I come from my grandfathers

My earliest memory of unbridled joy is from when I was 5. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I had been watching Ramayan on TV, and was fascinated with Lord Ram’s bow. I must have pretended to shoot arrows from an imaginary bow because the very next day, my Baba (paternal grandfather) had made a bow for me. It was massive, and curved in the middle just like the one on TV. I hung the bow on my shoulder and flaunted it to my friends for days on end.

I don’t know why I remember this particular memory. But I suspect it’s because in that moment I felt joy that an adult is incapable of feeling - the kind in which there is not even a shadow of sadness.

Both my parents used to work. So my school auto-rickshaw would drop me at my paternal grandparents’ house where I’d spend the day till late evening. I was raised by them as much as by my parents.

I was fortunate that my maternal grandparents lived in the same city. My Azoba (maternal grandfather) had the most interesting life. He was highly educated and extremely well-read. He landed a comfortable job which he quit to start his own furniture business that went nowhere. Unforeseen family circumstances forced him to take up two jobs in his old age. He began proof-reading and ghost-writing books for a local publisher, and writing PR communications for a Pharma company. He worked till he was almost 80.

It was he who insisted that I must go to a convent school so I learn to speak and write good English. It was he who taught me that reading and writing were superpowers. Every Diwali and every birthday, he would drag me to a bookstore and give me carte blanche to buy as many books as I desired. The precocious kid that I was, I would mop up books that were way beyond my age, which he understood but never - even once - objected to. None of those book shopping buffets were easy on his pocket but he didn’t care. Never think twice before buying a book, he told me once. It’s a lesson I have taken to my heart.

Till the very end, every time I saw him, he had newspaper cuttings ready for me - bits of information he thought I would find useful. He referred to me as a ‘scholar’, a ‘quizmaster’ and other such high-handed honourifics. There was no irony in it - he genuinely believed I was all that. He insisted that I should be well-read and did everything in his power to ensure that. At the time, I used to find it annoying - I must have barely read any of those newspaper clippings. But now, at 33, I believe, I am made in his image.

My Baba wasn’t nearly as well read as my Azoba. He never gifted me books - I don’t think he ever read one in his lifetime. But it didn’t matter because he gave me what every child needs to even hope to become a decent human - love and kindness.

That did not mean that he pampered me senseless.

I have another half-memory of him which is very instructive. I must have been 7 or 8. He had scolded me for something. I remember going to the balcony and crying. After what seemed like a minute, he came to the balcony, put his hand around my shoulder, and told me what I had done was wrong and that I shouldn’t do it again. He delivered the lesson with such tenderness that something moved inside me, because nothing explains why I remember that memory to this day. I have learned as an adult that truly loving someone means that you risk being liked less by them sometimes. It was an important lesson in tough love.

My Baba died when I was 13. My Azoba died when I was 26. I didn’t cry at any of their deaths. Children and early-adults are not fully-formed humans. Real pain is an alien concept to them until the tribulations of life force their body open and create a space where pain can be felt and processed. Only recently, I have learned to process meaningful pain, and I am still learning.

About 3 years back, on an inebriated afternoon in Kodaikanal, I was suddenly struck by a truth. It wasn’t a thought, but a truth. It came to me fully-formed as though it had been computing itself for many years in the back of my brain. The truth was that I come from my grandfathers. That without them, I would not have been I. That if it weren’t for them, I would be way more cynical, way more angry and way more rigid in my thinking.

Since then, not a week has passed that I haven’t thought about them. They are constantly on my mind. They bring me the kind of peace that a child is incapable of feeling. For in that peace, there is profound sadness - understood and reconciled.

This whole experience has made me a believer in afterlife. I don’t think people just die. They leave with us a thousand different seeds that grow within us, without them. We then pass on those seeds to others. Whether we perpetuate kindness or anger depends on us, because what we do in life echoes till eternity1.

My Baba and my Azoba didn’t think of their kindness as sacrifice. It just came naturally to them. Perhaps they too had kind grandparents like I did. I was too young and too stupid to acknowledge it when they were alive. But they live in me today as much as I live in myself. They made me with their hands.

May their souls rest in peace.