In the summer of 1944, a girl, aged about fifteen, arrived in a remote village in, what was then the state of Hyderabad and current day Karnataka. She had just married a young man from the village. She was from a far off town in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. She could speak only Tamil. She did not know Kannada, the language spoken in the village. Neither did she know Urdu, another language spoken there. The only other person who spoke her tongue was her new mother in law, through whom the marriage was arranged.
She was told that she was marrying into an illustrious family which had fallen into hard times. So, while she should’ve expected the monetary situation of her new husband to be bad, she couldn’t have been faulted if she had imagined a decent house to live in. After all, her late father in law had been a senior bureaucrat in the Nizam’s (ruler of Hyderabad) government and supposed to have built an enormous estate for the family. But soon she would discover that her new house was nothing more than a shanty at best or an oversized hut at worst, in a big open plot. She would learn that the mother in law had a falling out with her husband’s brothers and had moved out of the family house with her sons, turning them into one of the poorest family from one of the, if not the, richest.
The girl would spend the next three years coping with her new environment, culture, language, her mother in law’s eccentricities. She would give birth to, and mourn the death of, her first child before she had turned eighteen. Then in August 1947, she would hear the news of India gaining Independence, whose significance, perhaps, she had never cared to understand. She had obviously heard of the struggle for freedom but its effects hadn’t touched her. However, the effects of Independence would touch her. But not in the way she and the people from the village had hoped.
When India gained Independence in 1947, it was a cluster of princely states. Hyderabad was one of the richest of such states, ruled by the Nizam. While most of those states merged with India unconditionally, a few were resisting. Hyderabad was one among those that were resisting. The Nizam and his advisors were dreaming to be either accede to Pakistan or stay Independent. This dream lasted for a year till the September of 1948, during which a private militia called the Razakars had unleashed a terror in the state. They would go from village to village, plundering Hindu households, mudering men and subjecting women to the cruelty of their whims and fancy.
When the news of the marauding Razakars reached the village, Her family decided to flee, as did most of the people from the village. The family first moved to Hyderabad to stay with a few relatives from her husband’s side. But they couldn’t survive them for long. At the suggestion of a priestly gentleman from their village, who was visiting Hyderabad at the time, they decided to move to Pandharpur a temple in town in current day Maharashtra, where people spoke Marathi — another language she hadn’t a clue about and where they would stay as refugees till Hyderabad was merged into India, after the military action — Operation Polo — by the Indian government in September 1948.
She, along with her husband, moved back into the village and around Deepawali that year, she gave birth to her second child — a boy. They named him Vijay, to symbolize the victory over the evil forces of Razakars. She may have also imagined that the name also suggested a victory over the misfortunes she had to endure — losing her firstborn, being homeless, suffering scorns and taunts of strangers in Pandharpur. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
When her son was four months old, life gave her an enormous body blow— her husband died. There she was, all of nineteen, widowed, with an uncertain future among strangers and indifferent relatives, with a four months old baby to protect. She had no idea on how would she survive. All she had was her mother in law and whatever farmlands their relatives had decided was fit to be her husband’s inheritance. She had not much clue on how to use them for survival. But then she was nothing, if not a survivor.
The next twenty years or so she spent bringing up her son the way she wanted and protecting his inheritance. Few of the old family loyalists helped her with farming, which kept them decently fed. She made sure he had an education that would fetch him a respectable job, even when education was not in vogue and relatives sniggered at her insistence on education. All through the calamities, she never lost her grace and never complained of her misfortune or never wondered why God had been so unkind to her. If she did, then she didn’t show it to the world.
In the winter of life, she thought, life or God had finally relented and she could enjoy the luxury a few jewelries that she never had in her prime, a decent house filled with a loving son and grandchildren she had so lovingly given care to. But then life wasn’t done yet.
When she was about eighty years old, she suffered a fall in the newly constructed house, where once stood a oversized hut. She sustained fractures in her hips, which limited her movements. Even with repeated medical interventions, she would never gain her mobility back and could only move around the house with the help of others. She mostly spent time reading Tamil books and resting on her bed. When a curious grandson prodded, she narrated the stories of her struggles. When the bouts of pains hit her, she implored the Gods to tell her the reasons of her sufferings or how long does she need to survive them. But above all she wanted her son to be around her as much as possible.
Then, in the morning of 16th April 2019, she breathed her last, her son standing beside her, bringing an end to the extraordinary journey of an ordinary woman born as Bhagyam in Tamil Nadu, passed away as Rukmani in an obscure village in North Karnataka — some seven hundred kilo meters from the place of her birth.
She was my Grandmother!