I have two grandmothers. One is alive, one is dead. One is a reader-writer, the other could only read Marathi headlines, thanks to the night school which she attended at the age of forty. One is an animated storyteller, the other lived through stories of survival.
What is with grandmothers and stories? It seems like an inextricable connection across cultures. As if stories collected over a lifetime were protein for the mind and the heart, essential for the upbringing of children. With stories, grandmothers keep finding ways to bring adventure home, adding the ingredients of hope and imagination to the potion for staying young.
The grandmother in The Ammuchi Puchi by Sharanya Manivannan and Nerina Canzi bears this precious gift of imagination. She passes it to her grandchildren before her death. Riding the smooth waves of this moving story, I got a chance to explore an inner emotional fabric as intricate and colourful as the illustrations in the book. This is not a book review, but the account of an exploration the book led me to.
Death as a theme hasn't been a prominent part of children’s literature in India. It only shows up in mythological stories, where death belongs to the devil. It’s an act of god’s victory and not something to mourn, cope or struggle with. For children, there is no way to learn about death and everything that follows it, to be able to empathize with those who survive the loss.
The death of grandparents is different in its shape from other deaths. It can be sad, very sad, but it need not be tragic. By sharing anecdotes and memories, one can find ways to celebrate their life, in all probability a long one.
Other kinds of death can be more unsettling. When my uncle passed away in an accident, I was around nine. My first news of death didn’t seem scary. “He has left us to be with God”, my father told me while straightening the collar of my school uniform one morning. When I boarded the school bus, I imagined my uncle doing the same, boarding a bright yellow bus to the heavens.
A few years later, I received more news of someone’s somebody dying and it started to get scarier. Children losing their parents, women losing their husbands, the school losing its most loved teacher. To cancer, to heart attack, to accident. Death didn’t seem like a nice spontaneous bus ride any more, but a sinister white Maruti Omni kidnapping people on bright sunny days. As a child it was still unclear, what death could do, what grief looked like beyond crying endlessly.
Unless it was Mihir from Kyuki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, death established itself as irreversible. I wasn’t, and nobody is, born with the awareness and acceptance of this fact. It was confounding. Death felt tragic as a story, tragic from a distance, there was no empathy for those surviving the loss.
The story in Ammuchi Puchi is different. Within a few pages, I got attached to the characters of Aditya and Anjali, enough to feel their loss.
Unlike the stories I read as a child, the characters in this book aren’t flat or dolled up with broad strokes of fluorescent innocence. A grandmother with a bloody red mouth who cooks up ghost stories, until both the parents frown at her, felt like a real character — someone worthy of love and fondness despite their flaws and their capacity to annoy us.
This was so relatable. My late grandmother was the Tom to my Jerry. In between fights, she would often hand me some coins to go and buy her a few tobacco sachets, when nobody was home. I connected deeply to the evolving relationship between Aditya, Anjali and Ammuchi, and could feel the void left by Ammuchi’s death.
The book ported me to a time when death was confusing and I would question myself for not knowing the right way to mourn or to offer condolences to a grieving friend. Even the gentle and careful method of sharing the news of someone’s death wasn’t familiar to me. Some of my family members were infamous for their abrupt newsbreaking. I mean, could they not find a better way to tell an old woman that her daughter has just been widowed, than doing it while she is still holding a vessel full of hot milk? I wish I had seen elders handle death better, and not making it worse than what it already is. Schools also avoid engaging with this topic, perhaps to save us from sadness instead of preparing us for it.
The Ammuchi Puchi handles death not just through its twists and turns, but also with a change of colour when the death shows up. It prepares us visually as the characters communicate straight through their big beautiful eyes. Canzi portrays the grandmother’s lovable spirit, before and after her death through her expressions and fabric prints in the luminous illustrations.
By being a story of inheritance from a maternal grandmother instead of a paternal one, it gently attacks conventions of gender and family, but without any pretence or pride. The poet within the author shows through Aditya’s voice, and we fall in love with him and how he sees things.
A chance to witness Aditya and Anjali grow together, is the gift offered by The Ammuchi Puchi, and I am so glad I took it.
