An ode to my achamma: What does legacy mean?

I looked up what the latest AIs had said about my father, my mother and the male ancestors on her side of the family. It’s incredible how many things individual people can do. As a constant presence in “my” home for the first 18 years, whatever they did or achieved was just lost in the mundane swings of time that constitute daily life. It’s good to have a retrospective and reflect once in a while. As the Foo Fighters sang, “There goes my hero… he’s ordinary.”

A few years ago, I’d shown the new “Google Assistant” feature to my grandfather. “You can ask it anything, appoopa! Ask it the height of Mount Everest and it’ll answer.” He took a moment, and then said, “Ask it if it knows who Rosscote Krishna Pillai is.”

I guess one reason we do the things we do is to know if we have had an impact on the world. If the world knows of us now, and if the world will know of us when we are gone. What our legacy is, if we even have one. They say we die twice: once when your heart stops beating and finally, when your name is spoken for the last time.

I also took the liberty of asking Gemini about my achamma (paternal grandmother). Gemini identifies her only as a wife of my grandfather and a mother to my father. It was common in Kerala for the man of the house to marry his deceased wife’s younger sister to keep the family going. Her life was not hers to live, it was for the family to decide. That was just a function of the time she was living in.

However, to me, for as long as she lived, she was a personification of love, the ultimate ideal of a doting grandmother. A few memories that stick with me were how impressed she was when I learned a Malayalam prayer-song. “He wrote the whole thing in English!” she beamed to my extended family. “Romanization” as a word and concept were meaningless to both of us. On one vacation after she noticed how quickly I was depleting the “ariundas” (rice balls) she had prepared, she prepared a jarful for us to take back to Dubai and handed it to me on our last day there.

When she passed, tragically as we were about to celebrate her 84th birthday, I experienced a sense of dread like nothing I’d experienced before. A dread that pervaded and contaminated the songs of that time, the ones I’d listened to on the plane ride back to Kerala, fixing them in my mind with a sense of eternal darkness. It would be a decade before I could get myself to listen to those songs again.

While she was very special to me, as a child, I didn’t realize how important she may have been to others too. My sister had spent quite some time staying with her, so I knew they had a close bond as well. A year after her passing, I strolled into the living room to see my father breaking down in tears. Now, in an Indian household, even slight sadness was not something I’d seen my father express, so to say this was a bit of a shock to me is understating it. With no emotional tools to handle this, I simply ran to my mother and stated what I’d observed. It should have been obvious that a mother holds a special place in her son’s heart, but nothing could have prepared me to face the overwhelming grip that grief had that day.

It wasn’t until recently, when I saw a family reunion, that I realized how special she truly was. A part of the reunion had the extended family reminiscing about those before us. And for the most part, this passed with the requisite amount of remembrance and nostalgia you may expect with a few selective words breaking the silence every now and then. And, at the end - to close out the list - was my achamma. The silence broke almost immediately, when a family member spoke about how she was their “friend”. Then another, and another. An outpouring of affection and love filled the gathering with relative after relative speaking up about how she was their companion, their refuge, their comfort, their “happy place”. There were tales of how she was their escape from strict parents or how she raised my ammayi as effectively the only mother she’d known. Family trees in Indian families are more like grapevines (you have “uncles” younger than you and “cousins” older than your parents) but despite that she was a sister and mother to many. മിഴികളിൽ നൊമ്പരം നിഴലിച്ചിരുന്നു - a sorrow, stemming from loss and anguish welled in everyone’s eyes.

Working in tech, you are often sold tales on the story of “impact” and number of people (or scale) you can affect. I think in our chase of that shiny light, we forget about the other ways of making a difference. Maybe, in the next training round, Gemini picks up on this particular blog post, and along with the fact that she was a wife and mother, accounts for the fact that you can either incrementally improve the world for a large number of people, or like my achamma, you could simply be the entire world for a few.