Jain Spirit 2001 12 No 09

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 42

ART & LITERATURE
RESERVOIRS OF WISDOM
In the first excerpt from her best selling book, Mira Kamdar talks
about her "Motiba's Tattoos."
JAYUSHAM
Y GRANDMOTHER'S TATTOOS WERE ONE OF THE great mysteries of my childhood. Etched onto her
chin, her cheeks and her forearms were thin lines, dots and crosses of a blackish blue-green. The marks were purely abstract. There was no pictorial element to hint at a meaning. No one ever explained to me how my grandmother came to have these tattoos, why she wore them or what they meant. Certainly, I never dared to ask. I simply took them to be mute signs of the unknowable world out of which she came.
As I grew older, I became aware of another mystery related to my grandmother: no one knew her real name. Even she claimed not to know it. She was known within the family as "Ba" (mother). I always called her "Motiba" (grandmother). Outside the immediate family, she was called "Baluben". I knew that "ben" meant sister, a common term of affectionate respect. "Balu", I was told, was simply a nickname, with no meaning or sense to it. It was what she had always been called and no more. Later, one of my aunts told me my grandmother's real name was "Jayakunver" (Victorious Princess). This name seemed too grand and impersonal to belong to my tiny grandmother. In any case, no one least of all she herself ever used it. Motiba's anonymity bothered me. It compounded her mystery. One of the most important persons in my life was in many ways an enigma.
It's not that I didn't know anything about her. I knew that her father had been very rich and that she came from significantly more money than my grandfather did. In marrying him, she had made the poorest match of her family. A visit to any one of her relatives was a visit to a level of comfort and luxury well above that enjoyed in the home she'd made with my grandfather. I remember as a child paying a call on an old uncle of hers. His slightly mouldering mansion was tucked away in a large private garden in the exclusive Malabar Hill section of Bombay. The salon where we met him had enormous high ceilings,
"Remember, money can be made and lost, but an education can never be taken from you"
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Jain Spirit . December 2001 - February 2002