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Somewhere between growing up and growing older, you realise family isn’t just names or places.
It’s all the love, the grief, and the unfinished conversations stitched into your bones. This is a little piece of that.
~

My dad is the eldest son of the eldest daughter among five siblings, and the eldest grandson among fifteen grandchildren.
He’s also the eldest son of the eldest son of a family of three siblings — and again, the eldest grandson among many more.

Peculiar, isn’t it, that I find myself writing first about his maternal side in patriarchal Kerala. But that was my grandparents’ doing.
Both sides were so close, you didn’t even realise there was a side to choose – not until you were much older. Dad’s paternal family lived a stone’s throw away. But they were the serious kind. Reserved, self-contained, meet, greet and check.
The fun, the gossip, the laughter always belonged to the maternal side. Most of my grandma’s siblings started out their lives in my grandma’s home or close by. But with time, they had spread themselves across the city.

Oh, to have loved and lost.

My dad spent a lot of time with his maternal grandmother at Poovathur or Pullad, as they call it now. That house was the stuff of legend – our envy.
Between my dad’s memories and my grandmother’s stories, you’d think it was made of gold. Their childhood experiences. The children from that home, the grandchildren, oh so magical, so marvellous.
And we – the insignificant invisible lowlives 🙄

Even till her last days, Ammachy would be on the phone checking in on every sibling, every child, every grandchild. The stories of the yesteryears much stronger towards the end. For us, all the more reason to whine. Would she ever love us as much? Would there ever be enough love left for us, after all of them?!

She, too, never explained to us what it meant to be the eldest in every way. That before my father was even born, she had already raised four children – her very own siblings.

So, we looked at her begrudgingly, as though her love for them would somehow steal from our cups. At forty, I know how foolish that was. But at ten, when the stories were always about their children and their lives, it felt like a competition.

Child Ann, her siblings and cousins couldn’t imagine the loss my grandmother must have carried within herself— moving away from the ones she raised, taught, provided for, and nurtured.

Thankfully, my grandfather did!

Thinking of them, I wonder if he was ever a “patriarch” in the real sense. He loved and adored my sister as much as his firstborn grandson.
His wife was his equal. Both of them had their own spaces, their little worlds in their home. And he never, NEVER, missed an event at his wife’s childhood home or in the lives of her four siblings: marriage, illness, prayers, celebrations, anything – big and small.
They were part of his home, his family, too. I wonder what it must have been for him, for my grandma, raising her siblings under her in-laws’ roof. Sharing space. Resources already stretched thin.
Did they sigh disapprovingly? Did they whisper behind closed doors?
These are questions I should have asked her. But I didn’t.

Oh, to have loved and lost!

The Weight Some Shoulders Carry

My dad believes he has a right to all their lives – his cousins and their families.
We never understood why he threw tantrums over small slights.

Now, we do. His parents had made him believe these siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles — they were HIS.
He had shared his home, his childhood, his mother, his grandmother, and his emotions with them.
Of course, their joys and losses felt like his own.

Their birthdays are on top of his mind.
He wakes up saying, “Innu Achayande birthday aa,” and if you don’t respond quick enough, he sulks — like a little child.
“Why am I not on top of your mind the way you were on my mother’s and mine?”
Unreasonable? Maybe. But with the context he was raised in, it makes perfect sense.

Let me explain – when my 12th grade results came out, my parents were in Chennai with my Grandma’s brother and family. He was undergoing an open heart surgery. The morning they flew back, I also happened to lose a dear friend in a swimming accident.
But my win and my grief were quickly swept aside, as I saw the heavier cloud they carried stepping into the car. That was how it was for us.

The extended family, the ones we visited every holiday, were such a big part of our homes – my grandparents and my parents.

They were our family. But, we were their extended relatives.

Life and relationships are like that.
The weight is heavier on some shoulders than others.

Another uncle of ours, shows us glimpses of those emotional surges. The same “unreasonable tantrums.” He is close to my dad in age and position.
However, he has learnt to rein it in. My father not as much.

And maybe that’s okay, too.
It’s a burden he carries — just like my grandmother did.

What We Carry: Childhoods, Homes, and Goodbyes

Yesterday, we buried another one of my grandma’s siblings.
One last sister remains.

I went to be with the family – to be with them like my father would, if he could. No one asked that of me. My parents even said “You don’t have to. With your back, with your work pressures. We understand if you don’t” and I knew they meant every word.

All the more reason for me to go! And so, I did.
Weird, our relationships are.

The bus was delayed — 8:30 became 9, then 10, then 10:30. No matter how fast the time went, the destination seemed nowhere close.
I could hear the frustration building in Appa’s voice.
Why wasn’t I there yet?

Why wasn’t he there through me?

And when I finally made it before the final goodbye, there was relief — not just his, but Amma’s too.
After 55 years together, their emotions have intertwined.
His disappointments are hers.
Her frustrations are his.

After it was all over, we sat on the verandah at Konni.
My uncle said, “If one person would have really wanted to be here today, it was Thomaskuttychayan.”
Few understand the loss my father feels when his aunts and uncles leave.
For him, each loss is a piece of his parents slipping away again.

And so even in his physical absence, he was there – every waking minute since ammachy had left to be with his mother – in her home, in spirit and mind.

Just like his mother.

My sister and I laughed, imagining our grandma’s glee at her younger sister’s passing — she would finally be reunited with her little daughter. So much gossip to catch up on!

Being there, I carried three childhoods within me — my grandmother’s, my father’s, and mine.

Our children may never understand this kind of messy, beautiful intermingling.
But oh, how Poovathur, Mavelikara, Mundakayam, Konni, and Trivandrum are stitched into the fabric of our bones – no matter which part of the country or world we live in!