Kids Corner

People

Heirloom:
Prem Kahani

JASMEET KAUR SAHI

 

 

 

His toes curl within his slippers, seeking stability with each hesitant step. Within their sagging sockets, his eyes are still sharp; they see everything and hold the wisdom of a lifetime. Rough, worn hands like the bark of a tree that has weathered many seasons, tremble with uncertainty as his quavering voice murmurs words that unravel stories I now know by rote.

My grandfather – Bapuji, I call him – is a man, four score and almost a decade old, more than three times my age.

He is a man of few words, but I know that he loves talking to me. Every evening he shells out the same questions: ‘How are your studies going?’, ‘What are your plans for the future?’ and each time I try to answer with novelty.

These past few years, I have seen his memory recede into the dark corners of his brain, like a child hiding under a bed waiting to be found and coaxed out. I have been looking for the Bapuji I once knew, for some time now.

On a scorching summer afternoon, I see a crouching figure from the window upstairs. My grandmother, head covered with a dupatta, is weeding the communal green patch in front of our house.

Daadi-ma is the life blood of our family; she is the one who holds us all together and is the one constant in Bapuji’s life. She is his only current memory, the link between his past and present. He may not know what day or year it is, but she remains as fresh as ever in his fading mind.

Yet, like two beads on an abacus that were once together, time has pushed my grandparents apart.

Daadi-ma despises Bapuji’s love of slumber and it often causes a rift between them. While he sleeps, she wanders the house looking to occupy herself, sometimes tending to her vegetable patch, other times reading her gardening manual or chatting with the neighbours.

But when it is her turn to sleep he yells for her, sitting anxiously in his chair, hoping that the feeble decibels of his voice will make her appear magically in front of him, so that he can look at her and not feel so alone. When she does appear, he looks sheepishly at her as she adjusts his pillows, propping him up to ake him more comfortable.

‘I was worried about where you were’, he says quietly, to which her response is always, ‘Worried for me or for yourself?’

This was a typical afternoon for them.

The Rangoon creeper Daadi-ma has planted at the edge of the garden is bursting with colour. Delicate flowers with slender petals hang haughtily from the vine, while the many that have fallen create a bed of maroon and white below.

‘I used to play sitting on those when I was a child’, she tells me one evening.

The heady scent of the jasmine bush by the front gate signals the onset of dusk and prayer time for Daadi-ma. She plucks out a few buds and leaves them on the table next to Bapuji. The rest she takes with her to place next to the gutka from which she recites the daily liturgy.

As he watches her go in, Bapuji picks up a jasmine bud and inhales it deeply. Jasmine bushes grew abundantly in the courtyard of his childhood home in Sialkot.

Their wedding anniversary is in a week’s time.

I want it to be special.

I pore over the old albums in the living room to fish out their wedding pictures. I find a photo of Bapuji in his uniform standing with a colleague. I keep it to put away later in my diary and continue with my search. Bapuji sits in his chair unconcerned as I look for a photograph of just the two of them. Futility mounts and in the end I am only able to find two wedding pictures, each with my grandparents in the midst of a group of people in positions arranged with regimental precision.

The faces are unfamiliar to me, so I give the pictures to Bapuji. He takes them into his hand and looks at them with the vision of a man seeing something for the first time.

‘Do you know who these people are, Bapuji?’ I ask him.

He stares at them, squishing his toes in his slippers, unsure of what to say. I nod in encouragement, ‘That’s you on your wedding day, Bapuji!’

He looks up at me; his childish smile is heartbreaking because I know he has no clue what that means.

I let it pass.

Every Sunday, I take Bapuji to the local vegetable and fruit market, the sabzi mandi. It is a massive affair of shouting vendors and haggling customers with the raw smell of wet straw, the rush of jostling people and mounds of fresh produce all around.

I love bringing Bapuji here. His wrinkled hand is large and warm in my smaller, less experienced one. I hold out a fruit and ask him to tell me its name; sometimes I ask him to translate it into our mother tongue. Mostly, he just smiles at me and, from under his bushy brows, winks and confidently says, ‘I know what that is, why don’t you tell me? I’m sure you don’t know’.

The vendors often mistake us for customers and begin hawking the moment we walk up to a stall. I simply shake my head and say that we are only there to look around, much to their surprise. Soon enough, most of the vendors recognise our little game and try to help Bapuji with the names. When I ask him to hold a bitter melon in his hand, allowing him to feel the texture, they secretly murmur the answer, which for him remains just that, a murmur.

