Velyamachi: My Gutsy Grandma - 1

 Velyamachi: My Gutsy Grandma - 1

We have two old family pictures - one with Velyamachi (my mother's mother); the other with Velyappachen (my father's father), both taken on their only visits to Bombay at a studio at the Dadar T.T. (Tram Terminus) circle, just walking distance from the 5-storey tenements where we lived on Dadar Main Road.
Those were British days...before India's Independence in 1947. Our road had three film studios on it, and at that time that road was home for Bombay's Hindi film productions.
This blog is about Velyamachi. It was the first time she had traveled by train, probably the first time she had seen a train. She was 4 foot something...dwarfish, but an amazing woman.She wore a traditional white cotton mundu or wraparound lower garment and a white blouse or chatta. In her ears she wore small jewelry at the top, but in the lower ears the heavy silver jewelry made the holes in her ears bigger and bigger so the jewelry hung over her shoulders.
She was a livewire - who never gave up! Her husband had died early. Initially the family earner was her son John, a tailor who made Western-style clothes and suits for the Englishmen managing tea, rubber and other estates in what was then the raja-ruled state of Travancore - later to be a part of Kerala. He himself wore a half-sleeved shirts and short pants.
When her son too passed away Velyamachi was left to fend for herself. She did it by selling what she could grow on about an acre of land and the milk of two cows she kept. She and the children had black coffee sweetened with unda, a variety of jaggery She managed to get some schooling for three daughters {including my mother), then got them married off. She got her son's children - three sons and a daughter to finish school so that they could find jobs in Bombay with my father's help. In short, she saved the family!

That, briefly, is the story of a wonderful and gutsy woman. My wonderful Velyamachi!

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Dreams of One Country, Ms. Jagjit Daniel's MovieScopic India Novel. The book my wife Jagjit and I worked on together is now available for Print Copy delivery to you by Amazon - apart from e-download. Dreams is a story, set in the midst of national upheavals, on India's transformation: of the country's thrilling ascent to join the world's most progressive nations.

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