To Aunty, With Love

She worked for many years as the family’s caretaker offering only a glimpse of her own life but becoming an irreplaceable part of theirs. Nikita Biswal writes about the complex pain of losing ‘Aunty’ who was so much more than just the help.

Illustration by Bhargavi Rudraraju

My friends would often ask me about the lady who came to drop me to the school bus every day. “Is she your grandmother?” I had to repeatedly qualify my relationship with this fifth member of my family. Every time, I simply responded ‘Aunty’ – an all-encompassing word for my lifelong companion, guardian, maker of my favourite food, teller of stories and a woman I loved more than anything in the world. But in all our time together, I never once told her I loved her in so many words. 

Aunty, passed away from a heart stroke on the afternoon of 2nd September this year. Over the course of the twenty years, she spent with my family, I must have written her name innumerable times. I would carefully trace the letters in Hindi at the back of my triple-lined school notebooks and pass the pencil to her. 

“Now you do it,” I’d say to her. 

‘Jaishree Balekar’ she would write dutifully – over and over again until no space remained on the page – often in the middle of her chores or by losing out on sleep. Some days, she would wake up an hour before usual to finish the ‘homework’ I had assigned to her, just so I wouldn’t be upset. I had only put together a rough spelling because I was never very good at writing in Hindi. But this is how Aunty came to sign her name for the rest of her life – as she received deliveries and bought groceries for twenty long, biscuity years. As she grew older, she found it increasingly difficult to recall the letters. When we received post, she would look around the house for me and softly ask me to come see who’s at the door. 

On the morning of 2 September, as I walked out of my room, Aunty came in to make the bed I had left disordered. I said good morning and asked if she still had a fever. She nodded, asking me if she should bring me my breakfast. I remember how hurt she looked, her grey eyes drooping, when I refused. She had specially made the upma I love – with soft bits of dal. So I smiled and agreed. She brought me a plateful before leaving me to go take a bath. In the next few hours, I would be on the phone panicking as I rang my neighbour’s doorbell and tried to find the number for an ambulance. The house grew immensely quiet when Ma took her to the hospital. The pot of potatoes Aunty had cooked for lunch sat on the kitchen slab tilting under the weight of a ladle. It looked warm under its lid – ready to be served. I sat down with my eyes glued to my phone and waited for Ma’s call to tell me she was okay.  

Though none of us, not even Aunty, knew her exact age, she must have been nearing seventy. In my memories of her, she looks neither old nor weak. A few days ago I had held her arm tightly in mine as we walked from the car to the doctor’s clinic, pointing out the potholes to her ageing eyes. Her skin collected in folds in my grip. As we walked, I kept thinking of all the times I raced ahead of her slow feet when she walked me to the bus stop. I would pause every two minutes and turn around to check if she was keeping up. While we waited for my school bus, I would narrate my entire day to her. When I was late, Aunty would run with me to chase the bus, my red school bag slung on her big shoulders.

I was easily vexed if anyone described Aunty as ‘our help’. I was impatient with any criticism of her, quick to take another serving when someone complained about the salt in the food. I struggled to make sure she knew she was a part of our family. When we watched TV late at night, I urged her to sit on the bed with us instead of the floor. But she preferred it. I asked her every night to come sleep with me in my air-conditioned room but she insisted on sticking to her arrangement of mattress and blankets in the hot living room.

Aunty had arrived in our lives by pure chance. When my caretaker Amma announced she had to leave the city to go back to her hometown, my mother was considering leaving her job. The next day, Amma brought in a substitute. Aunty had left her home and family in Bombay – a husband and three sons whom she never spoke of – and had recently arrived in Delhi to look for work. She had taken a train and brought very little with her. Later in life, she told me stories about catching fish and swimming in the stream behind their lavish house with her brothers. I remember one afternoon I asked her if she misses her children, but I don’t remember what she said, or if she said anything at all. This is all we ever knew about her before she became an irreplaceable part of our lives. Our days revolved around her as she managed the house, cooked food, and looked after me and my sister.  

Because Aunty couldn’t speak Oriya, my parent’s mother-tongue, I too grew up speaking Hindi. She kept a small photograph of me in her purse. ‘You look like a boy here,’ she told me once, laughing when I asked her about it. 

I remember Aunty as a plump, big-hearted Bumbaiker who always had the most hearty laughter in the room. She dressed in the same three light sarees she adored and wore a tiny stone nose-ring even though her cupboard was lined with rows of silks and gold jewellery. Later that evening, I had opened her cupboard and rested my head on a pile of her clothes, breathing in the smell of her chiffon, and wept. 

For hours, I watched the ice frost the metal base of the body freezer, inching closer to her toes. Aunty looked like she was asleep and would wake up any minute now.

Over the next few days, guests and relatives poured in to our house to offer their condolences. They remembered Aunty’s famous chai. They spoke of the vada-pao and pao bhaji she had introduced into our household. I smiled as I walked around the house pouring water in glasses, clearing the table, not knowing what to say. I felt watched. I was overcome by a need to perform my grief as strangers touched my shoulder and spoke of their own loss. Minutes before she had suffered her stroke, Aunty had called out to me and I hadn’t heard her. 

I picked a flower from the floor where she was lying. Aunty and I had spent countless afternoons sitting here building towers with Jenga blocks. We would roll with laughter when the structure toppled all over us. She and I shared a love for practical humour that naturally made us friends. I placed my trust in her without any terms or conditions. I would run to her every time I was hungry, bruised, or afraid of the unwarranted insects in my room or the ghosts on the TV. I waited when she was not at home, refusing to share with my mother the honest demands I made with her so easily.

In turn, Aunty spoilt me to bits. She would lather my toast with extra butter, smuggle savoury burgers from the local shop in her handbag despite Ma’s protest, escort the spiders to the balcony with unwavering grace and pick out the cream from my hot milk with her fingers when I squirmed. When I was younger, Aunty would bring me my dinner with two chapatis held snugly under the tray. She would sit down next to me and begin narrating one riveting ghost story after the other. As I listened open-mouthed and she would slyly fold the extra chapatis into an endless queue of morsels – ‘see, just one more bite!’ 

Her love was simple and undemanding. When I left home to go to university, Aunty innocently asked me what the time would be where I was. She marvelled at the snow outside my window with the eagerness of a child. She taught me easy recipes – for french toasts and egg bhurji – over the phone. She would console me and ask after me even when my calls home became less and less frequent. It is only now that I realise how dependent I was on her constant forgiveness. 

I find no photographs of her with me to rehearse my grief. I decide to search for pictures of her in our old family albums when I go home – her face still young, hair jet black and smile smaller in those early years. I replay her last day repeatedly in my head and try to list what I could have done differently. At unlikely moments in the day, I find myself thinking of her deeply, intensely, trying to come to terms with her irrecoverable absence. When I think of her, she looks happy, healthy. She is sitting in her chair in the living room where she always sat listening to music or standing in her corner in the kitchen cooking in three pans at once. 

Nikita Biswal is a final year student of literature at King’s College London. She is currently writing about home, city, and memory. You can find her @nikitabiswal