He refuses to wear his hearing aid as a show of defiance, ‘I can hear perfectly well,’ he would often say, ‘it is all of you who don’t speak clearly, just keep murmuring around!’

His memory is failing him.

This phrase intrigues me. I often wonder how something as intangible as memory can fail a person. Memories are the stories that keep us going; at least for Bapuji, this holds very true.

He was a young man in the war during the 1940s, his future entrusted to a government that knew no better than to confine him to the trenches and rip his country in two: his childhood home now ‘Pakistan’, and ‘Hindustan’ or India, where he met and married Daadiji.

The Partition was an act that had cut so deep that generations after him could feel its scar in their being. This country, where he raised his family, was not the place he was born in.

For him, home is Sialkot in Pre-Partition Punjab where he hurried to milk the cows before the morning trade began and where he helped his mother knead the dough, only to mess up the amounts of each ingredient and, eventually, the entire kitchen.

Being uprooted from your home, leaving behind the house you grew up in and the courtyard that witnessed your childhood games can be a very difficult fact to reconcile – even for a strapping young man of 24. And yet, these memories remain untouched by the battlefield scars that mark him. He tells me these stories as if he is reading them out from a book in front of him, coherent and chronological.

My dad tells me that we have to find every way to help Bapuji recall his memories. It is the only way we can ensure that his brain does not shut him out, as it has been shutting the rest of us out for a while now. The Sunday excursions to the mandi are a way to help Bapuji reign victory over the already crumbling fortress of his mind.

Often I see him stop in his tracks when he spots another person with greyed hair: recognition! He greets the elderly stranger as if they have been friends for decades and begins asking him a barrage of questions, ‘When did all this happen? When did the mandi become so big? Where was I when all this was happening?’

Bapuji grows quiet and mumbles a final question to himself, ‘Where was I?’

All of this humbles me; I vow never to take the present for granted and to always make the most of what I have.

When I was younger, I asked Bapuji to keep a diary, an heirloom for our family so that the next generation might know where they came from. But he was too busy then. Now I am his diary, hungry for the past, filling my pages with his words. I am the heirloom, weaving out these stories for the generations to come.

My Bapuji no longer understands his present life or who he really is today. A confused smile appears on his face when I tell him that he is the grandfather to seven children, as if I am making it all up. I know I cannot completely clear out the cobwebs of his mind, but I wish to walk into those dark corners and sift through the dust to get to the stories that make him who he is today and help him find a way into the present; a present that now both confuses and isolates him.

A week later, we are all gathered around the table.

My grandparents sit opposite an extravagant chocolate cake and are surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles who have all made it to the event. The two wedding photos I found sit elegantly framed next to the cake.

Bapuji is overjoyed to see everyone and half-jokes that no one must leave. But I know what he is really saying, ‘No one must leave me’.

Daadi-ma looks at him and says, ‘They all have better things to do than stay here and watch you sleep’.

Smiling to herself she mumbles, ‘That right belongs only to me’.

Then, placing his hand on Bapuji’s shoulder, my dad asks the inevitable, ‘Dad, what are we celebrating today?’

There is an uncomfortable silence and Daadi-ma shakes her head. I wince and silently plead for the moment to pass so that we can cut the cake.

Bapuji looks at everyone around the table and finally rests his gaze on his wife, his other half.

He smiles as he takes her hand and holds it close to his heart. She smothers the smile forming on her lips, but her eyes soften.

I look down, secretly wiping my tears and see his slippered feet under the table, toes slightly uncurled.

 

December 11, 2012

Conversation about this article

1: Harjit Singh (Bothell, Washington, USA), December 11, 2012, 8:06 AM.

I wish I still had my grand-parents ... you are lucky to have 'em ... the pillars of the family.

2: Preeti Maikota Dabral  (New York, USA ), December 11, 2012, 9:54 AM.

Beautiful ... well-written ... heart felt!

3: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), December 11, 2012, 4:27 PM.

What a lovely painting of a graceful journey surrounded by doting, loving ones in an atmosphere of pure love. It is already an early heaven and awaiting the eventide and the ultimate journey: "sabhnaa sahurai vanj-naa sabh muklaavhaar" [GGS:50.19] - "Everyone shall go to their Husband Lord. Everyone shall be given their ceremonial send-off after their marriage."

Comment on "Heirloom:
Prem Kahani"









To help us distinguish between comments submitted by individuals and those automatically entered by software robots, please complete the following.

Please note: your email address will not be shown on the site, this is for contact and follow-up purposes only. All information will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Sikhchic reserves the right to edit or remove content at any time.