My Ammachi

This time, when I went to Kerala for a vacation and visited my Ammachi (grandmother), I thought that I should write about her. She was widowed at 32, and still managed to raise her 6 daughters well.
She is close to 80 now and is a reader of the Malayala Manorama newspaper for the past 60 years. Lives all by herself, with a maid for company. She still wears beautiful starched neriyathu and white white chatta and mundu. She has very severe arthritis of her left knee, and the right too is not too good. With the latest feavers affecting Kerala, she had an attack of Chikunguniya. This has left her all the more in pain.
She was a part of the Asharayathu family, Thumbamon. She got married when she was 13, and my grandfather 17. After marriage she went back to her house and then went to live with my grandfather when she was 17.
She was pregnant with her sixth child, 3 months gone, when my grandfather died of a snake bite. She was 32 with 5 daughters and pregnant and all alone.
They sold off the land they had and moved to another place. She had the financial support from my grandfather’s brothers and that’s it. She had 6 beautiful daughters (the genes I say they inherited from her) and had to ward off men, drunken men, old men, young men..all men , all the time.
She is a very very strong woman. Single handedly she looked after her 6 daughters and looked after her land. Many a times she had driven off drunken men off her property. Such strength I have never seen in anyone I know of. My mother says that the men in the area were scared of her. She would never be scared to pick up the vetukathi (a big knife) and be after the men who tried to trouble her daughters. Such courage, my Ammachi had. Never have there been any rumors of affairs or activities of any sort, about her or her daughters, which is quite a surprise in our country, when a woman lives all alone with daughters.
She is still a very strong person, with very strong opinions and principals. Since all these years of her life, she has been the sole decision maker, she gets irritated if any one advises her to go and live with her daughters :-) . She says she is capable of taking care of her self. She is the most courageous and strongest woman I have ever met. Her endurance and her way of life…. A sad story this may be, but, a very strong one.