No Work for Ammamma
The rule was that Ammamma should only rest. Ammamma had other plans, and eleven cups of coffee.
Ammamma ran a household for fifty-one years. Now the family has decided, out of love and after a great deal of discussion, that she should do nothing at all. She disagrees. What follows is salt in the coffee, a plastic plant watered daily, a compound interest sum done in her head, a lizard she is terrified of, a Hindi paper she fails all over again at seventy-eight, and two children who think all of it is the funniest thing that has ever happened — until their mother tells them what their grandmother did for them when they were the ones spilling, wandering and asking the same question two hundred times a day.
