Saudha Kasim | Story
Inheriting Possibility

My maternal grandmother Ayeshakutty T.T. died in 1984. No one is quite sure what illness struck her that January morning, but the local doctor said she had to be taken to the nearest city, Thrissur, to consult with a specialist. She died on the way. She was 62 years old.

I can barely remember her — I was three years old when she passed away in Kerala. I have only a secondhand memory of her: of a black and white photograph taken of her and that for many years hung on a wall by the bed of her husband, my grandfather. She had a broad forehead and wide dark eyes and her hair was pitch black underneath the white pallu of the saree that she used to cover her head.

Through facts often repeated by my own mother and her siblings, I gleaned precious information about her life. Ayeshakutty was the person at my mother’s bedside at the Elite Hospital in Thrissur when I was born. She gave me my first spoonful of water after my birth. She consulted a neighbour to figure out my Malayalam star sign. She’d done all this for my sister’s birth as well.

Like her namesake from Islamic history she was headstrong and direct and always called a spade a spade. I imagine, because I have no memory of a personal interaction or conversation with her, that these qualities would have helped her in her youth. For Ayeshakutty was also a rare thing in the early 20th century in northern Kerala: a Muslim woman who worked as a professional outside the home. From her early twenties through to her retirement she taught mathematics to primary school children in Irimbliyam, near Valanchery in Malappuram. In the years leading up to 1947 when she was a young mother she would often accompany my grandfather to attend pro-independence gatherings.

The saree she wore in that black and white photograph was a garment that she’d had to battle to wear. Women from our community weren’t supposed to work as a teacher or anything else. For her to have gone to the teacher training course in Kozhikode in the 1930s was outside the norm. When she married my grandfather (also a teacher) and moved to his home and started teaching at the school, she was the first woman in that clan to wear a saree. A severely plain, light shaded cotton saree that symbolised her status as a teacher.

The family she’d married into were not happy. She’d find, on mornings that she had to go to the school to teach, that someone had sabotaged her perfectly washed and pressed sarees and there were ash stains and worse marring the once pristine fabric.

In his 1987 documentary of Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, Basheer — The Man, the filmmaker MA Rahman shows the legendary writer sitting in his favourite easy chair under the shade of trees in his garden, talking to the artist Namboothiri who from time to time sketches Basheer.

Basheer’s parents sent him to school to study English and Malayalam at a time when his community didn’t believe in a modern education. His brothers and sisters appear in the film, the women wearing the traditional dress of Muslim women of that era: checked mundus and white kupayams and white meringue-like thattams piled atop their heads. Clothes that my grandmother had been expected to wear and which she never did.

Basheer, recipient of an education beyond the Quran, was never going to be just another Muslim man in Kerala running a small shop or working in the timber business like his father. Inspired by a meeting with Gandhi as a child (he said he managed to touch Gandhi’s hand) he’d go to the beach in Kozhikode years later and participate in the protests against the salt laws. He and his cohort were arrested and he spent many months in jail.

He was part of anti-colonial movements through most of his twenties and thirties. Constantly pursued by the agents of empire for writing against it in pamphlets and newspapers, he became a master of disguise. In the film, Namboothiri draws Basheer in these disguises and it’s easy to imagine the long, thin writer in the robes of a mendicant wandering the dusty roads of pre-independence India.

Around the time Basheer was escaping the authorities in the guise of a sanyasi, my grandmother was studying in school. Ayeshakutty’s father, my great-grandfather, had been part of the Mappila rebellion in the early 1920s and was sent first to Bellary jail and then exiled to Malaya. With no one else to support them, Ayeshakutty’s maternal uncle looked after the young family and as he was someone who believed in the value of a secular education and a genuine progressive when it came to gender, he encouraged my grandmother to finish school and train as a teacher in Kozhikode.

