Memories of my grandmother, in conversation with artist Aban Raza, by Ketaki Varma
“…the act of imagination is bound up with memory. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember, as well as how it appeared.” (Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory, 1995)1
I’ve been dreaming of my grandmother of late. My mother’s mother, Kalindi Deshpande to the world, aaji to me. I always miss her but it has been fifteen years since she died so my memories of her have faded now, and I don’t actively think of her. I find myself wishing I thought of her more, worrying that I’m forgetting her.
My recent dreams are surprisingly vivid. Scenes come to me as disjointed fragments. Mostly, I see her as I knew her: as a grandmother. The moments are in sharp focus, moving forward and backward across time and space, and I am part of them. I see her in the kitchen, making fresh dosas in her nightgown on a Sunday morning, the smell of roasted peanuts wafting through the air. I see her sitting on her diwan on a sleepy summer afternoon, my face buried in her lap. I see her getting dressed in a cotton sari, tightly-draped, pallu pinned to her matching blouse, ready for the day. She is just over five feet, but she seems tall, imposing even. There is a childlike curiosity and love in her, and a pride that I believe is reserved for me, her only granddaughter. I see myself in the car with her as she drives freely across the streets of Delhi in her Maruti 800. The car suddenly jerks, there is a puncture in one of the tyres She stops the car by the side of the road, steps out in the blazing heat and changes the tyre herself before setting off again.
I see her pre-cancer, with her famous white hair cascading to her waist after a wash, or knotted up firmly in a bun so as to not get in the way. But I also see things I don’t want to see: when she is ill and bedridden, the cancer eating her up. I can feel the blue veins on her hands, the bruises on her arms, the tired warmth of her body, the hard lines on her face. I see her fierce determination as she fights that cancer, again and again. I see her not wanting to burden anyone with her pain.
Curiously, my dreams also take me back to when I didn’t know her. Her younger days are known to me only through photographs and stories. The memories of others collide with mine. The scenes are less sharp now, out-of-focus, and I am an outsider looking in. There she is, a young woman working in the National Home Guard while engaged in courtship with a dashing young scholar, spending long afternoons at the Hauz Khas monument in Delhi.
Now she’s married and a mother of two, but she is also enrolled in an academic programme learning French at the newly-opened Jawaharlal Nehru University where her husband is a professor. She’s nearing fifty now, her children are adults and she has become an activist, dedicating her life to working with women in resettlement colonies across Delhi. She becomes a grandmother but her family is already bigger than ours; it includes her fellow activists, her political comrades, the women she meets and fights alongside every day.
I almost always wake up from my dreams disoriented, partially back in the present moment, but also expecting to see aaji near me, as an old woman now. I try to hold on to the dream a little while longer, but it is like sand in my hand, slipping away the harder I hold. I am left with a sort of gentle wistfulness. I long for the aaji I knew as a child, but also for the friendship that could have developed between us in my adulthood.
I wonder if everyone remembers their grandmothers this way, in fragments of memory and speculation.
***
Wrestling with the unsettling aftermath of my dreams, I turn, as I always do, to art. I find myself in conversation with artist Aban Raza, specifically her evocative oil paintings. Aban is only a few years older than me, born and raised in Delhi—my hometown, and where aaji spent her adult life. Her practice presents what has elsewhere been called a “constellation of moments”2, confronting the ways in which people and objects occupy private and public spaces in India today. She seems to work at the intersection of figuration and abstraction, blending the two in provocative, messy strokes of oil and colour.
Her works have a tactile, earthy quality that I find bear resemblance to my dreams. There is more to see than what meets the eye. I am drawn into her works: I can feel the textures of saris, I can hear the naarebaazi at protest sites, I can smell the oppressive tightness of space, I can see the hardship and resistance that mark each surface. The energy of the scene is brought alive on her canvas. Like Aban, the observer and documenter, I am compelled to bear witness to what she presents: the works invite me to participate.
I talked to Aban about this, and her relationship with the materiality of work.
I want the composition to be as strong as the story behind it. Not very consciously and deliberately, but I… keep thinking about it. That’s why I think oil is the best medium because you can keep moulding it. Now–– that quality of moulding, I don’t think any other medium can give it to you. Oil gives me freedom as an individual… oil gives me space. It lets me break, add, subtract things. There’s so many times that you make something, and then you can rub it. It leaves a lot of marks, and I think from the marks you build the composition… You feel like you’re building it out. It has a sculptural quality to it.3
It is interesting to think of material in this way, as a mode of freedom and a way to go beyond the immediacy of the moment. Oil offers that which other media do not: time. One needs patience to work with oil. One must be comfortable with imperfections, with layers and marks and distortions. One must rely on oneself. Aban’s canvases are not mere records of a scene; they are inscribed with her memories of that experience, and others she may have had. They are stories of fact and stories of imagination, sites of beauty, hope and musings.
