AppaW3 Nagarajan 500 - Winter Salon 2014 – Group 3: Julie, Vijaya, Jody

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February 2, 2014 at 10:18 pm #16132

Vijaya-Nagarajan
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Remember how you used that varumpadi, her monthly income, to cushion your monthly paycheck of Rs. 120, now worth only $3 dollars a month. Her income, though only $1 a month, was one-third of your government salary of a lower middle class clerk, so it must have been huge at that time. Her income was used to support your younger brother’s education to become a veterinary doctor and your younger sister’s marriage to a good match, to fulfill your responsibilities as the eldest son. Amma’s income was used by your mother to buy her beloved and much desired diamond earrings. My mother never saw that land or the income from that land. Years later your radical incomprehension of the inequality in all this would be a sore wall of rising hissing emotion between you two like a dam that would never break, but serve as a semi-permanent barrier between you both.



Appa, even today in her own mind, though you are gone, she has conversations about this with you. But it is different now. Her voice is back, freed, her mind is not pressed down, or pinched up, with this continual pressure to be someone other than she was. She tried so hard to be who you wanted her to be, and she felt a near continuous failure, for nearly sixty years of her marriage to you. She cannot believe that you are gone, that the pain, the weight that had been pressed down all these years on her head and her voice is completely gone. She did not know she could even have a life like this. She knows she is not acting like a typical widow. People must look at her now and wonder what happened to her. She laughs as she says this, not with a malice in her look, but with genuine puzzlement and wonder. Why she is like this now: Why she looks radiant and light-hearted, even to herself. Why she feels as if she is a different woman now. She is beginning to look at the accounts you had left her, mysterious at first, but now getting more and more comprehensible as each day goes by. She says to me with mirthful bewilderment, my mind is working, dear daughter. I thought I never had one, really.



Appa. Amma thinks the day after you left of how many other times you could have left us and she is grateful that you only left her now, after the three daughters had grown up and finished college, some with advanced degrees, and all three were married, and two of the three had their own children, two each, in fact, and three out of those four had already become teenagers, and you could begin to see who they were. She is grateful that you did not leave us when you had left us in India for a few years to go to America in 1970 to study in graduate school.
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