminutive and cute as a doll, which--timid and diffident, four feet eleven, in her perennial mid-calf batik dresses--she was, or because, as a child might, she ate almost everything--sliced beetroot, tomato, pineapple, melon, rice, mutton curry, pancakes, or buttered toast--with a frosting of the sugar forbidden her, a diabetic. It was because she was the daughter of Big Nana, Alice Rebello, her mother, my great-grandmother, frail, mild, with a constant gentle smile who, miraculously on every visit, slipped my mother an exquisite  piece of jewelry for us “when we grew up,” delicate confections of diamonds, tiny rubies and pearls, or Burma rubies with sparkling deep depths set in rings and earrings bought for her in Persia by my great-grandfather, a veterinary surgeon, attending the British army, or, more precisely, its horses.  (“Horse-doctor’s granddaughter,” we’d tease my mother, forgetting our two degrees of connection.) 

These Big Nana slipped to us when unobserved by her son and daughter-in-law, who had moved in with her, an ex-nun of whom my father said, “She’s a virago.”  (“What is a virago?”  “Oh never mind.”  Another word for my childhood Kabbalah.)  Jewelry so beautiful, and atavistically desired in a culture in which, traditionally, jewelry was a woman’s only inalienable possession, yet rending relationships--for one might have children in multiples, but not jewellery, so every piece given to Petra renders Paulina bitter, for jewellery—like food—represents love in the algebra of Indian culture. 

                                                * * *

Some time in my early childhood, Nana decided to stop stepping outside her beloved house. Within it, she had all she wanted: husband, children, and friends who’d drop in with gifts of the sweets she craved, delectable hemlock. And so she lived contentedly, in narrowing circles, a life-long voluntary house arrest, gradually renouncing visiting, parties, shopping, cooking, her world shrinking to ever fewer rooms. 

And in this small world of family, in an odd transmutation, she became the child to be petted and indulged.  My younger sister tricked Nana so often that, surely, Nana was tricking her in turn.  Eating a delicacy specially prepared for her, brain cutlets, tongue curry, she’d say, “Nana, this food is not nice.”  “And Nana’s face fell,” Shalini would crow.  “And then I said ‘It is Delicious.’”  

And so, protected, Nana floated, so passive she could never remember to cut her toe-nails; they grew, long, yellow, ridged, gnarled keratin, until the doctor paid a home-visit to cut them for her.  

But faith can move mountains, and love can move recluses. Nana’s two exceptions: Family, God.  She left the house on rare and select missions: to visit her mother, Alice, or her grandmother, Flora Coelho (who, in a confusion-inducing swirl of modifiers, was my great-great-grandmother, still alive in my early childhood, famous for her fourteen children, “The Holy Family,” of whom nine became nuns, or Jesuits of outstanding piety--“the ginger beards,” a stray Portuguese gene tinting their beards auburn—while her married children produced a slew of eminent churchmen and churchwomen.) 

Another exception: when her youngest son Ronnie treated us to chop suey, sweet ‘n sour, and vast cloying pastries in Bandra’s sophisticated, upper-crusty MacRonnels whose green-lit and aromatic ambience made you hungry the instant you entered.  Ronnie, a Chartered Accountant, sweet-natured, gentle, smiley, was everyone’s favorite, the prerogative of the youngest; the only brother who did marry, late, he still, straight after work, visited his old home, where he was loved-up, lapped-up, listened to (and the never-seen characters of his office, like his lame polio-stricken boss, Patrick Saldanha provided life-extending, soap-operatic gratifications to his parents and his spinster sister Joyce) before he dragged himself to his own home, tired and  talked-out, on the days he had the energy to.  

The final exception: the perilous Sunday morning crossing of the street to the massive St. Andrew’s Church, opposite her house, its floor, gravestones of glorious mismatched marble—deep peacock purple; pale green onion slices; dark red tree-rings, or sheerest white--a paving of crazy geometry and desperate love. The gravestoned floor sang belated praises to generations of Coelhos, Rebellos, Lobos, Saldanhas and Noronhas, all of whom, apparently, were dearly beloved paragons, exemplary husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, and if those engraved lauds and laurels were a  quarter-true, the final musing would be all too true, “The earth shall not see their like again.” 

And in the courtyard, amid amiable huge-winged marble angels and antique urns, was the oceanside family grave in which my elder brother, Gerard, who died as an infant three days old, was buried--a spot of fascination, yet dread of the inevitable unruly adult emotion.