Amma the bindass

Illustration/Uday Mohite

We recently celebrated Amma's (Indu Shedde's) 95th birthday. I am in utter gratitude that she is among us, and in good health so far, even at this age. She can see (more or less), hear, walk, and she sings every day. She plays Hindustani classical music on her Casio keyboard daily. I had gifted her a Casio last year, and the moment she took the cover off, she started playing Raag Kedar on it, as if she'd been doing that all her life. Her big concern is: which bhajan will she sing at the temple tomorrow? She used to sing on All India Radio and has given public concerts, and has a wide repertoire of Hindustani classical music, including raga-based bhajans. Still, she feels she can't sing God the same old bhajans every day. So she asks anyone with an android phone, to play her Anup Jalota on YouTube, so that she can learn new bhajans. I just love her attitude: always looking to up her game.

She adores radio, I call it her permanent boyfriend. Her favourite is All India Radio's Marathi Asmita Vahini on 558 AM, with superb, high-quality discussions and Hindustani classical music, whose standards neither FM radio nor TV will hardly ever match.

I got us Suta sarees for her birthday. Hers was a plain rich purple, her favourite colour, except for a thin black border and beautiful black tassles on the pallu, that I found very classy. I chose it as much for how it looked as how it felt - it's made of mul (mulmul or muslin cotton, a speciality of Bengal weavers), and very soft on the skin. I paired it with a purple-and-black silk ikat blouse and an unusual embroidered cloth necklace with lotuses.

A number of relatives and friends came to wish her. For lunch we had a typical Saraswat meal, with batatya song (a favourite potato and onion dish), tendli-bibbya ambat (a hot coconut curry made with ivy gourd and bibbe, tender cashew nuts), fruit sasam (a cold coconut curry with mixed fruit), apart from rice, dal, chapatis, and Dharwad pedhas for mish-ti (Amma's favourite, as she comes from Dharwad). For teatime, there was a birthday cake, wafers and hot-hot mixed bhajias of potato, onion and capsicum.

But the highlight was her autobiography called Empress of Her Destiny: Autobiography of Indu Shedde: ‘Vegetable Art' Queen and much more. I've been working on the book since 2019, so three years. I was determined to gift her the book on her birthday and see her smile. She is very chuffed indeed. But I want the book to be a lot better, with more photographs, a different layout, etc, so for now I have made only a ‘birthday edition' of one-colour printed copy for Amma for her birthday. The wonders of ‘print-on-demand' printing. Otherwise, in my time, you had to print squillions of copies by offset printing.

One of the unique things about Amma that I celebrate in the book is her ‘vegetable art' - original creative decorations that she made from 1967 for a decade or more - the Air India Maharaja and Boeing, a Bharata Natyam dancer, the Taj Mahal, a pair of swans and much more - all entirely from fresh fruit and vegetables. I wrote also, acknowledging her financial wizardry, of "just a housewife," thanks to which she and Papa have left a legacy for my sister Sarayu Kamat and me. But her other big legacy is her very bindass attitude in life, absolutely daring and fearless. I hope I have taken after her.

People also wrote beautiful tributes to her. What's the use of saying nice-nice things about people after they're gone? Say it to them while they're still around.

Fiercely independent, Amma has preferred to stay in a senior citizen's home after Papa passed away, and avoided staying with my sister or me. She stayed with me for eight months in 2020-21 when the institution shut down due to Corona - and now lives in a cottage amidst a fruit orchard, two hours from Bombay, a home for senior citizens, with a live-in caretaker. The home is primarily for the Saraswat, Konkani-speaking community, and not open to the public. From her verandah, she can see hills, part of the Sahyadri range that leads to Matheran: they are clouded in mist in the monsoon. Here's wishing Amma good health and good cheer always.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com