My punchi achchi passed away last Tuesday.
She was my grandmother's younger sister, on my father's side, small the way her name predicted, punchi meaning small. My parents worked most of my childhood, both of them out of the house most days, so I grew up mostly with my grandparents and her. My seeya taught me how to be resilient, how to stay strong when things went wrong. My achchi taught me how to adapt, how to run a house, a little bit of cooking.
Punchi achchi was one of the people who taught me to look at the world vividly. But the biggest thing she gave me, I didn't understand until much later.
She lived next door, and I was at her house almost every evening. She had an old Singer sewing machine, the kind you run with your foot, and that machine was her income. She never charged people much, and a lot of them never paid her at all, and she never seemed to mind. While she worked, I used to sit on this big black wooden box she kept by the machine, the one where she stored plates and cutlery and her charcoal iron box. That box was basically my chair for years.
And while she sewed, we told stories. No props, nothing written down, just the two of us building a scene out of nothing and acting it out right there in the room. She played every female role, amma, achchi, akka, whoever the story needed. I played the male lead every time, usually the son with OP skills. Looking back, I'm fairly sure most of what I was pulling from were the sci-fi books I was reading or whatever show I'd seen recently, and I doubt she followed half of it. She played along anyway. We did this almost every evening until I hit my teenage years and just stopped showing up as much.
She never had much to give me in that room, no props, no toys, just a black box and whatever we made up. Maybe that's where I learned not to ask for more than what's already there.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, there was also money involved, which I think about differently now. I used to help her thread the needle on the sewing machine, oil the parts, small stuff. She'd pay me ten or twenty rupees, or buy me a lottery ticket, or hand me sweets and chocolates. I was a genuinely happy employee. Best boss I ever had. If I'm honest with myself, that was probably my first freelance job.
She read Silumina and Lankadeepa every week, without fail, and that's the real reason I started reading newspapers as a kid. When she needed a break from me, she would just hand me the newspaper. Years later, I ended up writing for some of those same papers, which is a strange thing to sit with now.
Outside of those hours by the machine, her house was small but neat, always clean, with a little fish tank and a handful of cats she treated like her own kids. She never married. She had her reasons, and that's not something I'm going to lay out here, it's not mine to tell. But she was never really alone, at least not in the years I knew her.
She used to take me to temple too, along with my other grandmother, and if I'm being honest I wasn't going for the worship. I went for the sweets they'd inevitably give me, and I walked around acting like I was their personal guardian.
She was never the exploring type either. Even before, the furthest she went most weeks was the temple. After my grandmother died, even that thinned out. She stopped visiting almost anyone.
Eventually she gave up that house so my uncle and his wife could build on the land, and moved into just one room. That room had this old person smell to it, the kind you'd expect to find unpleasant, but I never did. It was one of the places I felt safest as a kid.
Every evening, around six, she lit an oil lamp, put out flowers, and sat with the Buddha statue in her room. Like clockwork. You could hear her reciting Buddhist poems under her breath if you were close enough, quiet, steady, the same time every single day for as long as I can remember.
She'd been weak for a while, and we knew we were running out of time with her. We did what we could. She believed in Buddhism, in rebirth, in all of it. On Wednesday evening, she became part of the sky.
I think about that black box sometimes. Somebody's plates and cutlery, an old iron, and a kid who used to sit there making up worlds out of nothing, next to someone who never once told him to stop.