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Diwali at Oadby

Diwali at Amma's house was not optional. However far you had moved, you came back to Oadby for it. She would have been cooking for three days — the whole house smelled of ghee and cardamom — and the front room filled up with cousins and neighbours and people none of us could quite place. She lit the diyas herself, every single one, and would not let the children do it until they were old enough to be careful about it. The photographs from those evenings are some of the only ones where she is sitting down. She is always smiling in them, usually mid-sentence, usually telling someone to eat more.

Ravi Venkataraman · 10 Jun 2026

She Never Told Anyone

I am keeping my name out of this because it is not my story to claim. I know for a fact that Priya Amma sponsored three girls from her home village in Kerala through secondary school, for fifteen years. She found out about them through her sisters and set up a small standing order that she told no one about. I only know because one of those girls contacted the family after she died to say thank you. That is who she was.

Anonymous · 8 Jun 2026

She Still Wrote Letters

Priya Amma never got comfortable with WhatsApp. She would read the messages and then ask Deepak to respond for her. But she wrote letters. Actual letters, on blue inland-mail paper, to her sisters in Kerala, to old friends from the training college, to a former student who had moved to Canada. She wrote them in a small precise hand. After she died we found two boxes of letters written back to her, going back decades. People had kept them because they were worth keeping.

Ravi Venkataraman · 8 Jun 2026

Forty Years of Friendship

Priya and I arrived in Leicester within six months of each other. We were both strangers to England and to each other, and we became the kind of friends you only make when you are both slightly lost in the same place. She taught me how to find a GP, how to read a gas bill, how to make English people feel comfortable at Indian functions. She was sharper than she let on and funnier than people realised. She had a way of saying the most devastating thing in the most gentle voice. I will miss her every day.

Sunita Pillai · 8 Jun 2026

Deepak's Wedding: What She Said

At Deepak's wedding Priya Amma pulled me aside during the reception and told me, very calmly, that I was going to be a good son-in-law. Not that she hoped so. That I was going to be. It felt less like a prediction and more like an instruction from someone with the authority to issue them. I have tried to live up to it every year since.

Ravi Venkataraman · 8 Jun 2026

The Sambar

Priya Amma's sambar was something my mother used to talk about before I ever tasted it. When I finally married into the family and came to Leicester, the sambar was exactly what she had described: the particular sourness of real Palakkad tamarind, the freshness of the curry leaves she grew on the kitchen windowsill, a depth of spicing that took her two hours and she would not share the method. She tried to teach me twice. Both times she kept adding things after I thought we were done. I think the secret was in what she did not measure.

Deepa Krishnamurthy · 8 Jun 2026

You've reached the end.

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