On the Phone with "Aggi" (that's Kannada for Grandma)

I rang my uncle a couple nights ago, to let him know that I'd be visiting the city also known as B'Lore or The Silicon Valley of India. Instead the housekeeper picked up the phone recognized I was a foreign caller and gave it to my grandmother who's been living under the same roof as my bachelor uncle for many many years, in a nice residential neighborhood of B'Lore. I told her it was "Guru" and she took a second to recognize my voice and responded "oh-ho, charana!". She prefers to call me Charana.

In my broken Kannada and her vastly superior command of English we conversed for 15 minutes about my upcoming trip to Asia. She told me my uncle was at work and that I should call back later to arrange pick up from the airport. Perhaps I should email a cousin as well, she suggested, who'd do a better job relaying the message as my uncle doesn't check is email that often.

I asked her if she'd ever visited some of the places I'm trying to see on this trip: hindu ruins at Hampi, himalayan foothils in Darjeeling, Goa beachs, Rajasthani lake palaces. She responded with a short sigh, "No." My grandmother never really travelled outside the vicinity of her home cities of Mysore and Bangalore, which comes as a surprise to me considering her politician father who was of considerable means. She explained to me that she married young and started her family early (we're among the youngest of her grandchildren as my mom was her youngest of 6 children). My grandfather was a succesful lawyer, but with a large family and perhaps cultural reasons I have yet to understand, their discretionary spending was quite limited.

At the end of our conversation we reminsiced about the time I spent with her while she was recovering from hip replacement surgery on a trip I made to India 5 years ago. I told her I was looking forward to seeing her and half jokingly suggested that she join me for some excursions to ancient ruins. She laughed heartily, but as I epxected declined. It was totally out of the question she indicated, at her age and with limited mobility (she uses a walker). It's astonishing to me that she's scarecly seen the rest of India. Maybe she's forgotten, I'll have to ask her when I show her pictures at the end of my trip.