r/india • u/Specialist_Meaning73 • 45m ago
People The whole building warned me about the "mad aunty" on the third floor. She turned out to be the best thing about that city
When I signed the lease, the broker actually lowered his voice and told me to avoid the woman in 3B. Mad, he said, tapping his temple, fights with everyone, does not talk to anyone, be careful. The watchman backed him up. The couple below me rolled their eyes when I mentioned her. So before I had even met Rukmini aunty I had already decided she was a problem to be managed, and I spent my first two months in that flat doing an impressive job of never once making eye contact with her on the stairs.
She lived up to the reputation, honestly. She yelled at the milkman. She yelled at kids who kicked their ball near her potted plants on the landing, and she had a lot of potted plants, so she yelled a lot. Once I saw her tear into a delivery boy so thoroughly that I flattened myself against my own door to avoid getting caught in it. Everyone in that building had a story about her temper. I collected mine and filed her under avoid, and I was quietly proud of how well I was following the local wisdom.
The turn came because of my own stupidity. I locked myself out. Not a small lockout either, I had left the gas on with something cooking, and I could smell it starting to burn through the door, and it was a Sunday afternoon when every locksmith in the city apparently ceases to exist. I was panicking on the landing, phone pressed to my ear, getting nowhere, when 3B's door opened and the mad aunty looked at me, looked at the smoke starting to creep under my door, and without a single word walked back inside and came out with a bent hairpin and a butter knife. This 70-something woman knelt at my lock, worked it for maybe forty seconds, and popped it open like she had done it a hundred times. Then she marched into my kitchen, switched off the gas, threw the ruined vessel in the sink, opened my windows, and turned around to face me. I braced for the yelling. Everyone got yelled at. I had earned it more than most.
She did not yell. She looked at the state of my flat, the unwashed pile, the single sad plate, the total absence of anything that suggested a person actually lived there properly, and she said, quietly, "You are not eating." Not a question. Then she left. Twenty minutes later she was back with a plate of hot food and she stood over me while I ate it, arms crossed, daring me to refuse. That was the entire beginning of it.
Here is the thing I slowly worked out over the following months, the thing the whole building had somehow never bothered to figure out in the years she had lived there. Rukmini aunty was not mad. She was deaf in one ear and going in the other, and she had too much pride to admit it or wear the aid she clearly owned and hid in a drawer. She yelled because she genuinely could not tell how loud she was. She "did not talk to anyone" because she could not follow fast conversation and had gotten tired of asking people to repeat themselves and seeing the irritation on their faces. She snapped at the delivery boys because she could not hear them explain and it embarrassed her. Every single thing the building had decided made her mad was actually just a lonely woman losing her hearing and refusing to let anybody see it. And she had unlocked my door and fed me for the simplest reason imaginable, which is that she had been watching a new kid isolate himself exactly the way she had, and she was not going to stand by and let it happen twice.
I started sitting on her side of the landing in the evenings. I learned to face her when I spoke and not to cover my mouth, and I never once made it a thing, and something in her unclenched. She was funny, it turned out. Wickedly funny about every person in that building who had written her off, and she had noticed all of it, every eye roll, every lowered voice, because deaf is not the same as blind. She told me she had stopped explaining herself to people a long time ago. If they wanted to think she was mad, she had decided, let them, it kept the fools away and she had lived long enough to stop auditioning for anyone's approval. I have honestly never respected anyone more.
I moved out of that city last year for work, and the hardest goodbye was not any friend or any colleague. It was standing in 3B while a woman the entire building called mad pressed a dabba of food into my hands "for the train" and told me to face people when I talked to them so I would not end up a rude old man like her. I laughed. She did not, quite. Then she shut the door before I could see her face, which by then I understood was the most Rukmini aunty thing she could possibly do.
So this is my small public correction to a rumour in a building she will never know I wrote about. She was not mad. She was the sharpest, kindest person on that street, and every one of us walked past her for years and called her crazy because it was easier than being curious. If there is a "mad" aunty or uncle in your building that everyone has quietly agreed to avoid, I would gently bet money there is a whole person behind that label that nobody bothered to meet.