Days before Dassera, I’d returned from a long trip to the US and Canada. After a successful edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, for whom I’m Senior Programme Advisor, South Asia, I travelled first to Cambridge in Massachusetts, then to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Everywhere, I had meetings, and gave priority to visiting museums and art galleries, especially showcasing the art, culture and history of Black, indigenous and marginalised people and minorities, and erased histories. Whatever present I may bring Amma, Indu Shedde, 97, chocolates, soft slippers or a shawl, I know she will save it up for later, from old habit. Nothing gives her as much joy as the regular delights I bring her from Vijay Stores, Santa Cruz—yellow poha chivda, methi khakra, and brown Dharwad pedha (as Amma grew up in Dharwar, Karnataka). I know that spending the day with her makes her much happier than anything money can buy. And I brought her laminated cards of her “vegetable art,” that she used to do in the 1960s, to earn a few pennies from home, as she raised two young girls, my sister Sarayu and I—table decorations made entirely of fresh fruit and vegetables—of which only a few remained, after I had gifted these to people in all these cities. Amma was elated to hear how her work was appreciated everywhere.

I’d brought Amma “magic crayons” from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)—crayons in stippled colours. She immediately started using them for a drawing, ‘Different Shapes In My Room,’ in which she drew the outlines of variously shaped containers in different colours, all overlapping and creating a lovely pattern—all the while sucking her lips in, to concentrate better. She used the Vijay Stores’ Dharwad pedha box for a square, then a mug for a circle, a Lacto Calamine bottle, the round lid of a little steel dabba in which her caretaker angel, P, soaks methi seeds overnight for her to have in the morning, and finally, an oval shape. We had an epidemic of giggles when she confessed that she got the oval shape from her denture case. So imaginative is our darling Amma.