I wonder what aaji would look like if Aban had painted her. Perhaps she would be as she is in photographs, but I imagine she would be more like how she is in my dreams, suspended in time. How would aaji have wanted to be painted? She would have wanted to look proper, dressed in an ironed sari and bindi.
She wouldn’t be smiling even though she had a beautiful smile, because she was self-conscious of her teeth. She would find a comfortable place to sit and would be sure to sit up straight, hands in her lap, staring almost defiantly at you with her piercing grey eyes. She may look stern, but there would be a twinkle in her eye. I wonder how Aban would then mould her, how she would shape her onto her canvas.
There are many things [that comprise an oil painting]. There’s the experience of others, the experience of self, the experience that you want to preserve, the experience you don’t want to preserve, the experience that you don’t think is important to that particular composition, it all comes together.4
What multitudes would be contained in Aban’s painting of aaji? What would she see in her that I cannot? Would she see glimpses of herself, or traces of other women that she painted in the past? Or perhaps she would see traces of her own grandmothers, the women that have shaped so much of who she is today. Perhaps she will draw me into her, sealing us together.
***
I asked Aban about her nani, who was also an artist, and an art teacher. Fragments emerge, similar to my memories of aaji.
… it’s these tiny-tiny segments that I remember [from my childhood]. I remember her tending to her plants, first in her garden and then in these old wine bottles she used to collect. I remember she used to make me climb on her back and give massages. I remember that during the [summer or winter] break, in the colony she used to hold these art competitions where the gift was a 5-or-10-rupay ka Dairy Milk chocolate.
And that makes me feel very warm towards her. Very recently, a painting was discovered in my mama’s house, where all her stuff was kept. A simple artwork from 1995, where she had painted a landscape, the sky, birds flying, very simple.
The inscription at the back says (in Urdu):
Khula aasmaan, hari zameen sabke liye hai par yeh tasveer sirf tumhaare liye hai, Aban.
So clearly there’s something there which I do remember, but [also] don’t remember. It’s a lovely piece.5
There is something strangely profound about the dedication of this painting. I am reminded of the title of Aban’s last solo exhibition: there is something tremendous about the blue sky (2022), which turns our gaze towards the lives of minorities in India today, and their rights to protest and live. The open sky and green lands belong to all, says her nani through her painting and in her note. Is this not precisely the universal claim that has defined resistance to tyranny throughout history, the same idea that Aban seems to invoke when she speaks of the tremendous blue sky? It is what one reads in the women that she so poignantly captures. I think of aaji, a woman from a different time but similarly privileged background, who spent so much of her life in pursuit of these free skies. She firmly believed in the independence of all women: that they should have the right to live the life they choose.
I think of the women she worked with, and the communities that continue this fight today. The politics of independence is everything. It is always urgent, always requires our attention. There is, I think, a hopeful idealism that marks these lives, that unites them in their journeys.
What is one to make of this idea of freedom and justice that travels across time and space?
***
One of my recurring dreams is set in the garden at my grandparents’ home in JNU. It is the mid-90s, I am not yet ten years old. Aaji is in the garden, tending to her plants. She is meticulous in her work. I see her weeding out stubborn roots, repotting plants that need a new home, throwing away what cannot be salvaged, cleaning the leaves that are thick with summer dust. I am standing near the karonda tree that shrouds the gate, chewing the little, sour fruits till my mouth is coated with them. I am thirsty but I can’t stop watching her. She is giving her all to this garden that is both domestic and wild. She is at once gentle and rough, demanding and easy, efficient and relaxed.
I do not know if this dream is real, or whether I have constructed it from different moments, but it is an abiding image: aaji as gardener. She nourished the soil and people that surrounded her, especially women.
Using her influence and spirit, she supported women from communities less privileged than hers to choose lives of independence: from domestic abuse, from financial restrictions, from dowry, from acid attacks and other gender-based violence. She emphasised the importance of education, and of economic freedom. She was selfless in her activism. To be an activist in the purest sense of the word is to put community first: to work closely with others, to share ideas, to be hopeful. This is what it means to grow a garden, to nurture it and open it to all.
For Aban, collective work is this garden: a space of care, nurture, resistance, transformation, endless possibility. She tells me about individuals and institutions that have shaped who she is: artists, curators, writers, thinkers, academics, activists. With them, she is part of a movement that is greater than herself. She calls this a garden of care.
