WIth my Grandmother ...

Met my grandmother. This time she really looked old, she lost much of her interest in watching TV serials. She lost the patience to see Cricket matches too, she even forgot the name of her all time favourite star 'Sachin'.



Dependency must be crippling her spirits. Hope memories do not worsen it.

This time two more things got added to her existence - a new phone next to her bed and a walking stick. She refrained from having both till she could not live without it.

I touched her hand... her skin has now become a saggy flap wrapping her frame, I took her arm feeling the delicacy of lifting a baby and as I did it I could see her painted image on a porcelain plate in the cupboard - a rare honour of the Chinese bestowed on the then aristocratic Indians in Malaysia , she used to tell. I hardly believed it till I saw similar ones in the Mysore Palace.

These hands fed me for 23 years, it is with these same hands she tied a bracelet to my wife when she could hardly move around. Till very recently she used to cook her meals and others too . She keeps repeating “ I am 84 … and why this delay?”.

How easily she befriended the shuddering thought of death!

This time I asked her whether she felt un cared for and she replied : ‘ parents love their kids out of their own selfishness, they must not expect anything in return!”



It seemed like a revelation that rolled into a paradox to me seeing the words as isolated entities : Love – Selfishness - Expect – Return … but together it must make sense this comes from the depth of her being.

Hey..wait a momen,did she not tell in her own words , what Gibran said, without ever even hearing about his works…

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” ( Khalil Gibran, The Prophet )

Truth sometimes comprises of mutually exclusive, contradictory entities if seen in parts.

… and how I desperately wish to hold her hand and take her for a walk ? To tell her that I owe her much, that she lived a life that was all giving. How I wish I could just tell it all at one go, and I tried it once. But I had to repeat it aloud so many times till I felt like some one who had to repeat “ no mention please “ few times.

Intense moments get mocked by acts made to execute formally.

Any way, I now realize I am late. Those words of Grellet flash forth … from the back flap of the notebooks my grandmother used to cover with brown paper.

I expect to pass through this life but once.
If, therefore there can be any kindness I can show or any good thing I can do
for any fellow being let me do it now...
Let me not defer it, or neglect it,
For I shall not pass this way again. ( Stephen Grellet )



She saw me staring at it, a portrait painted during her thirties. She asked me to get it from the shelf and hand it over to her. Her shivering arms all stretched to take it...bridging over 50 years . She held it close to her chest...wiped it with her saree...and told, ‘take my new picture too so that you could keep it beside it’.

Young picture becomes old…and old picture becomes new, sure that must be another way of trying to live ‘in the present moment’ !

Just as I was about to leave, she told 'call me some times'... with a naughty grin she added this too ' you will come this side only when you have some work here'. I know she did not mean it for she knows me as the one who is impulsive and yet affectionate.

I take refuge in that for the time being ! I know she is still annoyed with me for not joining her on the last Onam.

Note: Of late I was reading on "Time Lapse Photography" , found this picture on 'Wikipedia' quite metaphorical of existence at the gross level.