Amma

Today was the first death anniversary of my great-grandmother; who died last year almost to the hour. She was in her late eighties, and towards the end I guess it was a relief to her to finally go. Every time I went to Karachi, she would always be there, in that little single bed in the corner of the large room she had. The room was by no means cut off from the rest of the house; there were both my mamoo’s families living in the same building, and that room was the center. There were no ancient childhood stories told to a circle of grandchildren; she didn’t have the strength for that in my lifetime. That is what my grandmother is for. She was my mother’s mother’s mother, but as it is with old people, we children didn’t regard her much when we were kids until our early teens. But now, I guess there are no regrets. On our last visit to Karachi while she was still alive, she called us all to her and showed us her old photographs of her life in India before the partition. She didn’t tell us any stories, just narrated events: seeing the Quaid give speeches, seeing the political parties’ rallies and what happened when she and her family finally ran away from Delhi, their hometown for centuries, into Karachi: ‘I was already married with three children, the only ones I’ll ever have. Our house in Delhi…ghar kya tha, it was a palace…the grounds, the large, spacious rooms, the decorations! All are ruined now…they destroyed all the houses in their fights. All we had when we fled was a bag of gold coins worth about a million Pakistani rupees in that time. And that was a lot…. a whole lot, I can tell you. it was more than we needed, and a lot more than other people had. And most importantly, there were no regrets.’ That was all she said, and it wasn’t much; after that, I guess I was fascinated and went to her every day. I got no more events, but a lot of satisfaction. The last time I saw her alive, (and this is not the last time I saw her breathing, but when it was actually the last time, she wasn’t there—she was just in too much pain and had forgotten almost everything, including me and her daughters) she put her frail arms around me, wished me a safe journey, and said that there was treasure in me, real treasure that would do the world more than anyone else. She was just the bravest woman I had ever met…so many scary things had happened to her and yet she bore it wonderfully, until she forgot in the end. These are a series of events that Amma (my great-grandmother) went through. The magic was put on her by my great-grandfather’s first wife, whom he had divorced after finding out that she dabbled in witchcraft. My great-grandfather died when his children from his second marriage were very young, but my Amma lived on for a whole lot of years. What exactly the witch wanted, we never knew, but she sure did torture the poor old lady. Strange things happened, with no explanation. When she’d get up from her bed after sleeping or taking a nap, sometimes her back would be wounded, dripping with blood-- I once heard my grandmother telling my mother that it was as bad as if she’d had a car accident. Other times when she rose from her bed, there would be tiny cones of paper, no bigger than half a finger, under the bed and under the pillow, too. These would be filled with a special kind of red sand. This sand is apparently used to stuff voodoo dolls. My family is Muslim, and in our prayers, we have a series of actions that consist of standing, bending, kneeling and bowing, all while praising Allah the Almighty. Once Amma was saying her prayers like this when suddenly, while she was bending and reciting the short prayer that goes with the bending position, a small egg, smaller than a chicken’s, and coloured bright yellow fell on her shoulder out of nowhere and landed on the prayer mat. I was born at this time but was never told what happened next. She was praying indoors and no one was in the room with her. Coupled with these events, Amma suffered constant pain in her heart, her head and her back. The doctor couldn’t find any diagnosis. The pain was not enough to kill, just enough to torture her constantly. We Muslims know that black magic is real, because there is a prayer In the Holy Book, the Quran which guards against it. Amma never went to any fortunetellers, or anyone who claimed to have a method to cure this, but kept her faith in Allah and kept on reading only this prayer. How did this happen? Perhaps the so called logic-minded of you would try to discern how these cones of paper and that egg came to be. It was just pure simple black magic and there are such things. One last event finally closed the chapter of Amma’s sufferings. Well, it was pretty unexpected, and quite sudden. The garden of the house that Amma lived in with my grandmother had a tree right in the center and it was al ways in the way. So, one day the gardener was given orders to chop it down. No the axe did not go berserk, nor did the tree turn into any kind of a Whomping Willow. When the tree was cut, a little hollow was revealed, in which there were, not one, but two voodoo dolls of Amma. Red sand and all. On the back, chest and head of both the dolls were driven huge pins. They did not go all the way in but were at exactly those places where Amma felt the pain. Well, they were taken out, and the pain was gone. Where the dolls were taken or how they were disposed of I do not know. The witch also died some time later and the other frightening things stopped happening. All Amma wanted on the last day was some ice cream, of which she could only manage one spoonful. But her death was painless, as far as anyone could see. My mother went to Karachi that night, but I couldn’t; I had school. I know death anniversaries and birthdays have no place or relevance in Islam, but I guess that’s all I wanted to post today…I don’t want any place where I post my writings to be without some remembrance of her, and my blog’s no exception.