…In this garden of care, things come together and grow together, and also die together, then regenerate, because that’s also part of the cycle. These spaces offer shared solidarities, shared emotions, shared ups-and-downs of life. Our personal lives are still our own, but we come together for a certain purpose. We sit together for a certain time, and we deliberate together for a certain length. We debate. We have lunch. Its a microcosm of how warm life can be. That the world can be better places because there is this warmth.
These platforms are where ideas can be voiced, thoughts can materialize, we can keep bitterness away and just learn from each other, sharing, and making the garden beautiful. A collective is a space where everything can grow, even weeds. Caring for each other, sharing moments with each other, happily.6
A garden is a space both imagined and real. It is a space of action and a place of idealism. It is where ideas and people can co-exist, feed off each other, learn, grow, recuperate. It is inherently radical in its politics, its history defining its present and future. It cannot bloom without hard work and solidarity.
Collective action can only be imagined as such a garden, then. One need not think of it as utopic; it is messy, complicated, tiring. But there is no boundary to this work, it is limitless. That is its beauty and its power.
I think of Jamaica Kincaid’s question: “Where is the garden and where am I in it?”7 The garden is here, is it not? In aaji, and in Aban, and in all the women that bloom alongside them. Women who don’t know each other; women who come from different backgrounds, do different work, occupy different times; women who seem to have nothing in common—except a relentless pursuit of truth, justice, care. The humming fertility of this garden is made abundant by these women.
This is where I wish to see myself.
***
It is always worth making a garden, no matter how temporary your stay. Perhaps they wouldn’t last, but wasn’t it better to go on like Johnny Appleseed, leaving draughts of pollen in your wake? (Olivia Laing in The Garden Against Time, 2024)8
When aaji died, her garden felt bereft. People remember her regularly, with deep admiration. They called her courageous and compassionate. They said it was unfair that she left us so soon. How I must miss her, they would say to me. But as time passed, life went on. People stopped checking in as often. As is the way with grief, its intensity was left for her immediate family to bear. At first, we would talk about her every day. Then it became every other day, as we went back to school, or work. Other events happened in our lives that took up space, and I felt her fading away.
Now, we mostly remember her on special occasions – her birthday, her death anniversary, her wedding anniversary. We are sometimes confused about the exact facts of her life, we fight over them. There are no new stories to tell, so we repeat the same ones. There are days when we don’t think of her at all.
But then she appears in my dreams and I remember that she is still here: she is woven into the fabric of my identity. She is braided into the daily gestures of my mother and the political life of my uncle. I see her loyalty and independence in the women around me, the women I have deep and enduring friendships with, the women I respect and am inspired by, in life and in art. I see her in the way she is remembered. I see her courage in the women that Aban paints, and the ones she doesn’t. I see her in the collective work of women around the world. I see her in the past, present and future, both as memory and as a figment of my imagination. It is appropriate that I was named by her: Ketaki, an odd-looking flower that she loved because of its heady perfume and bright yellow colour. What a poetic choice. A flower. I carry her in my name, and in me.
She is everywhere. She has left draughts of pollen in her wake, and the garden is in bloom.
Special thanks to Ashwini Deshpande and Sudhanva Deshpande for sharing their memories of aaji and for their inputs on this project.
Endnotes
- The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison. In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83-102
↩︎ - Phrase by Manuela Ciotti in her essay on There is something tremendous about the blue sky, Aban’s solo exhibition at Galerie Mirchandani Steinruecke in 2022.
↩︎ - Author’s interview with Aban Raza, 2025.
↩︎ - Ibid
↩︎ - Ibid
↩︎ - Ibid
↩︎ - From The Disturbances of the Garden, Jamaica Kincaid, The New Yorker, August 2020.
↩︎ - The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Laing, Olivia. Published by W W Norton & Co Inc, 2024. p. 2
↩︎
Bibliography
- Curatorial note for Luggage, People and a little space (2020), a solo exhibition by Aban Raza at Galerie Mirchandani Steinruecke, by Arushi Vats
- Encounters with Faces: a conversation with Aban Raza (2024), by Ankan Kazi and Bhakti S. Hattarki for DAG
- In Conversation: Olivia Laing & Jamaica Kincaid (2024), for the online edition of Granta Magazine
About the Author
Ketaki Varma is a senior arts administrator and creative producer, with additional experience in art writing and research. Her work has been at the intersection of public programming; institutional-building and governance; and fundraising. She is particularly interested in visual cultures of South Asia and the extraordinary ways in which they represent the social, economic, political and environmental life of the region. She currently heads cultural initiatives at Asia Society India Centre.