Grandmother of the Bride

Mohammad Amir bowling is one of the more beautiful sights in the world - fast, fresh, whippy, and seaming, he lights up dull evenings here in Madras. And then there's Mohammad Asif, trundling along from the other end, weaving his wiliness around that unsuspecting outside edge. On one such evening, I sat before the television, watching these two when Paati sat beside me and said, "Will you turn down the volume for a second? I need to talk to you."

Paati always had the strangest things to say, and mostly, they concerned food. She would offer some strange dish, usually, "Shall I make Maggi for you with some kadalai in it?" or "What about bread with tomato and molaga podi, toasted with cooking oil?" "Perhaps you'd like some mango juice - one half of the mango was spoilt, so I squeezed it along with the other half to compensate." I usually listened to these questions, and dismissed them politely. Sometimes, impolitely. But Paati never failed to offer these quirky culinary delights.

On this particular day, it didn't seem like she was offering me anything to eat or drink. I felt she actually had something to discuss. I wondered if she had her leg-cramps, whether her eyes were watering, it could've been her teeth, or her hands, or that shooting headache she complains of sometimes. She once had a 'gastric' pain from her head to her stomach, radiating from end-to-end endlessly.

But she seemed fine. Perhaps she wanted to buy something for the house. Once she wanted to buy a folding bed, in addition to the four in the house, because you need one for the guests. Once she decided that a steel almirah must be duly purchased for keeping my books. Once she demanded a separate TV she never really watched.

"I am organising a wedding," she said, with a faint smile.
I was surprised. Organising a wedding - at eighty-six! It couldn't have been mine, she didn't have the guts to suggest something like that. There was only one other cousin eligible, but my Paati wouldn't bother with his wedding at her age.
"It is between a neem tree and another sapling," she continued, with that smile still lurking on the corners of her face.
I was startled. But I maintained a straight face and asked, "Why? What have these trees done to merit this treatment?" I really wanted to ask her if this was an inter-caste wedding.
"So," she started. My Paati tells the most convoluted stories - like the Panchatantra, where one starts with a story, and then moves to another one, and another one nestled within it, and so on and so forth, before each shell is reopened, and each story is revisited in reverse, and all neatly tied up in the end. "You know, that a niece of mine gave me a neem sapling. I planted it in a little pot on the balcony, next to the manathakkali plant. It was growing really well, and slowly outgrowing its pot. So, I called Sarasu, the lady who sweeps the steps, and asked her to plant it outside somewhere. When she uprooted it from the pot, She discovered that another plant was intertwined with it. She told me that this was great luck, and that I had to marry them off for lifelong fortune."

I wondered if it was some Rama Sene at work - marrying off intertwined couples.

Paati was in her flow now, "So, Sarasu took the plants to the Amman kovil on Boag Road and planted them there. A vaadyaar will come sometime next week and decide the date of the wedding. I have already arranged for a veshti and saree to be bought for the bride and the groom, and one more saree for Amman and a veshti for the vaadyaar." Darth vaadyaar.

I was now too stunned to speak. Paati said, "I know you think this is ridiculous, but I believe in all this. See, your cousin in the US gave birth to a boy the day I found these plants, and that other cousin found a good job. All this is because of the intertwined plants." I wondered if discovering intertwined people also brought good luck. What about intertwined dogs? Or cats? Or books?
***

A few days later, she told me, "The vaadyaar came today from the Amman kovil. He is from the Nagavalli Amman kovil."
Thatha jumped in with this little detail, "It's on the platform right next to Sivaji Ganesan's house."
"He said that the wedding will cost a thousand five hundred. Four brahmins will be fed, and some naivedyam will be given to the people who come to the temple that evening!"
"When is the wedding?" I asked.
"On the fifteenth."
"Fifteenth, fifteenth. Sunday." Thatha repeated.
"On Thursday, the vaadyaar will come and collect the money."
"I have been discouraging your Paati from the time she brought it up," Thatha said, suddenly. By this time, I found the whole wedding too beautiful, too poetic to let it die. So, I said, "Thatha, please. It's just a small thing. Let her have her fun."
***

As Thursday approached, and a fever raged within me (the intertwining wasn't bringing me health), Paati began getting expectantly fidgety. "Should I make a sweet for the wedding myself?" she asked me. I gave her some sound logic, "See, at your daughter's wedding, you didn't cook. Only the samayal fellows did. So lets just let it be, no?" "Should I give the green saree to the bride and the red one to the Amman?" "That sounds like a plan, Paati. Amman usually wears red, no?" I said, offering my expert knowledge on the Nagavalli Amman's fashion sense.

