What My Grandmother Hid in the Rice Tin
Under two inches of rice lay her entire secret economy.
My grandmother did all her banking at knee level, in a steel tin that once held five kilos of rice. We found this out eleven days after her funeral, when the relatives had finally gone and my mother started the terrible administrative work of emptying a dead woman's kitchen.
The tin sat on the lowest shelf of the store cupboard, behind the pickle jars, exactly where it had sat my entire life. Dented on one side, the old brand name worn to a ghost of itself, a tin so ordinary that thieves broke into the house in 1997 and walked right past it to steal a radio. Ma opened it to see if the rice inside was worth keeping or had gone to weevils.
Two inches down, her fingers hit paper.
She called my name in a voice I did not recognize, and I came running from the other room, and together, kneeling on the kitchen floor like people at the edge of a dig site... we excavated my grandmother.
Rolled bundles of notes, each bound with a rubber band gone brittle. Fifties, hundreds, a few five hundreds, folded in the tight small way of a woman who had known real scarcity, the folds so old they had become creases the money could not forget.
We counted it twice. Forty one thousand rupees, give or take, hidden by a woman who told us all, every single month, that she had nothing, that her widow's pension evaporated by the second week, that she could not even contribute to Diwali sweets.
I laughed at first... I thought we had caught her at something. A miser's stash, a sweet little scandal, the kind of thing families retell at weddings.
Then Ma lifted out the notebook.
It was a school exercise book, the kind with a lion or a rose on the cover depending on the year, and this one had both, because it was actually three notebooks, each one sewn to the next with white thread when the pages ran out. Inside, in my grandmother's careful, heavy Hindi, the letters pressed so hard they embossed the next page, were names. Columns of them, going back to 1988.
Shakuntala. 500. Returned.
Meena, tailor wali. 2,000. 1,200 returned, balance forgiven, daughter's wedding.
Pushpa. 800. Returned with 20 extra, returned the 20.
Kamla, upstairs. 3,500. Train ticket and two months' rent. Do not ask her. She will return when she returns.
Page after page... Thirty one years of it.
My grandmother, who signed her own name slowly, with her tongue between her teeth, who needed me to read her the electricity bill, had been running a bank.
A lending circle for the women of our colony, interest free, collateral free, operating out of a rice tin behind the pickle jars. Wedding earrings redeemed from pawnbrokers. Exam fees paid the morning of the deadline. And at least twice, judging by the entries with train ticket written next to them, escape money. Quiet, folded, unbureaucratic escape money for women whose situations the notebook recorded in two or three merciful words.
The rice on top was camouflage, obviously. But Ma says it was also belief. Her mother-in-law held that money should never travel alone, that cash handed over bare was cold, and so every loan from that tin went out with a fistful of rice on top. Grain first, money under. Nobody leaves my house with naked money, she used to say, and we all thought it was just one of her kitchen superstitions, filed between never sweep at dusk and never say the baby is healthy out loud.
We sat on that floor for two hours reading names. Some of the women were dead. Some had moved away decades ago. Some we knew: aunties who had pinched my cheeks at every festival, standing in our doorway all those years, and I had never once seen the invisible ledger lines running between them and the small woman at our stove.
Then Ma went silent in the middle of a page, and I looked over, and there was her own name.
1994. Saraswati, my Bahu. 3,000. School fees and shop debt. Returned with tears.
My mother put the notebook down on the floor, very carefully, the way you put down something hot, and walked out to the balcony... and did not come back for a long time.
Later, over tea gone cold, she told me. 1994 was the year Papa's shop nearly went under, the year of the flooded godown and the ruined stock. They were too proud to ask his mother for help, and his mother knew it, and so one afternoon when Ma was crying quietly over the fee receipts, my grandmother had put the tin on the kitchen table, counted out three thousand rupees, put rice on top, and said: this is not a gift. This is a loan. I am writing it in the book. You will return it when you can, and until then you will look me in the eye at dinner like a borrower, not like a beggar.
"She wrote me in the book with everyone else," Ma said. "Same page as Kamla and Pushpa. Do you understand what that did? It meant I was not a charity case in my own house. It was the kindest thing anyone has ever done to me, and it looked exactly like strictness. Everything she did looked exactly like strictness."
Charity keeps its accounts in shame. A loan keeps them in a notebook, and a notebook lets two women look each other in the eye at dinner.
We discussed what to do with the forty one thousand rupees for about a week, and every option felt like spending someone's temple. In the end Ma tracked down the last three open entries, women with balance still marked. She went to each one and told them the account was closed, forgiven, finished. One of them, an old tailor's widow two lanes over, held Ma's hands and cried and then, because human beings are what they are, tried to press two hundred rupees into them anyway.
Ma took the notes, went home, and put them under the rice.
Some banks refuse to die.
I have thought about my grandmother constantly since then, and about how completely we misfiled her. We had her down as a sweet, slightly stingy old woman with kitchen superstitions. She was the most trusted financial institution in a one kilometre radius, with a thirty one year record and a default rate any banker would kill for, and her only branch office was a shelf behind the pickle jars. Sometimes I read profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and I think of her notebook, three exercise books sewn together with white thread: the only book she ever wrote, and the best thing I have ever read.
Last winter I finally wrote about her properly, a poem about family and the strange bookkeeping of love, about how memory is also an account that someone has to keep. I sent it to a monthly poetry contest mostly so the deadline would force me to finish it. In the last stanza I finally understood what the rice was for. It was not superstition and it was not camouflage. It was so that when a desperate woman opened her fist at home, the first thing she saw was food, not debt.
The tin lives in my kitchen now, lowest shelf, behind my own pickle jars. There is rice in it. Under the rice there is one folded five hundred rupee note, the first entry in a notebook I have not needed to open yet.
But I keep it stocked. You never know when someone will need a train ticket.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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