It must have been around 1:00 AM, when I woke up with a start. I immediately smelt the fragrance of the night jasmine flowers coming in through the window—they always blossomed during my Durga Puja vacations. Was the window open? Then I touched my grandmother’s side of the bed in the dark. But she wasn’t there. “Amma…Amma,” I called. No response. “Was she in the bathroom?” I waited for a few minutes, then I got out of bed and checked. She wasn’t in the bathroom either. I noticed that one of the bedroom windows, the one facing our orchard in the back, was ajar. I slowly opened the window and peeked out. Through the iron-grills, I saw the silhouette of my grandmother’s small figure walking through the mango and jackfruit trees, going in the direction of our cowsheds.
My grandmother was widowed in her early forties. She was married at thirteen to a man twenty years older than her. Despite having little education, she managed all his land, crops, fruit orchards, cow-sheds and chicken-farms after he passed away. She was gentle and a soft voice, but all the people she employed feared her. Whenever some employee didn’t follow her instructions, she would slowly take off her glasses and look at them with a cold stare. She brooked no disobedience, spared no one if they did not follow her instructions.
1:10AM I saw Amma’s silhouette disappear behind the jackfruit trees. Where was she going in the middle of the night?
Rongi Didi, my friend who was couple of years older to me once said,” They say your grandmother is a witch. That she follows pagan rituals. In fact, both your grandmother and HiruAmma are witches.”
Hiru-Amma was my Amma’s next-door neighbour and her best friend. Both widowed at a young age, they wore stark white sarees and were perhaps equally wrinkled. They must have been beautiful in their heyday, but they shaved their heads, as required by the Rules imposed on Bengali upper caste widows at that time. Both had to cook their own vegetarian food in separate utensils, meant only for them. They weren’t allowed onion and garlic even, or masoor dal—all supposedly things that would arouse sexual impulses.
“Don’t you feel hungry, Amma?” I asked her once, when she was sitting next to me at lunchtime, fanning me with a palm-leaf fan. The Rules allowed her to eat only one vegetarian meal a day, which she ate around 11AM. Then at 6PM, she ate a meal of puffed rice, milk and bananas.
She tousled my hair and said, “Don’t you worry, little one. I manage somehow. Now eat, eat.” She said, as she tried to put a piece of fish on my plate.
“No, no I don’t like fish,” I screeched. The truth is I liked fish, but I couldn’t bear to eat it, especially since my Amma ate so poorly. It was so unfair—the whole family ate lavish meals while she had to eat like a mendicant.
I loved her so much. But ever since Rongi Didi shared with me the rumors about her, I was troubled.
1:15 AM Should I follow her? I debated with myself. I would have to walk through the orchard. Rongi Didi said tamarind trees have ghosts. I would have to go past the tamarind tree if I followed her.
“They both killed their husbands,” Rongi Didi said.
“What?!? That’s not true,” I said.
“Of course its true. Both their husbands died on Amavasya night. Everyone in the town knows that witches attack on Amavasya,” Rongi Didi said with utter conviction.
But Ma had said that my grandfather died of liver cirrhosis, from drinking too much. Even when he was alive, it was my grandmother who looked after the finances and raised the kids. “He was a difficult man to love,” my grandmother had once said to me, wistfully. I wondered if it was difficult to follow such strict rituals for decades in honor of a man you didn’t love. After speaking to Rongi, I asked how Hiru-Amma’s husband died. Amma said, “Heart attack.”
There was no way to know if both the women had used black magic on their husbands, and I was too scared to ask. But I did know a side to them that no one else did.
1:30 AM The clock ticked away. I kept looking at the darkness through the iron grills, but there was no sign of my Amma. I didn’t want to be alone in the room. And maybe this was my chance to get to the bottom of the rumors surrounding her. I quietly opened the door.
I took a deep breath as I stepped down the big verandah. “Never go to the cowsheds alone,” my mother’s advice rang in my ears. My grandmother owned a sprawling estate and the cowsheds were located at very back of the property, beyond the orchard. The orchard was full of mango, jackfruit and paan trees, and one lone tamarind tree. It was a little distant from the servants quarters as well, so that part of the estate was really isolated. I started walking towards the cow sheds—my own breath, the rustling of the leaves in the wind, the crackling of the dry leaves and twigs under my chappal—everything scared me.
