My Thakuma, who never set foot in the kitchen

My Thakuma was not like other grandmothers.

She never entered the kitchen. She did not pinch my cheeks or press an extra helping of rice onto my plate or any of the things grandmothers were meant to do. When I think about her now, I think about cigarettes and gold medals and the smell of a James Hadley Chase paperback left open on the arm of a chair.

She was born into an illustrious zamindar family, on Guy Fawkes Night, which I suspect explains quite a lot.

A childhood, polished

She went to Loreto Convent in Calcutta. Her nanny made her bed for her. Her nanny polished her shoes. This was the world she grew up in, and she carried it lightly. She won two gold medals, one in English and one in Mathematics, and at the age of fourteen she was presented to King George the Fifth during his 1911 trip to India. She wore a new hat and coat for the occasion. The hat was apparently quite something.

In the 1920s she was offered a place at Oxford to read Mathematics. Let me say that again. In the nineteen twenties. At a time when most Indian girls were not being sent to school at all, my grandmother had Oxford on the table.

She did not go. She met my grandfather at a tennis match instead, and fell promptly and rather scandalously in love. Under different circumstances she would have ended up in another large, well appointed household, presiding over dinners and ordering linens. What followed instead was a life of theatre.

The cigarettes, the nails, the novels

I remember her hands very clearly. Manicured, always. She smoked unfiltered cigarettes with what I now recognise as enormous style. There was always a paperback at her side, usually James Hadley Chase, occasionally something I was too young to be reading over her shoulder.

She taught me the word “whatcha-ma-call-it” when I was six. She also taught me an extremely effective phrase involving the word “bloody” that I will not commit to print here. She thought it was hilarious. My mother did not.

When things did not go her way she went on hunger strike. This was not a metaphor. She would retreat to her bedroom and refuse to speak to anyone, and the long furious letters she wrote during these periods would be carried out on a tray by whoever had been deemed safe enough to deliver them. I was occasionally one of these messengers. The letters were beautifully written.

She had decided opinions about almost everything, and she expressed them. She adored my sister. She believed flip-flops ruined your toes, and once, in a fit of conviction, hid every pair my sister owned, leaving her barefoot for weeks. The family argument that followed was one of the great theatrical events of my childhood, ending with Thakuma flinging the slippers onto the floor with extraordinary force and announcing that none of us understood anything about feet.

Sheridan over my shoulder

What I remember most, though, is sitting on the floor of her room revising for exams, and Thakuma reciting Sheridan and Joyce from memory. Not the way you and I quote a line we once read. The way someone who has loved a thing for sixty years quotes it. Pages of it. Whole speeches. She would close her eyes and the words would come out.

It is the kind of education I do not think exists anymore. She did not have a phone. She did not have a screen. She had a memory like a cathedral, and she had filled it.

Pages of Sheridan. Whole speeches. She would close her eyes and the words would come out.

I have thought about this a great deal in the years since. About what it means to know something properly. About the difference between looking a thing up and knowing it. I think about it when I am teaching a masterclass and a student asks me how I know when a curry is done, and I realise the honest answer is that my grandmother and my mother and my aunts taught me, by being in the room.

Not a grandmother who cooked. Still a grandmother who taught.

The interesting thing is that I run a kitchen now, and the woman who shaped me most in this family never made me a single meal. She did not need to. She showed me how to be peculiar, and how to be certain, and how to find a sentence beautiful, and how to argue your corner from a bedroom with the door closed.

All of which, it turns out, you need in a kitchen too.

She would have been a hundred and twenty four today. Born on Guy Fawkes Night, full of sparks and fireworks from the start. Her intelligence, her eccentricity, her stubbornness, her flair for drama. I see all of it in my sister, in my daughter, in the cousins. In me, probably more than I would like to admit.

Happy birthday, Thakuma. I am still not wearing flip-flops indoors.

More soon. Mandira.