A t Jhanse Atta’s I had gotten ill and spent a week in pools of cold sweat from chills right in the dead of summer when the heat melts sandals to the road. To my right was a dresser and to my left a huge safe that had been around my grandfather most of his life. When Jhanse Atta was married, Jayjaya had given them to her from the house in Podili. As I slipped in and out of consciousness, I had a vision of a tunnel with a shining light at its end. I walked towards it. The tunnel became a rooftop, and Jayjaya was looking at me like he used to, his eyes a little wet. I woke up and stared at the mother of pearl in the doors of the dresser, then the blackened rust in the grooves of the safe.
When I recovered, I videotaped the objects unique to our family’s history, like the dresser and the safe and Jhanse Atta’s collection of family photos. I took stills of them in the brightest part of the house, the puja room. Under a fluorescent tube, framed pictures of deities lined all four walls up to the top of the high ceiling. Their eyes, surrounded by gold and flowers, stared down at me.
The house is off the main road in Ongole and is long and narrow like the inside of a Victorian row house, while the outside is angular and rough cement. In the old commercial district all the houses are enclosed on all sides by other houses like this one; Jhanse Atta rents the top two floors and lives on the first, which has no windows. In front they have a shop facing the street, with plenty of sunlight, about eight feet wide by ten feet deep. Around a desk and small chair are rows of modular shelving housing a variety of neatly stacked colored paper. Her husband has a lucrative business selling government forms for every legal, civic, and property related transaction in town and for the county, since Ongole is the seat of the Prakasam district.
Jhanse Atta would spend the afternoon in the shop since her husband was often away on trips with the Rotary Club. She enjoyed grabbing my cheeks with her hard grip and would bop me on the head to show affection. She was loud and crass. I would flinch and feel at home. On the road, a pack of barking wild dogs passed by. A male and female were locked together, while the rest circled around trying to disengage them. Blood dripped down their legs.
After the barking had moved down the street, she told me that Jayjaya took her out of school pretty early, before what they call intermediate in India and we in the U.S. would call high school. He thought she didn’t need to learn anymore. All of the things I do here in the shop, I learned on my own.
When she was young, people remembered her with her father in his shop. Her large eyes, like her mother’s, he kept close. Her sharp tongue, like her mother’s, made him laugh. She followed his example. What she learned from her father never failed her.
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Aug 7, 11:32 PM