Thursday morning, I was too tired from my fever to drive to work. I worked on the internet and a phone, sleeping for an hour, working for an hour, and pretending to be important to the world. Every time the doorbell rang, Paati would jump and rush to open it (her leg pain, her limping, were pushed to the background), only to find the milkman, the flower-lady, the courier-dude, the vegetable-lady, or a man collecting donations for a temple. By evening, Thatha was muttering under his breath, "Kandraavi. Dirty fellow. He's not come at all. Keeping us waiting like this all day. I told your Paati on that day only - don't try and organise something at her age. She can barely walk, and she's trying to organise a wedding."

I looked up from my laptop and asked Paati, "Do you want to go check the plant and the vaadyaar in the temple?"

She agreed immediately. Ninety-year-old Thatha and a four-year-younger Paati trudged down the stairs and in my car to the Nagavalli Amman temple on the platform next to Sivaji's house. When we reached the platform, we found that there was no such temple there. There was an Amman temple, but she was of a different variety. We asked a fruit-seller, who directed us to the road behind Sivaji's house.

When we reached the road, we found no kovil. I looked around, Paati was getting a little irritated, but Thatha got down the car and confidently walked towards what looked like a house. "That's the temple!" he declared. It was, in fact, a house. Thatha tried asking someone where the Amman kovil was, but his deafness meant he didn't hear a word of what was said.

Suddenly, I saw this large hoarding for a festival at the Nagavalli Amman kovil, and hiding behind that hoarding, was the kovil - the size of ten matchboxes, adjacent to a gutter. "That's the temple!" I said. I led them towards it when loud devotional music started playing from a conical speaker above it. Thatha discovered a temple festival office just behind the temple, and Paati immediately recognised her vaadyaar in the makeshift office.

I expected this vaadyaar to be the topless, pot-bellied, bearded, severely sacred-ashed and veshti-clad. Instead he looked like an extra from Goripaalayam. Long, curly hair, almost like a Afro, a thick moustache, a gold chain, a bright green shirt with the top button off, dark green loose pants, rings on six fingers, a pair of shades in one hand and a Reliance phone in the other, and bright, white shoes. When he saw Paati, he smiled brightly and said, "Amma! So nice of you to come here!"

I asked, "So, where are the trees?" Are they still up to naughtiness or have you unintertwined them?
Paati asked, "Why didn't you come home today?"
He said to my Paati, "You see, Amma, the trees..."
And suddenly, someone increased the volume on the loudspeaker, and we didn't hear the rest of the sentence. Thatha hadn't heard a word of the conversation until then even.
Then the vaadyaar shouted out to some boy to turn the damn music off.
When it was quiet again, he said, "The neem tree, Amma... It died."
"Died?"
"Yes, Amma, the leaves all dried up, and it died."
"And the other plant?" I asked.
"Oh that," he said, "That died a week ago."
Paati was heartbroken. The vaadyaar was unmoved, "That's why I didn't come today, Amma." He walked us to a small enclosure next to the temple, right by the gutter, and pointed out the flora to us. The neem tree was just a stick standing on the ground, and the other plant was nowhere to be seen. The vaadyaar said, matter of factly, "So, if you buy two more plants and come, we can get them married off."
"But weren't they to be married off because they were intertwined?" I asked.
"You can always intertwine the new plants," he said.

Thatha, who finally heard and understood what had happened, said, in English, "I think this isn't worth it."
"Lets go, he is cheating us," Paati said, again, in English.

And that was the final word on the entire affair. We got into the car and drove back almost silently.