But before I talk about the gang, I have to talk about him.
My grandfather — Maama, we called him — was the first love of my life. I spent chunks of my early childhood in his orbit: some evenings, whole stretches of time that I still carry with me. He worked as a clerk, and he was fond of reminding me that he had so many responsibilities. He said it with a kind of theatrical weight, but he also made it funny. He had loads of joke books. He had a temper. He had a stubbornness that was almost a point of pride.
And he had Uma.
My mother was his favourite, and everyone knew it. She was his go-to, the one who made him smile without trying. There was nothing she could do that he didn't approve of. Between them was a bond that felt almost apart from the rest of the family — a friendship as much as anything else.
But it was hard, too. For both of them.
Maama had grown up poor, the last born in his family, and by the time I knew him he was holding up an entire world on a salary of less than ₹700 a month. His wife and five children of his own. Two sisters-in-law. A niece and a nephew. All the children studying. Five girls among them who would, by the expectations of the time, need to be married off. The weight of that — the logistics, the worry, the sheer relentlessness of it — is something I can only begin to imagine.
How Savitramma ran that household, I will never fully understand. She did it, and she kept doing it, and the cost showed up in her body the way costs always do. Both she and Maama carried severe anxiety — his came out as ulceritis, hers as hypochondria. I think now about what that anxiety must have been rooted in. The constant, low hum of what if something goes wrong? What if someone gets sick? Who will marry the girls? How will we manage? That kind of fear doesn't stay in the mind. It moves into the body and lives there.
Then Uma got a job at Canara Bank.
Maama had pushed her towards it, and when she got it, something shifted. She began to help run the house — with joy, I think, though I also remember her saying it was hard. It was hard. She became, quietly and without anyone quite deciding it, the person both her parents leaned on. Emotionally. Financially. Practically. She was the oldest daughter, and she held the shape of the family together.
When she and Pappa got married, they lived first in Jayanagar, then moved to Sripura, and eventually she bought a house in Kumara Park. That was the moment everything changed — not just for her, but for everyone.
The oldest daughter had bought a house.
The oldest daughter had bought a house.
At twenty-six.
In a family that had grown up carefully, anxiously, counting every rupee — that act meant something enormous. It meant a new kind of safety. It meant the fear had not won. But it meant something else too, something that rippled outward to every one of her siblings: it is possible. You can make a home for yourself. You can do this. And I will be there to guide you and support you when you do.
She didn't just buy a house. She quietly rewrote what the family believed was within reach.
And in doing so, she became what she would remain for decades — the compass, the beacon, and the backbone of the family.
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