Grandfather

For Thatha

When I was in Kindergarten, our class took a field trip to a barn, where we rode on haystacks and ate lunch out of brown paper bags -- a novelty for me, given that my mother has always been strangely averse to disposables. There are yearbook pictures of me and my friends, all toothless and tiny, atop trucks, carrying pumpkins, feeding chickens, but what I remember most is my grandfather asking me to write him an essay about my experience. I was six; I could barely write, but I whipped out a green sheet of construction paper and utilized my full seventy-word vocabulary to pen a powerful work of art. Joan Didion would have been proud. 

All this to say that upon the second day of my visit to India this year, my grandfather asked me to write him another essay, this time about him. I've written about him before on this blog: after all, my mother claims it's impossible to utter the words "Oscar Wilde" without mentioning him at least once. But since he asked for an entire piece in his honor, I shall deliver: 

My grandfather is eighty-something years old, with enough health problems to scare my mother every time he stands. Yet, he offered to sleep on the floor so my cousin and I could get the beds, and acted genuinely surprised when we refused. He once spent an entire afternoon accusing the Californian education system of racism for not accepting foreign medical students, suggesting that my mother fly down south and ask random people (Jimmy Fallon style) "what they have against Indians" all solely to entertain me. He goes out of his way to pronounce 'milk' "like an American", probably because he's never quite forgiven me for saying 'water' like vada when I was a toddler. 

But what struck me, more than all this, was how similar we were; I was reminded of how much weight I carry in these veins. Of course, my bronze skin and bushy eyebrows are evidence of centuries of ancestors I need not know to understand, but I realized my identity isn't just skin deep -- my indecision, my humor, my taste in books, my love for music, and everything in between are not the product of years of nuturing, decades of schooling, or the company I keep; it's a parting gift from his genome to mine. 

In moments like these, I just have to quote Sarah Kay: the universe has already written the poem I was planning on writing.

I'm sitting here trying to invent new literary lenses, develop layers of nuance in history and politics, "figure it out" by writing blogs as though life has some great big secret, but frankly, what can I add to a conversation between cosmic powers? This house, eight-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy three miles from everything I've ever known, is a second home. These people, who haven't seen me in six years, name me heir to the throne. It's not hard to see why dynasties rise as often as the seas -- look at how thick blood can run. This balanced universe is so precarious that my silly little aphorisms can't explain it. There are no metaphors for the thread of gold that wraps its way around the globe, assuring me that, no matter what, this bloodline is my legacy.