When our mother died, she was eighty years old. Since our father's death many years ago, she had lived all by herself at 'Sridhaam', the old family house in Allahabad. She died in her sleep and in perfect health, her physician assured us. All of us – her five daughters, three sons and our families – gathered at the old house for the death rituals. Despite the mourning, it was a wonderful reunion. Sridhaam had space for us all, wrapping us in its familiar warmth, just as Amma had always done.
As the eldest, I took charge of the kitchen and the sleeping arrangements. It seemed to me like I slipped into her place as naturally as if I'd never left. My city-ways, my life in Washington, my work as a research analyst with the World Bank, fell away from me like a swiftly-fading dream, as I walked barefoot across the cool, polished cement floors, measuring out the day's rations from the store-room and calling out to the vegetable vendor in the street below.
In the evenings I would sit where she sat, on the wide, wooden takhat in the deep verandah overlooking the inner courtyard, and find myself wearing the same indulgent half-smile I recognised as hers, as I watched my younger siblings and young nieces and nephews laugh and chat. I felt what I imagined she felt – love, but in a distant sort of way. Amma despite her warmth had always been a little apart; someone happy to look in through the window but never attempting to join in.
My parents had had a good marriage – we had never heard them argue or disagree; and they had given us a secure, unshadowed childhood. If our mother spoke little, it was only because that was often the way of women of her generation. Of all her eight children, I was the one who most resembled her in looks and she was a beauty, though not conventionally so. She was tall, slender and dusky-skinned. Her long glossy black plait, that hung all the way down her back, did not start to turn grey until she was sixty. Her features were fine but haughty and strongly defined, with dark, unreadable eyes set under high, winged eyebrows. Certainly she was very different from her only sister Rukmini, who was ten years younger. Rukmini mausi was ebullient and outspoken, and with the plump, fair softness typical of the Sarvarya Brahmin caste to which they belonged.