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PJ: And on my mother's side, I'm very, very close to everybody, all of my aunts and uncles, and my, my grandparents. And my grandmother was an interesting -- I was very close to both my grandparents, and my grandmother was a very quiet, in many ways, woman. It was clear that my grandfather, they had a very traditional relationship, and I think sometimes it was hard for me to kind of understand or be sympathetic with, with that relationship. Though she had her ways of kind of fighting back, you know, in her, in her own way. But it was really my grandfather who just was an extremely powerful ruling presence in, in the house. And a lot of what my mother got in terms of love of literature and love of history comes from my grandfather and then has been passed down to me. He used to have, I think he had -- when he, he just passed away last January, and we were going through his things. I think he had something like forty-two dictionaries. [Laughs] Just, he loved it. From, from the, from as early as I can remember, he would get a dictionary out in the morning -- he would go for a morning walk, and he would memorize, it was either three or five new words every morning. And he did that until he died. He was just fascinated with words and language, and we found -- when I was going through all of his stuff, it was amazing. We found letters that he had written, just musings, articles, all kinds of things that he'd been keeping. And then we also found some amazing pictures of him with Nehru when, when Pondicheri was being turned over, or was it... I think it was Pondicheri, was being turned over to the British. And it was really, he was very central to that history, which I guess I knew, but sometimes you don't really know it until you go through and you see some of the letters and some of the pictures that go with it.

AI: That is really interesting. I'm, I wanted to ask you -- in fact, well, maybe I'll come to this a little bit later about how much of India's history you became aware of a little bit later on in your childhood. But before we go there, I wanted to ask a little bit more about your grandmother. Was this the grandmother you wrote of who was highly educated and who went to graduate school?

PJ: No, my aunt.

AI: Oh, your aunt?

PJ: I mean, my great-aunt, excuse me. My great-aunt, who was my grandmother's older sister, was highly educated, and went and actually was one of the first, maybe the first female ob-gyn in India, and was very, very well-known and a strong feminist. My grandmother was not. I mean, was really, I don't know, I've asked my mother many times, "Why is it that the sisters ended up..." I mean, she was educated, but she got married very, very young. I think she was seventeen, sixteen or seventeen when she was betrothed to my grandfather, and I think they got married shortly after that. And you know, I think that she always thought of herself as the one who wasn't educated and wasn't as good as her sisters.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.