During the afternoons, when all the servants went for their siesta to the servants-quarters, the two Ammas would lock themselves in a room. Then my Amma would open her mahagony wooden almirah. Behind all her colorful sarees, which she was no longer allowed to wear, was hidden a ttransistor. She would take it out gently and tune in to Aakashvani, Kolkata. Both of them would then spend more than an hour, listening to the local news and to old Bengali movie songs in Binaca Geetmala. By the time the servants woke up, the radio was carefully put back in its hiding place.
I was the only one privy to their secret. They trusted me more than they trusted their own children. And they taught me things I will never forget.
“Create space in your life for your own rules,” Amma said to me once. I was sitting in front of both the Ammas distraught, tears streaming down my face. “
“But they say it’s a sin,” I cried. My entire class was going for a school-trip, but it was on the same day as my period. I was afraid that if I went, some grave disaster would befall me.
“When we don’t go deep within and listen to the voice of reason, that is a sin,” Hiru-Amma said.
I stopped sobbing. I thought for a moment and said, “But I will feel guilty.”
Amma cuddled me close to her and said, “Shona, you are a girl…tomorrow you will be a woman. If you don’t learn to listen to yourself, you will be made to feel guilty for everything—even for being alive.”
“ But Amma, isn’t it bad to do things secretly?” I looked at her eyes and asked.
She patted my cheek gently and said, “But are they ready to listen to your truth? Your heart must decide what is good and bad, not others. Being true to your own self, is more important than being true to others, especially when others impose meaningless rules on you.”
“What if my friends find out?,” I said.
“Well, at the worst, they will call you a witch. And believe me, being a witch is not too bad.” Amma’s eyes twinkled as she said that. Hiru-Amma let out a deep throaty laughter. Why did Amma say that—was she really a witch? I was on the verge of asking her, but I held back. I guess I was just too afraid to know the answer.
1:33AM I shuddered as I approached the tamarind tree—big, ominous branches looking down at me. I suddenly remembered how Rongi said that the long tamarind fruit, hanging down from the tree, looked like devil’s fingernails. Just as I was under the tree, I heard a rustle in the bushes on the side. I screamed. I ran as fast as my legs would carry me. When I was at a safe distance, I turned. I saw the silhouette of a squirrel scampering up the tree. ”Phew.”Then slowly, I looked towards the cow shed. In the window of the water pump-room, next to the cowshed, I saw a faint flickering light. With my heart in my mouth, I started walking towards the water-pump room.
“Why did Rongi say Amma is a witch, Ma?” I finally asked my mother one day. My mother looked at me, stunned.
“Oh, don’t listen to all that,” Ma said quickly.
“But why would people say things if there was no truth to it?,” I insisted.
Ma sighed. Then she said, “You know how we have Durga puja in the pandal every year. You know how goats and pigeons are sacrificed on the day of Ashtami?” I nodded. Ma continued, “Both the Ammas did not like that ritual at all, though it has been practiced in our family for generations.
Finally, one year Amma told your Dadu that she will not go for the Ashtami puja. Dadu even beat her, but still she refused to go. A year later, on the day of Mahalaya, which is an Amavasya right before Durga Puja, Dadu passed away. A few months later, even Hiru-Amma’s husband passed away.
“Was he a drunk too?”
“No, but he weighed more than a hundred kgs. Had high sugar and blood pressure-ate uncontrollably. But people said both these women brought the evil eye on their own husbands by refusing to attend the Ashtami Puja. And I guess women of that generation who dared to diobey the Rules were just branded as witches. And the reputation stuck.”
1:40 AM I had believed my mother’s story, but tonight I was having my doubts again. Where was Amma going in the middle of the night? I had read that pagan rituals are performed after the moon is high in the sky.
I walked to the water-pump house, my fear overtaken by curiosity now. Was Amma in there? The water-pump room always had a big padlock on the door. But now, the door was unlatched. Once I reached closer, I quietly edged near one of the windows. I stood on my toes, so that I could reach to the level of the window. I peeked in. In the dim lamp of a lone kerosene lamp,I saw Hiru-Amma seated on a cane-stool bent over, trying to light a portable stove. Next to her, my Amma was looking down—she was focused on her knife, intently chopping some onions. And next to her was a pressure cooker, a packet of rice and another glass jar, half-full with masoor dal.
I smiled to myself. My Amma was definitely a “witch”, and I was proud of it.
Published In: https://www.momspresso.com/parenting/anecdotal-evidence-only/article/my-grandmother-the-witch-short-story-lido7u2sxm8a?lang=0
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