Ammamma's WhatsApp Group
One wrong tap made an eighty-year-old grandmother admin of the family group. Fifty-three relatives have not been the same since.
I want to say at the start that it was an accident. I have said this to my mother, to three aunts, to my cousin Deepthi in Chicago, and to my uncle Prabhakar, twice, once while he was shouting. I will say it here too, for the record.
It was an accident.
Ammamma got the phone for her eightieth birthday. We all chipped in. It was a big phone with a big screen, because her eyes are not what they were, and I set the font so large that a single “Good morning” filled the whole display like a cinema hoarding. I put in a photograph of Lord Venkateswara as her wallpaper and a photograph of her late husband, my thatha, as her lock screen, and then she asked me to swap them because she said it felt rude to make God wait behind thatha.
Then I added her to the family group.
The family group was called Kanuri Family Official, and it had fifty-three members across four continents, and it was, to put it gently, a swamp. Every morning at six it filled up with pictures of roses and sunrises and babies in turbans with GOOD MORNING written across them in gold. By ten, my uncle Prabhakar would have forwarded four health messages, each more urgent than the last. Drinking warm water with turmeric at 4 a.m. cures all diseases. Do not eat curd after sunset, scientists in Japan have proved. Forward this to ten people or your kidneys will suffer. Nobody had the heart to tell him. He was the admin. He had made the group in 2016 and he guarded it like a temple tank.
So I added Ammamma, and I meant to send her a private message showing her how to reply, and my thumb was in a hurry and the menu was long, and instead of tapping “Message Saraswathi,” I tapped the option directly above it.
Make group admin.
I did not notice. That’s the important part. I put the phone down on her lap, said, “Okay Ammamma, now you’re in, you can see everyone’s messages,” and went to eat pulihora.
Her first message to the group was a voice note, three minutes and forty seconds long.
It began with her breathing, very close to the microphone. Then: “Is it on? Pavan. Pavan, is it on? There’s a red thing. Is the red thing on?” Then the sound of me, from the dining room, with my mouth full, saying something nobody could make out. Then a pressure cooker whistle, three times, enormous. Then my mother asking who had touched the dal. Then a long silence, and the sound of the phone being turned over and over in her hands like a hot potato, and her voice, distant now, saying to herself, “This is how they waste their whole day.”
Fifty-three people listened to the entire thing. I know because the little blue ticks appeared one by one through the evening, across time zones, from Dallas to Dubai.
My cousin Deepthi replied with a crying-laughing face. My aunt in Pune said, “Amma, so nice to hear your voice!!!” with three exclamation marks. My uncle Prabhakar replied with a picture of a lotus and the words Welcome Elders.
Ammamma listened to all the replies, which took her an hour, because she played each one five times. Then she put the phone on the windowsill and said, “Too many people. Like Tirupati queue.”
That should have been the end of it.
It took her nine days to discover what she could do.
She had been asking me to show her how to delete messages, because she had sent a photograph of her own thumb to the group three times and was mortified. So I showed her. Long press, the little dustbin, “Delete for everyone.”
“For everyone?” she said. “Even in America?”
“Even in America.”
She looked at the phone for a long time. Then she scrolled up to that morning’s messages, found my uncle Prabhakar’s forward about how microwave ovens were secretly reading our thoughts, and pressed on it with her finger, and the little menu came up, and there was the little dustbin.
“Ammamma, no, that’s his—“
Delete for everyone.
The message vanished. In its place, in small grey italics, were the words: This message was deleted by admin.
I stared at it. Ammamma stared at it. Then she turned and looked at me over the top of her spectacles, and I have seen that look exactly once before, in 2006, when she discovered who had eaten the whole jar of avakaya from the top shelf.
“What,” she said slowly, “is admin?”
I could have lied. I want that noted. I could have said it was nothing, a technical word, and taken the phone and quietly fixed it. But she was my grandmother, and she had raised my mother and four other children on a railway clerk’s salary in a two-room house in Kacheguda, and she could tell when I was lying from the way I held my ears.
So I explained.
She listened very carefully, with her hands folded in her lap. Admin can delete. Admin can add people. Admin can remove people. Admin can change the name of the group and the photo of the group. Admin can decide who is allowed to send messages, and when.
“Who else is admin?”
“Only Prabhakar mama. And you.”
She nodded, slowly. Then she asked for her reading glasses, the strong ones, and a cup of coffee, and she did not need me again for the rest of the afternoon.
The next morning, Kanuri Family Official had become Saraswathi’s Family.
The group photo, which had for nine years been a blurry picture of a 2016 wedding in which half the faces were cut off, was now a close-up photograph of a jar of Ammamma’s mango pickle, the oil glowing red, a steel spoon standing upright in it.
At six a.m., when the roses and sunrises usually began, there was one message, a voice note, eleven seconds long. “Good morning. One good morning is enough. Thank you.” Then the settings changed, and a grey line appeared across the screen: Only admins can send messages.
For forty minutes, fifty-three people across four continents could not say good morning.
