Last week, my grandmother would have been 111 years old had she still been around. My father called her Ma, so we did too. I think she passed away in 1988 or 1989, so would have been in her late 70’s. I never knew my grandmother except as an old, old woman. Even my earliest memories of her she was an old, fat lady.

She lived with my aunty around the corner, and she’d sit on the stoep (porch) in the sun, half napping. Ma would peel apples for my cousin and I. I’m sure she did many other things, but this is what I remember. I also remember her being at our house and my father would send one of my brothers to pour him another drink. He drank whisky and coke and she’d ask why he only wanted so little coke at a time instead of just pouring a full glass. My father would snicker that his mother wanted him to get drunk quickly.

I asked my eldest aunty in Toronto to tell me more about Ma, because I wanted to know who else she was, other than the grandmother that I knew.

I learned that she was born in 1912 in Standerton in South Africa. She went to school until grade 1 or 2. A boy at school hit her with a ruler so she didn’t want to go back and her father agreed. It was right around the time of World War 1 and the Spanish Flu, so I can’t even imagine what would school have been like in 1919 for Indian people in South Africa?

When she was 7 or 8, she was sent to India with her brother. The travelled by sea with some neighbors to go and live with their father’s sister somewhere in Kacholi. How well did she know these neighbors? Was she scared? Did she wonder about the family she was going to live with?

She settled in and was immersed in the new culture learning the local languages and working in rice fields. Years later, while working in the rice fields she started menstruating. The arrival of her period meant it was time to go back home to her family in South Africa. Did she even remember them? What about her brother? Was there a letter sent saying “we’re sending your daughter home” or did she just arrive on the doorstep. Had she seen her family at all during that time? I’m guessing no as I would imagine passage to India was not readily affordable. Did she feel abandoned being shipped back and forth – literally? I have far more questions than there are answers.

Back in South Africa with her birth family, she would have been 15 or 16 when her mother had a new baby. She had two brothers and now this baby sister that had arrived. My grandmother had relayed a story about helping her mother transfer the infant from one breast to another. She thought her mother was sleeping, but it might have been a stroke because her mother died in the days after.

Her father, who my aunty calls Nana, had a lady working in his store. This lady helped take care of the new baby and the family; they eventually married and Nani is the woman I know as my great grandmother.

Ma, who was not Ma yet, but a beautiful 17 year old, married the man who would become Bhaji – what we called our grandfather. Ma gave birth to twins a year later but they didn’t survive. Nani, her stepmother was not that much older than her, so was having children at the same time. Nani had 3 children after marrying my great grandfather. I remember being confused as a child by why my grandmother’s siblings were my parent’s friends; it was my father’s uncle, not his cousin. Now it all makes sense.

I don’t know if I remember Bhaji my grandfather or if my memories are only imagined from the photos. I remember a stern, slender man. He died before I was 5. My earliest memories of Ma would be around the same time, when she peeled our apples as we played on the stoep. She’d have been 60 when I was 5, and was already so old.

She had Motabhaji – my oldest uncle, (who’s name was Mohammed, but I only knew him as Motabhaji) when we was 19. My youngest uncle, Saliem is about 13 years older than I am, so I’m going to guess born around 1954. Ma would have been 42. That’s 24 years of child bearing starting with the twins. There were 10 siblings that came after.

So my grandmother, this old lady who I knew only as Ma had to assimilate into a new family twice by the time she was 15, in two vastly different cultures and traveled to India and back by ship. She dealt with her mother’s untimely death, birthed 12 babies over 24 years, and raised that family. She lived through the Spanish flu, two world wars and through the creation and then the eventual dissolution of the apartheid system in South Africa. There’s also a story about my uncle going out for the evening and having to leave the country that same night after a foiled anti-apartheid action in his twenties. What heartache is that for a mother to bear? I never knew that uncle, he died in an unrelated accident when I was too little to remember. How do you measure the toll of each of these experiences? It appears that the grey hair and deep wrinkles that I only saw as the marks of age, were really the hard earned medals in the life of an unbreakable warrior woman, a venerable heroine.

This is one of my favourite pictures of her taken before my time. That’s my father on the left with the hat – my one brother scowling on his lap the other facing him. Beside him is his sister and then in front of her my grandmother smiling. That’s my mother in the back with the striped shirt. They all look so happy.