This Absurd Life

Is also quite meaningful

In the old blogging platform, I blogged about whatever I felt like blogging about, similar to what I do here. Every once in a while, I collected a few posts that belonged to a theme, copied and pasted them into a document, added a few relevant photographs, and designed a cover page with a title and a photo. I then printed at least one copy, which I mailed to my parents.

Some were collections from my international travels. A few were from observations and ruminations from road trips. Or, simply from life in Oregon. Whatever the theme was, well, there was autoethnography, like how I blog here. Those authethnographic comments were the hooks, I am sure, for my parents.

Appa read them all, perhaps scanned through the pages—sometimes as many as fifty in a booklet—if the content was a little too alien to him. Amma looked at the photographs, and maybe read a piece here and there.

Once, I had included a note to Appa that he should read out a particular piece even if Amma did not read that herself. And I wanted to make sure he explained the importance too. A few days later, in a phone conversation he confirmed receiving the mail and that Amma also read the piece that I had highlighted.

After reading them, appa did not toss the documents away. He saved them. He also numbered them as Volume X.

Of course, in conversations after receiving the mail, Appa often let me know what caught his attention. There was always something that was interesting to him. Like the instance when he told me that what I always refer to the “cosmos” in my atheistic framework was not all that different from what he believed as the Hindu faith.

That much I knew.

What I did not know was that he had even marked, underlined something that, I suppose, caught his attention, or made him think. Like this one:

I am yet to go through all the volumes in order to see if there were other pages where appa has marked anything, or has written anything. For all I know, this was the only one that really got to him. Even if so, it is awesome.

I am happy that my parents were able to participate in my autoethnographic examination of the world. Because it is autoethnography that often reaches not only into my own past but well into the family’s past, it is part of their stories too.

Now, with both parents having exited the planet, my father following my mother a year later, I will soon head back to Eugene with these printed and numbered volumes of my writings.

The following is from the post, which I blogged on November 12, 2012, that I wanted appa to make sure that amma also read.

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The women who made my life so sweet!

It is Deepavali time in India, which brings back lots of memories of the phenomenal sweets that mother made for the occasion.

My favorites were the cashew sweet and the gulab-jamuns that she made. I often swung by the kitchen and the pantry areas whenever mother was not around and gobbled up sweets that were off-limits.

As a kid, I ate sweets all the time. From morning until night. Sweets any time. It continued on even into my young adult phase. As an undergraduate student, I once had 22 gulab-jamuns in one sitting.

It was always an additional pleasure to listen to my grandmothers recall stories about my fascination for sweets. An incident that they recalled often, which always made me feel special, related to a milk-sweet. To make this “thirattipal,” my grandmothers patiently stirred, and stirred, and stirred milk for hours until it boiled down to the sweetest delight ever.

I was about five years old and was in Sengottai when paatti decided to make this milk sweet for her grandson. The process started late in the evening. I was apparently sitting right by her side and started falling asleep, which is when I made my grandmother promise to wake me up after she was done making it because I wanted to eat that sweet as fresh as I could get them.

The extra kick in the story was when she described how she woke me up and I ate it half-asleep. And then woke up in the morning and ate that sweet before eating or drinking anything else.

It was well into adulthood, after a few years of life in the US, when I realized that I hadn’t ever thanked them for all the kinds of grandmotherly acts they did so meticulously. I had never thanked them for making all those heavenly sweets.

My great-aunt was the only one alive by then. Every time I met with her, I recalled all these stories and thanked her. I asked her once how she had the patience to make all those sweets and other snacks. Which is when I found out that she often felt nauseated after that constant exposure to the smells. Sometimes, the nausea was so intense that it led to, yep ... I felt awful. But, it didn’t matter to her. That was her life and she enjoyed doing what she had to do.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with my mother recalling some of these old stories of my fascination for sweets and about her awesome cashew sweets. Mother didn’t’ make any sweets this time around because tradition bars any celebration for a year whenever there is a death in the family.

After all this, will it be a surprise if I noted that I made a sweet? Yes, I really did!

I made a carrot-payasam over the weekend. It was wonderful. But, nothing like the sweets that my mother and grandmothers and great-aunt made.

My thanks to all those women who literally sweetened up my life.