My grandparents were a big part of my life. The love they may not have had for each other was still evident in the way they reached out to those around them. Every afternoon I’d come home and take off my shoes and sit on the sofa, sighing like a salaryman with a dozen mouths to feed. Never mind that I was a scrawny schoolboy. Resting at home after a long day outside is one of those universal human experiences that I believe we all share. Anyway, every afternoon my grandfather would call, he never missed a day, to inquire whether I’d come home from school. It wasn’t a long conversation. He’d ask whether I’d come home, and I’d answer that I had and then we’d hang up. As a child I never understood the significance of that call. I must have thought it a routine part of my day, like getting up or brushing my teeth. But now, I perhaps would not have hung up so quickly? Margaret Mead mentioned that “one of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night”. For someone to love me so routinely, I believe that it made me more human, even if it wasn’t obvious back then.
He passed away when I was 14 and those little moments, we had shared everyday were quickly eaten up by other things. Did I feel his absence? Did some part of me come home everyday and tense up, ears perked up for a call that would never come? Did I miss him? Did I even know him? On the day of his passing, I believe it was around Sankranti, I complained that we hadn’t gotten to fly any kites. Of course, that’s a pretty insensitive thing to say at a funeral, especially to my dad who’d just lost his father. He was furious and I was confused. Back then I simply couldn’t understand what my grandfather’s death had to do with flying kites. He wasn’t a person to me; he was a voice. He was a question. He was a single question. My grandfather was “Has the boy come home yet?”
I’ve since met my grandfather through countless stories told by relatives and even my own parents. My grandfather was, in fact, human. A deeply flawed, deeply respected, and deeply loved human. Perhaps if I’m suddenly pulled back in time, and I’m standing in front of the phone one sunny afternoon as a young schoolboy, I wouldn’t have hung up on him so fast. Maybe I’d have asked him how his day was. Maybe I’d have talked to him more everyday and over the weeks he could tell me of his life. I’d hear about his childhood and his dreams. He could tell me to focus on my studies or describe how different the world was back when he was a student. I would in turn tell him about what I wanted to do with my life, and he would, informed by a wealth of mistakes, tell me to be careful and I would shrug it off as “just something old people say”. Maybe I’d choose to be something more than an answer. More than “Yes, I’ve come home”.
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My grandmother could have commanded armies. Not in a crude manly way, with false bravado and brute force. No, my grandmother had a silver tongue and sharp eyes. She was cunning and diplomatic, forgiving all slights against her family (and there were a lot of slights) but never forgetting the bastards’ names. She was intelligent and full of a rare fire that comes around only once every generation. She could have conquered the world.
She was also a woman growing up in 1940’s India. She was plucked out of school and married off at 13 to a man seven years older than her. She birthed him a daughter and two sons before they fell on hard times. Deserted by my grandfather because of reasons he couldn’t control, my grandmother was alone, raising three children through one of the darkest times in our family’s lives. We were tainted and ignored by people who once sidled up to us, who had once sat at our table and ate our food. Through all this turmoil, my grandmother burned.
She could have burned out. What an insult this was to all her potential, to the flames that seethed inside her. A lesser human would have succumbed or lashed out. My grandmother was no lesser human. She burned like a beacon, using her very lifeforce to keep her children warm. My father and his siblings remember their mother with something deeper than fondness, they remember her with a fiery respect. They would rally behind her like clans behind a powerful and benevolent leader. She led them through the dark and it cost her every bit of her life.
My grandmother came to live with my father soon after I was born. Until the day I turned 18, which is also the very day she passed away, my grandmother was always there. Now I believe it’s important for you to know something. The woman who I grew up with was not the same person I’ve described in the previous paragraphs. My grandmother, the one I grew up with, was a mean, bitter old woman. She was pessimistic and finicky, and we fought often. I was young and naïve and didn’t know of the things she had done to leave her this way, so I complained a lot. How can she not understand me? Why must she meddle? I asked this of anyone who would listen, and no one answered. I wish they had.
Did I love my grandmother? Did I love the fiery old woman who poked and prodded at everything I did? She was there when I woke up and when I went to sleep. She fed me three meals a day and rubbed oil into my hair. She sniped at my friends, sneering at them if they were girls or from another religion. She told me the stories of our gods, fondly remembering them as having gotten her through all those dark times. She watched the same serials everyday, enjoying the family drama from the safety of her room. In sharp contrast to my grandfather, my grandmother was so intensely human to me growing up. In her death, on my birthday, I remember falling to my knees. I didn’t feel anything as simple as sadness….
You see, all those years I’d been told one thing:
My grandmother had moved to be with me. She had made me her life’s goal. She was made out to be a moth drawn to a flame. She was just a pile of embers who had retired to live a life doting after her grandchild.
But there, on my knees staring at my phone reading that my grandmother had passed away I realized that I suddenly felt very cold. Imagine how a peasant growing up in a heliocentric world would have felt suddenly hearing that they weren’t in fact the centre of the world. That the sun was not, in fact, revolving around them. Of course, I didn’t realize all this at the time. It took many years, with me having to meet my grandmother many times over through the countless stories that I’ve since been told. If I could go back in time, I would look at her, really look at her and notice the soft glow behind her eyes, the searing heat just under her skin, a raging fire bridled by age and a foolish society. I would perhaps listen to her bitterness and assure her that she had not burned in vain.
I do not believe in reincarnation, heaven, or the immortal soul. I believe the desires and identities of our ancestors are laced in our living flesh. My grandmother’s fire burns in me. I was never her fireplace; I was a torch. One day, I will have a daughter, whether by blood or by bond and I will pass this fire on. I cannot go back and give my grandmother the education she deserved, and I cannot go back in time to pull her back for all those times I tried to push her away. For all the light of hers that the world did not get to see, I burn. Even if she may never know it, she is a matriarch and, in her name, I burn.
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My grandparents were a big part of my life. More so after they left it. I will take their stories and pass them on and in that way, for at least a little longer, they will live on. Who knows? Maybe Heaven is real. Maybe they’re waiting in a little café at the edge of Nowhere. Maybe everyone you’ve met personally in life, waits there for you. They’ll be sitting at a corner table, griping about the food or the customer service and we’ll sit and talk. My parents will have gotten there before me, and we’ll all talk. Then I’ll watch them all walk into the great beyond leaving me alone to wait for my own children and grandchildren. I think, that would be nice.
