Ammaachi
Balammal was born in Palayamkottai, a small town in southern Tamil Nadu
in 1907. She was the fifth among nine – or may be – ten siblings. Her father
was a well-known contractor to the British Sahibs and some of the buildings put
up by him stand till today as solid testimony to his professional capability
and integrity. Life in the big contractor’s house as a small child may not have
been all that unpleasant for young Balamma who was by far the fairest and the
most beautiful of the brood. But the father died rather prematurely and the
task of bringing up the children was taken up by an iron willed maternal
grandmother. She saw to it that all the children, including the girls got an
education. This must have been a revolutionary step during the second decade of
this century. So there she was, this young woman of great beauty, at just 17
years of age, given away in marriage to a short and extremely dark complexioned
young man of 20 years of age. One suspects that Balamma must have accepted the
young man as her husband only because she may have had no choices in the
matter. But then it may not have taken her much time to realize that her
husband possessed an extraordinary intellect. I believe that Thondaman Muthiah
Bhaskara Thondaman could not have achieved all that he did in his lifetime but
for the unstinting love and quiet support of his wife.
Balammal was my maternal grandmother fondly addressed as Ammaachi in
Tamil. Ammaachi followed her husband to all the places where his government job
took him. He rose from being a humble Clerk in the Collector’s Office in
Tirunelveli to retire as a Collector himself from the old North Arcot District.
This in itself would have been a great achievement for most men. But in the
case of T. M. Bhaskara Thondaman, this paled into insignificance compared to
his artistic and literary achievements as a connoisseur, curator, exponent,
orator, scholar and writer.
I was brought up by Ammaachi almost from my birth. When my grandfather
died in 1965, I was just fifteen years old. But I was old enough to know that
my Ammaachi never bothered to read any of her illustrious husband’s writings; I
had also never seen her attending any of his scintillating lectures on art,
poetry and sculpture. I have heard her remark to him sardonically as to whether
he himself was writing all those adulatory letters to himself.
It was much later in my own life that I realized that Ammaachi by her
quiet, unassuming and non-interfering ways had provided the bedrock of support
on which her husband’s monumental achievements were built. Ammaachi loved her
husband, her daughters and all her grandchildren in a way that is no longer
fashionable – without any concern for herself.
She had seen much pain in her life. She had seen much pain in her life. She
had lost a young daughter before she was thirty. She lost her only son when he
was nineteen years of age to blood cancer. Thondaman Thatha himself died just
after he turned sixty one in 1965. Hardly three years later, her elder
son-in-law and my father, V. K. C. Natarajan died in a swimming accident in Kanyakumari.
Much later in 1990, she lost her younger son-in-law, R. Subramaniam, also at a
comparatively young age of sixty. In 1996, I, her eldest grandson, lost my
elder son Niranjan Natarajan at nineteen, the same age at which Ammaachi lost
her son Karunakaran. She did not know of any other family which was visited
upon by death and tragedy at such regular and unfailing intervals. She had to
the best of my knowledge never touched the Bhagwat Gita. But I realize that she
had completely understood the teaching about Karma Yoga and was always there to
give her unassuming and quiet support to her husband, her daughters and her
grandchildren, whose need for consolation was her greatest priority.
It would be a fair assessment to say that Ammaachi gave unto us all much
more than what we ever could return to her. I am still haunted by the images of
her emaciated and bony fingers holding my hand to console me when I wept at her
bedside after Niranjan’s death. Hardly two months later, she had called it a
day on 9th July 1996. She was eighty nine. As the doors of the
electric crematorium closed, I was overwhelmed that this was my last look at
this simple woman who had done so much for us all her life. Even as the flames
caught the bright silk sari adorning her body, she looked, to borrow a phrase
from Gopal Honnalgare, endlessly affectionate.
I wish I had the talent and skills with the written word to compose a
worthy enough eulogy for Ammaachi!
