I got to know my grandmother had another episode of losing consciousness. A few weeks ago, I got the news from Ammi that Amma’s lungs were failing, so she struggles to breathe sometimes. I guessed it must be that. She feels fine now. These were the words I wrote about 3 weeks ago in my journal, and on December 24, 2022, at 12:20 AM IST, my grandmother passed away.
The moment we are born in this Universe, we start to affect things and people around us. In chaos theory, people often give this example of a butterfly whose mere flapping of its wings could result in a storm halfway across the world. So I would like to share how my grandmother – Ayesha Begum is one of the primary reasons I can do what I love.
She never knew her age, probably because people were not big on documentation back when she was born. But several anecdotes indicate that she might be in her late 80s. Women were discouraged back then, so she never learned how to write. Although she could recite half of the Arabic Alphabet. If it was not the will of her caregivers to educate her, it was poverty that prevented her. Survival triumphs education, I guess.
Although lacking formal education, she was very good at sewing. She was so good that she earned a living out of it, with my grandfather being a street vendor. I have no inkling of what it was, but she managed to educate two of her eight children. Both girls. One is my Ammi. Ammi tells me that the money was so less that she had to make notes from the books she used to borrow from her more “affluent” friends. And the thing she used to take notes on was thread-binded registers that she used to make by putting together pieces of paper. It’s 15 degrees F outside, and I am writing this on my multi-screen computer setup with my thermostat set at 70 degrees F.
I am not taking away anything from my family members and friends, but probably if it was not for Amma, my mother would not have educated herself and, by extension myself. So it’s the gratitude I feel when I think of an “illiterate” woman who made sure at least a couple of her children became literate so they could go on and educate their children.