For Shakuntala Mohile, who was more than a grandmother

Peeling the grandmotherly layer off my Aaji's persona and seeing her for the person she was and aspired to be seems like a fitting tribute to the way she lived her life.

A few weeks ago, an interesting article about cell biology caught my eye. It seems that all the eggs a woman will ever carry, form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old foetus in the womb of her mother. In other words, our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother.

Says it all, really.

I lost my Aaji on 20 February. My last grandparent. And among my favouritest people.

Shakuntala Mohile (née Bhise) was 97 and passed on just two days shy of her 98th birthday. It's some solace that I spent time with her when I was in India last September.

My grandmother in the late 1970s

I realise what an utter luxury it was to be able to cherish and savour a grandparent until my late 30s. So much so that I might have taken her unwavering presence in my life for granted.

Now, with Aaji gone, it feels as if I am finally bolting the door shut on my childhood. As if she was my final link to the safe, indulgent and carefree world that only grandparents seem to weave for their grandchildren.

Aaji was one of my earliest caregivers, helping raise me in my first year after my mother resumed work. Even as I grew older, I have the fondest memories of numerous summer holidays spent at my grandparents' home, where Aaji would indulge all her grandkids, cooking their favourite foods.

My grandmother and I in 1984

But her grandmotherly avatar just scratches the surface of the rich, complex person she was and who she aspired to be.

A legendary cook, Aaji loved feeding people and ended up having two cookbooks published in Marathi of traditional community recipes from the Konkan coast of India, after she turned 75.

She was a formidable, resilient woman with vast reserves of good cheer and a loud, infectious laugh. It didn’t take much to make her laugh and you couldn’t stop her once she’d started. But underneath that gregarious, merry exterior, there lay a private, deeply reflective soul.

Most evenings at home in Mumbai, just before sundown, she would freshen up, wash her face, comb her hair, redo her bun and set a chair in the balcony that offered her a view of the entry gate of the apartment block where they lived. She would sit there for quite a while, often lost in thought, her elbow resting on the balcony ledge as she watched the world go by. A quiet, thoughtful pause in her day before evening kitchen duties beckoned.

My grandmother in her younger days photographed by my grandfather

I loved to watch Aaji go about her routine when I stayed over at my grandparents’ place. She had a slow, meditative manner about her, in the way that she took on any task. Nothing could rush her. Whether she was buying something at the market, pounding fresh herbs to marinate fish with, or working her sewing machine in the afternoons, she seemed to be fully present in the moment, and on her own time.

Aaji’s primary love language was ‘acts of service’, doing things for the people she loved. She loved cooking for and feeding loved ones and she went above and beyond in the way she churned out the most complex things in her kitchen with all the patience in the world.

Aaji making a seven-tiered modak, a sweet treat from India’s Maharashtra region

One Diwali (in 1991), when the family had gathered in Ichalkaranji, she brought along ‘kiddie’ faraal that she had painstakingly made for us kids for our bhatukli play - with mini chaklis, shankarpalis, kanavle and ladoo.

Her other acts of service were bringing everyone thoughtful, handcrafted gifts that were a lesson in recycling and sustainability long before they became buzzwords - handkerchiefs, cloth bags for grocery shopping that could be compactly packed into tiny pouches sewn onto them, hand towels, and the most beautiful, braided bath rugs.

Gifts from my grandmother - handmade tote bags, made over many afternoons spent on a sewing machine

And as indulgent as she was as a grandmother, I don’t recall her baby talking to us when we were little. Not that there’s anything wrong with baby talk. But having Aaji talk to me as she would to an adult made me - a mere child - feel seen and heard in a way that babying didn’t.

It’s probably also what helped our bond seamlessly evolve as I grew older. As much as she lavished grandmotherly attention on me when I was younger, we began to relate to each other on more equal footing as women once I stepped into adulthood.

I still recall - as clear as day - the conversation that tipped the scales over to that other side. I was 18, and had to do a class assignment for a Feature Writing paper that required us to interview an interesting personality, anyone we wanted really.

I picked Aaji because I thought it would be easy. I knew her so well already, didn’t I? Plus, her first cookbook had just been published, which meant I had a great news hook to lead this with. The sheer audacity of that thought process surprises me to date. Because there was nothing easy about that story.

I went in expecting a breezy interview and instead came away with grim insights on what it felt like to be a woman who was tightly bound by the time and traditions she was surrounded by.

That day I briefly forgot my Aaji and met Shakuntala Mohile (or rather, Shakuntala Bhise) for the first time. The woman who stepped out of the role and character of a homely grandmother to share her life’s hopes, dreams, triumphs and disappointments.

That day, she shared glimpses of the many Shakuntalas in her -

• a girl of 16 who was unsure of marriage and instead dreamed of working an office job and living by herself in a small, Mumbai flat.

• a 40-something woman for whom keeping her daughters from routine kitchen duties was a quiet act of rebellion against the patriarchal society she lived in.

• a woman in her 70s who was content with how life had turned out and proud of what she had “finally achieved for herself.”

That she still emerged content and satisfied with life and made gold of the hand that time dealt her is a testimony to the person that she was.

In the days following her death, the degree to which she touched her family members’ lives was apparent in the many conversations we have had about her. I see Aaji now in not just her children but in anyone of us who lived around her.

They say a person dies twice, the first is their physical death, while the second is when they stop existing in everyone’s living memory, or when their name is uttered for the last time.

Aaji has a long life to live yet.