She walked into the room and didn’t fully trust me at first and I could tell because she directed all her questions about me to amma. “என்ன பன்னீண்டு இருக்க இப்போ? எவ்ளோ வைஸ் ஆடு? கல்யாணம் எப்போ?” What is she doing now (employment)? How old is she? When is the wedding? She drew closer to me when she realized I could speak Tamil despite me being an artist and 24 and unmarried. My mom told her she could collect names of eligible men. I laughed instead of glaring at amma because I was jet lagged. She had a bandage around her arm from a fall a few days back. Her bracelet pressed into her skin when she fell and sliced it. I felt the pain hot in my body when she told us (I’m sure you could feel it too. Imagine. Her skin looks like wet paper or spring roll skin. Soak it in water. Press a solid gold bangle into it with the weight of a body). She lived in a house with her daughter and needed us to yell to hear us. Later, she said she lost her hearing and her hair when her husband died. She told us that six times in various ways until she said her daughter lost her patience instead. This was in a hushed voice as her daughter was across the apartment. She mouths, “She hits me. She yells.” She pulled her japamala out of her sari blouse, rotating it around her neck until we saw a safety pin holding it together. “She cut this.” She didn’t say it though - she motioned. Still, my dad and I were huddled around her, so she felt safer to confide. She motioned again, gesturing to her sari, showing us four fingers, miming someone ripping the sari, using scissors to cut one to shreds and throwing another out a window. She paused and pointed to her daughter in the other room. “All her. She hits me. She yells,” she repeated. It stung later when she brought us to the bedroom that she shared with her daughter and son-in-law, pulling out each of her saris from her closet, all carefully folded and pressed into bags, describing their weight on her shoulder and which ones she had blouses for. For the ones she didn’t have any for, she would say, “the blouse hasn’t been made for this one yet, so I can’t wear it.” She said that for about 4 saris. I didn’t think anything of it, but later when my family was thinking about how we could help her, my mom told me she was expressing her bitterness that her daughter hadn’t gotten them done for her yet. She needs help to walk outside, but inside, she spends her time taking out her saris, admiring them, folding them. She didn’t want us to think she was shallow for that. She earnestly asked that we don’t think that of her five times before we left. She spends some hours writing, “ஸ்ரீ ராம் ஜெய் ராம்” Shree Ram, Jai Ram. 108 times a day - but only half that on the day she fell, she told us. Sometimes the repeated phrase lines up perfectly in her notebook in little columns, but she said you can tell when she was distraught on some days when the written chant started slanting.
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