Grandfather: A Sketch from an Indian Childhood
Reminiscences of a Morning
A shadow of a man floats into my mind occasionally, a mere apparition and a few vivid glimpses accompanying it. He was my grandfather. He reminds me of how people fade from the world without leaving any visible mark, no matter how much interesting a life they have led. He was a middle-income land-owning farmer in South India, in the early 1900s, having about five acres of land where he cultivated rice, coconut, Areca nut, bananas, and cashews. He was 72 when he died in 1977 and I was just a three and a half years old child.
I never got to know him except through his diaries, in which he journaled his income and expenses, and through his curious collection of porcupine spines, sands of different colours, red and white sandalwood pieces, conches of many sizes, a deer horn, and a pouch of ‘ponpanam’, the half gram gold coins in circulation when he was young. In this collection, he also had British coins from when India was a British colony.
How we collect material objects, thinking they will remain in our possession forever, and how life cheats us with death, taking away all those possessions and throwing them into the careless hands of other people who might not even know what those objects mean to us and how dearly we held them in our minds! So, those coins fell into my careless hands, and I eventually lost them. I have no memory of how I lost them.
Memory 1
It is a clear morning of spring. I somehow find myself on the long mud path lined with mango trees, Jack trees, Tree of Heavens, Kenda trees, and Indian Kapoks, from our house to the iron gate of the compound wall. The floor is laid with mango leaves- fallen, young, purple leaves. They emit a mild and fresh mango fragrance.
Grandfather, wearing a ‘mundu’ (a one and a half metres long rectangular cotton garment worn around the waist), stands at a distance, near the gate. He is tall and heavily built and is walking towards me with the help of a long and well-carved walking stick. The stick's grasping tip is a monkey face.
As I am just a three-year-old in this memory, I am not supposed to wander off out of my safe zone, and it seems I have done so and he is coming to pick me up and take me back into the house. Or maybe it is drizzling, the rain on my bare arms and neck, and a cold dab of mist. The drizzle might have begun suddenly and he wanted to take me inside.
Memory 2
Grandfather is sitting on our verandah, on a traditional wooden recliner, an armchair of mammoth proportion, compared to the humans supposed to sit on it. The backrest of the recliner has decorative holes throughout, each the size of a finger hole. Grandfather seems to be napping after his mid-day meal. I walk to the back of the wooden armchair and poke his flesh protruding through the recliner holes. One, two, three, …I count as I poke through each hole. Grandfather laughs.
Memory 3
After lunch, as usual, he is sitting on the verandah in his chair. A small mat lay in the courtyard under the sun on which my grandmother or mother had laid out spiced raw mango pieces to dry. Once they dry completely in the sun, in many days of summer sunlight, they are kept in air-tight jars to be opened and used after the mango season ends. They will last till the next mango season.
I climb down from the verandah to the courtyard and try to pick up a mango piece from the spread. Grandfather calls out loudly for someone to pick me up and prevent me from eating the mango that is too spicy for a kid of my age. I freeze with the mango piece in my hand, alarmed by the sudden clamour.
Memory 4
Grandfather is sick. He is lying on a bed, spread out on the floor in a small room inside our house, built of red laterite stone, and wood. There are massive wooden pillars, thick wooden windows, and a ceiling of wood blocks below the original mud-tiled roof. Shadows dance on the whitewashed (lime-coated) walls as an oil lamp flickers in a corner inside. My mother and father are trying to give some medicine or water to Grandpa but he seems to be unconscious.
Memory 5
There is a scent of burning raw coconut meat and coconut oil. When the wicker in a lamp burns, the oil fragrance fills the air. This is more than that. The wicker is burning not in a traditional lamp but in coconut oil filled in a half-cut raw coconut.
Grandpa lay on the bare floor in the larger room adjacent to where he was in the previous memory. He looks like he is in a deep sleep. Many half-cut coconut fruits are laid in a circle surrounding him, filled with coconut oil and small cotton wicks burning on their brim. Just behind where his head lies, a traditional bronze lamp is lit. On the lamp, the wicks are arranged circularly. The golden light from the flames gives a mysterious glow to his forehead and cheeks. We children are not allowed to keep going into that room once we were made to prostrate at his feet and ask for his blessing for one last time.
Memory 6
There is a burning pyre at a distance. My mother’s sister has picked me up and she stands beneath a young mango tree. This specific mango tree was planted there after burying our pet dog when she died. She might have been a watchdog rather than a pet dog. In those days, nobody in our place knew what a pet dog meant. My mother’s youngest sister who was only five years older than me also stood there near us. She was pointing to the pyre to let me know that they were burning Grandpa.
The rest of the things I know about my grandfather are from other people’s accounts and his frugal possessions and journals. On a day, probably at the peak of the Indian freedom struggle, Grandfather wrote in his diary, “I did not do anything for my country today”. He was not a freedom fighter. He was just a feudal landlord who was literate, who had travelled a bit all over India and as far as Varanasi in north India, and who used to read a little classical poetry and literature in two languages, Malayalam our mother tongue, and Sanskrit, the language of the sacred scriptures of Hindus. The spirit of freedom and revolution might have touched his heart in some way though he was not directly involved in the protests.
His real passion was the medicinal system of Ayurveda. He has in his notebooks, many Ayurvedic medicinal preparations elaborately recorded. I learnt later that this was a common practice as people used to make certain health supplements and medicines listed in the old texts of Ayurveda in their homes annually and store them for future use.
These glimpses alone are available as my resource and reference. They are knit into a single hanging bridge of memory falling apart from decay and old age. I could walk very little down it in my probe to understand what kind of a man Grandpa was. The information we have about people is what we compile and analyse to form a holistic impression of their personalities, and we mostly interpret them through direct interactions. I know very little about my Grandpa's personality.
Yet, these memories help me understand the history of my place and my people in a better light. The minimalistic life that people lived before the onset of consumerism, the routine of a countryside farmer, the role of travel and books in those days as pristine sources of knowledge, and the self-sufficient manner in which those days people personally understood and studied healthcare and medicines - all of it condensed inside a caleidoscope of broken memories.
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