She was the last link to my native village. We called her “Ba”, our paternal grandmother. I grew up in Delhi. But every summer vacation my parents would pack me and my three sisters off to our native village — a quiet hamlet in the Hafoos mango belt of South Gujarat. It was the village of Anavil Brahmins where age-old feudalism was more or less intact. My grandfather owned huge tracts of land tilled by dublas, the so-called low- caste peasants. We would spend our days roaming among mango and chikoo orchards, drink water from the well and attend to the call of nature in open fields — all very “adventurous” for city kids like us. Every morning we would head off to the cow shed where Ba would be milking the cows. She would offer us milk, fresh and still warm from the udder. Lunch consisted of thick rice rotlas and val beans with mango pickle. Thick rotis made from rice flour is the staple food in rural South Gujarat, unlike bajra rotlas, which are prevalent in other parts of Gujarat.I would spend the afternoons wandering in the backyard, which was almost a wilderness — overgrown with weeds and thickets of thorny bushes, beautiful wild flowers and tiny birds chirping among the bushes. Those still and silent summer afternoons punctuated by strange sounds had a calming effect on me, almost bordering on melancholy. Ba passed away last month. I can still picture her, standing in her kachado — a divided dhoti-like saree that is worn by rural women in parts of southern Gujarat and Maharashtra. After my grandfather’s death, and most of our relatives having moved out to cities, Ba was our last link to our village, our fields and orchards, the cattle shed and the smell of cow urine and hay, the dung-plastered thatched house, the smell of wood burning in the chullah, the play of shadows in lantern lit rooms — all my childhood summers and the memories of a world that seem to have been there for ever has now changed for ever.