 Family lore speaks of Ayeshakutty’s uncle as a true rebel — long after the country gained independence in 1947 he continued to participate in protests and marches dressed in khadi and driven by Gandhian values. An inability to conform to orthodoxies seemed to be the family’s marker. When she wore that saree and stepped out of her house and walked to the school to teach, clearly there was no earthly force armed with ashes and muddy water that could deter Ayeshakutty from fulfilling the role she’d chosen for herself.

Once, in college, my friends and I sat together in our hostel after the end-of-year exams and spoke of the future. Unlike my grandmother’s generation, none of us women had to debate whether we would be allowed to work. Each one of us imagined a career for ourselves. Some of us decided on the number of children we must have for a happy home. For myself, I found that the conventional marriage and 2 BHK house and two kids held scarce appeal. Will your family allow that, my classmates asked. Will your community? Don’t they marry early and quickly and won’t you be a mother by the time you’re 25?

I remember saying that I’d dig my heels in and refuse — I came from a long line of people who stood their ground. My classmates laughed and said they expected a wedding invite soon and they hoped I would serve mutton biryani to them at the wedding lunch despite my vegetarianism.

Two decades passed and my friends got married, divorced, remarried, moved cities and countries and had a child or two. I never sent them invitations because I had somehow managed to stay true to my word and refused to get married and have children. I’d run into those classmates once in a decade and they’d ask: how had I managed this, how had I got around what conventionality had expected of me?

In Basheer — The Man the writer explains why he began writing fiction. When he was a child, Basheer would borrow books from a neighbour and read them and find that the villains in these stories, the thieves and murderers and thugs, were Muslims. And yet, looking at his family, he couldn’t see such characters there. They were just ordinary human beings making a life in a world that didn’t make things easy for them.

When I looked around the cultural artefacts of my youth, I didn’t see myself reflected in any of those books or movies. An Indian Muslim woman was usually portrayed perfunctorily in popular culture. They were mostly veiled or if they had to be truly independent of the cultural markers of their community they needed to turn their backs on their families and friends and traditions and become completely other.

Where was the role model for me to emulate, I would often wonder in those years. Where’s the true icon for bookish Muslim girls who just want to be left alone to dream?

It took me some time to realise I had to construct the person I wanted to be out of what had come before, out of the family histories that were being kept alive by my parents’ generation. I had to understand the freedoms had come at a cost, sometimes huge personal costs, for my ancestors. Exiled fathers. In-laws who couldn’t understand why a woman would need to stake a claim for individuality. Managing a bustling household of children and elders and animals on a teacher’s salary. All these and more stood in the way of women like my grandmother who were fording unknown territories to a promised land.

The portrait of Ayeshakutty that I’d become familiar with as a child is no longer where it once was. The house she’d lived in has changed considerably as well. My family has kept no shrine to our forebears where I can find her.

So where do I look for her?

I find her in the faces and mannerisms of my mother and my uncles and aunts. I also find her in the landscapes that she’d have known like the back of her hand — especially the river that flows near my mother’s ancestral home.

That river, the Nila or the Bharatapuzha, has changed significantly over the decades. What was once a bucolic, rural patch of land has transformed into something semi-urban. The river itself has been affected by sand mining and climate change. If I have to find the traces of my grandmother I have to look at the photographs of the river from the mid-1980s. Yellow with age but with landscape features still discernible, the photographs were taken in peak summer and swimmers have discarded clothes on the sandy banks and I can spot an aunt or a cousin diving in the green waters.

The river bank is where I imagine my grandmother was most free. This was where she could experience quiet joys: her children swimming and fishing and on summer nights she could gaze up at the stars.

“My footprints have left large imprints in many places,” Basheer says towards the end of MA Rahman’s film. “I have tried to erase them, but in vain.”

I look at the photographs of the river again and I find that their footprints are there: those of my grandmother, my grandfather, their ancestors and all those who’d walked those paths and riverbanks and paddy fields. As long as their memories and their thirst for freedom and a life and world where they bowed to no one are kept alive, they will never be erased.