You have to understand what that meant in our family. My aunt in Pune called my mother. My mother called me. Deepthi called me from Chicago at what was eight-thirty at night there, laughing so hard she couldn’t speak. My uncle Prabhakar called no one; he simply drove over from Ameerpet on his scooter, in his helmet, and stood in the doorway of Ammamma’s room with the helmet still on.
“Amma,” he said. “Who did this?”
Ammamma was sitting on her cot with the phone in both hands. She did not look up.
“Prabhakar,” she said, “is it true about microwave reading our thoughts?”
“It’s a forward, Amma. It’s just what people send.”
“Do you have a microwave?”
“Yes.”
“Is it reading your thoughts?”
My uncle took off his helmet. He looked, for a moment, like the small boy he must once have been, standing in the same doorway in Kacheguda being asked who had broken the radio.
“No,” he said.
“Then don’t send,” said Ammamma, and turned the messages back on.
After that, she was unstoppable.
She learned polls. The first one, sent on a Sunday morning, asked: Who has eaten breakfast? The options were Yes, No, and Lying. Eleven people voted Lying, out of guilt.
She learned to schedule the silence. Every evening from eight to nine, only admins can send messages. She called it Dinner Time and pinned a message to the top of the group explaining it, in a voice note, in which she said that a family that puts its phone down for one hour a day will not die, and that she had personally lived for eighty years without a phone and had felt, overall, very well.
She learned to remove people, which she did only once, to my uncle Prabhakar, for eleven minutes, after he forwarded a video claiming that onions placed in socks overnight would remove toxins from the body. She added him back with a voice note that said, simply, “Onion is for sambar.” He did not forward anything for two weeks.
And she learned, to everyone’s terror, to mention people by name. The little @ sign. You would be at work, in a meeting, and your phone would light up: @Srikanth you have not called your mother since Thursday. @Deepthi send photo of baby, real baby, not cartoon baby. @Pavan your hair.
I don’t know what she meant by the last one. I got a haircut anyway.
The strangest thing was that people started to talk. Not forward. Talk. My aunt in Pune sent a photo of the first guava from her balcony tree, and five people replied. My cousin in Dubai, who had not posted anything since 2019, sent a voice note of his daughter reciting a Telugu poem, badly, and Ammamma replied with a voice note correcting her pronunciation, gently, and the girl sent another one, better, and Ammamma sent a single folded-hands emoji, which in our family was now understood as the highest honour available.
The real test came in November, with the wedding.
My cousin Ravali was getting married in February, and her side of the family wanted the function in Vijayawada, and the groom’s side wanted Hyderabad, and somehow this had become a war conducted entirely in the family group in long paragraphs written at midnight. Old grudges came up. Somebody mentioned a gold chain from 1994. My aunt in Pune left the group and was re-added by her own son, and left again.
For three days Ammamma said nothing. She read everything. I watched her do it, sitting on her cot with her glasses on, scrolling slowly, her lips moving.
On the fourth day she typed a message. It took her twenty minutes. She typed with one finger, the way she used to thread a needle, very slowly, very sure. Then she pressed send.
Wedding in Hyderabad. Reception in Vijayawada. Both sides happy. Both sides travel. Gold chain from 1994 is with me, it was never lost, I kept it safe, Lakshmi please stop crying. — Admin.
The group was silent for four minutes. Then my aunt in Pune, the one who had left twice, sent a folded-hands emoji. Then the groom’s mother, whom nobody had even realised was in the group. Then fifty other people, one after another, folded hands, folded hands, folded hands, until the screen looked like a temple.
It was in December that she asked me for the number.
“Ramanna’s,” she said. “You have it. Your mother has it. Don’t pretend.”
Ramanna was her younger brother. Nobody had spoken to him in twenty-two years. There had been a dispute about land in their village near Tenali, after their father died, and things had been said at a funeral that could not be unsaid, and the two families had simply stopped. I had seen him once, at a distance, at a wedding when I was nine. I remembered a tall man with a white moustache who looked at our side of the hall and then looked away.
“Ammamma,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“I am eighty years old,” she said. “I am admin. Give me the number.”
I gave her the number. She added him to the group herself. I watched her do it. Her finger hovered over the screen for a long time, and then pressed.
Saraswathi added Ramanna.
The group went quieter than I had ever seen it. Fifty-three people, and not a single good morning. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody wanted to be first.
Then, after a long, long hour, a message came in from a number with a photograph of a paddy field as its picture.
Akka.
Just that. Sister.
Ammamma looked at it for a long time. Then she pressed the little microphone, and held the phone very close to her mouth, too close, the way she always did, so that her breathing came first.
“Sankranti lunch is at my house,” she said. “Fourteenth of January. One o’clock. Bring your wife. Bring your grandchildren. Bring your pickle also, so everyone can see once again that mine is better.”
She let go of the button. The voice note went.
Then she put the phone face down on the cot, the way she always did when she was finished with it for the day, and asked me to bring her a coffee, and said that this phone business was very tiring and she didn’t know how young people managed.
Behind her, on the cot, the phone began to buzz, and buzz, and buzz.