My Amma’s story

My Amma’s story

It was during the second lockdown, when the days in Kerala felt unusually still.

The rain had stopped by afternoon, the kind of soft stopping that left the air heavy and damp.

The street outside Lakshmi Amma’s house in Thrissur was unusually quiet.

No school children. No temple bell. Only a distant auto horn and the slow, tired call of a vegetable seller pushing his cart, mask slipping below his nose.

Lakshmi Amma stood in the dining room, looking at the old wooden almirah as if it might answer her questions.

“Tomorrow or day after, they will come,” she said to herself.

Her son, Unnikrishnan, almost fifty now, had called from the US two nights ago.

“Amma, we’re finally coming for a short vacation,” he had said.
“With the children also.”

After the call, Lakshmi Amma had not slept properly.

What all should be kept ready?
What all would they ask for?

That afternoon, she was searching for the brass nilavilakku wick box, the small, round one with a dent on the side. She always used it when the family came home. Properly lighting the lamp mattered to her. It meant welcome. It meant the house was awake.

“I’m sure I kept it here only,” she murmured, bending slightly and pulling open the bottom drawer of the almirah.

The drawer came out with a familiar wooden sigh.

A smell rose, mothballs, old cotton, time.

Inside were neatly folded mundus, kept for guests who no longer stayed. Two unused kasavu tablecloths, stiff and yellowing at the edges. A stack of instruction manuals, mixer, pressure cooker, television, things she had once read carefully and now no longer needed.

We keep many things long after their use is over, because letting go feels like closing a door we may still want to open.

She moved her hand deeper into the drawer.

Her fingers brushed against something thick.

Not cloth.
Not paper.

Something solid.

Familiar.

She stopped.

“What is this now?” she said aloud, her voice echoing slightly in the empty house.

She pulled it out slowly.

A faded green cover appeared. The corners were smooth. The album felt heavier than she expected in her hands.

“Oh,” she whispered.

It was the photo album.

She had not been looking for it. Not at all.

She placed it on the dining table. A thin layer of dust rose and settled in the afternoon light coming through the grilled window. The light made the dust glow for a moment, as if it were alive.

Lakshmi Amma stood there, both hands resting on the album.

“When did I last open you?” she asked softly.

Years. Maybe more than ten. Maybe more than twenty.

Life had become quiet without asking permission. Children had grown. Rooms had emptied. Drawers had closed and stayed closed.

She pulled a chair and sat down slowly, knees protesting a little.

She opened the album.

The first page held black-and-white photographs.

Her parents.

Her Amma, Kalyanikutty Amma, standing straight, hair neatly oiled and tied back, blouse crisp.
Her Achan, Narayanan Nair, standing beside her, smiling carefully, as if the photographer had warned him not to move.

“Achan never liked photos,” Lakshmi Amma smiled.
“He used to say, ‘Why freeze the face when it is still alive?’”

She traced the edge of the photo with her finger.

There was a tightness in her chest, not sadness. Something gentler.

Recognition is what remains when sorrow chooses silence.

Turning the page, she saw herself.

Twenty years old.

Standing with friends near the college gate.

“Radha… Annie… Leela…” she whispered.

They were laughing at something outside the frame.

She could not remember the joke.

But she remembered the sound of that laughter, easy, loud, careless.

Some sounds fade from the ear but never from the body.

The album moved forward, as albums do.

A smiling photograph of Gopikrishnan, her younger brother.

She paused.

That photo had been taken the day Gopi passed Pre-Degree. He wanted to join engineering. For the application, a passport-size photo was needed.

She remembered that day clearly.

She, Gopikrishnan, and her father had gone to the studio in town. Gopi had adjusted his collar again and again. Her father stood behind him, saying nothing.

After the photo, they had lunch at a small hotel near the bus stand.

Rice. Sambar. One fish fry.

She could still taste it.

Now, Gopikrishnan was no longer there.

He joined the Air Force after engineering.

But fate had other plans.

He did not return.

She remembered how her father became smaller after that. Quieter. As if part of him had been turned into furniture, present, but unmoving.

Lakshmi Amma sat for a long time before turning the page.

Then came the wedding.

She and Krishnan Nair.

Both stiff. Both serious.

“Look at us,” she chuckled. “As if we were attending a government office.”

She remembered the heavy jasmine garland. The sweat. Her Amma whispers, “Stand straight, Lakshmi.”

They had no idea what life had prepared.

A few pages later, something surprised her.

Their first trip to Simla.

She smiled.

It was Krishnan’s idea.

Gopikrishnan, her younger brother, after joining the air force, was working in Chandigarh then. It was his first station in the Air Force.

“Let’s go once,” Krishnan had said. “When else will we see snow?”

The photo showed Lakshmi Amma wrapped in a thick sweater, looking uncomfortable. Krishnan stood proudly beside her, hands in pockets.

She remembered how cold it was.
How her feet hurt.
How she had complained.

But she also remembered standing silently, watching snow fall.

Some places enter our lives only once, but stay forever.

Then came the children.  Birthday photos. Oil lamps. Cake-smeared faces.

One photo made her stop. Unnikrishnan, six years old.

Standing in the backyard. The plastic cricket bat is almost taller than him.

“Amma, throw fast!” she could hear him shout.

He missed every ball. And laughed every time.

She covered her mouth.

“I forgot that laugh,” she whispered.

We forget joy not because it was small, but because life keeps asking us to move on.

School photos followed.

Uniforms too big. Then too small.

In some photos, she saw herself in the background, busy and half-visible.

At the time, she never thought those moments mattered.

Now she understood.

The most honest lives are often lived just outside the frame.

Toward the end, the pages grew thin.

Photos came less often.

Phones replaced albums.

The last photo showed her and Krishnan sitting near the temple pond.

Side by side. Looking in the same direction.

“Who took this?” she wondered. Krishnan was no longer there to answer.

She closed the album gently. The house was quiet.

But it was not empty. Everything had only been layered.

She left the album on the table, where the light could reach it.

“There is no hurry,” she said.

Forgetting does not erase life.
It only waits for us to return.

.