The Way Home

"Are they laughing at me?"

Perhaps children more filial than my sister and I would've acted differently in our shoes, but with our extended family an ocean away, we never did manage to stay in touch. We call our grandparents a handful of times each calendar year, smiling awkwardly and promising to visit while they recount stories of when we were children -- notably, the last time they felt like they knew us. 

Today was our Annual Call #1 (Occasion: New Year's). My sister held the phone tentatively for a few minutes, saying, "Yes, we'll come soon!" in a pitch almost an octave higher than her regular voice (her White People Accent, as we call it, which makes it all the more strange that she uses it on our Indian grandparents). She promised that she was enjoying college, that she had friends, that she would assimilate well when she moves to New York in June. She handed me the phone. 

Hello?

Yes, this is Deepti. Happy New Year! 

Yes, I'm working hard. Yes, I eat well. Yes, I am telling the truth.

And then it was over. I passed the phone back to my mother, and eavesdropped on their conversation while my grandfather cried to her about not being able to communicate with his own grandchildren. He can't hear us, he can't speak well; he asks if we are laughing at his choppy English, and I wanted to remind him that we would never, but of course he doesn't know us well enough to know that.

I often wonder about lost wisdom. Pierre de Fermat, a French mathematician, scribbled a theorem in the white space of a textbook page, writing "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain" alongside it. Unfortunately, he died prematurely and never wrote the full proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, as it would eventually be coined. Thus, it remained unsolved for the next 350 years (not for lack of trying), and this streak was only broken by the advent of the modern computer and an entirely new branch of mathematics (number theory). 

I'm sure most of us aren't harboring secrets that would revolutionize mathematics as we know it. Nonetheless, there are anecdotes and perspectives and thoughts that will be buried or burned with us, because there simply is no way to categorically transfer our brains to the next generation. Everyone has some tidbit of trivia stowed away in the depths of their craniums that they don't remember learning -- perhaps a weird fact about Hernan Cortes, or titanium? This often fills me with panic; that I didn't learn solely via a systematic, scalable, and repeatable system terrifies me. The fate of humanity can't possibly rest upon us individually whispering pearls of knowledge to each other, then individually remembering them, can it?

I fear it does, and not just because we're fundamentally an oral society. Rome fell into the Dark Ages within two generations -- that is, we went from Plato and Socrates to a millennia of illiteracy and isolation in the same time my grandparents have been alive. My mother used to tell me that 'knowledge is the one thing they can't take away from you', but knowledge is lost all the time, every day. The only tool we have to combat this is language, something my grandparents are conveniently losing as they approach old old age. 

All this to say -- the ability to read Sanskrit and analyze astrological birth charts, the recipe for paruppu sadam, the memory of my great uncle are all but lost to the fire. My grandfather had two girls, who in turn had all girls, so the Natarajan name is almost gone, too. It's all so terribly sad, that we can't inherit every morsel of our ancestors, that the mind can't be read like a book. That lyric from Taylor Swift's Marjorie always comes back to me -- "I should've asked you questions / I should've asked you how to be, asked you to write it down for me / should've kept every grocery store receipt / because every scrap of you would be taken from me."

Perhaps someone less sentimental than me would realize that losing something isn't always a loss -- I don't even believe in astrology, why would I need to retain my grandmother's ability to read a birth chart? I suppose it's more about having roots, knowing that we've inherited what we're capable of. I suppose it's also about choice; that I've always had the option to learn astrology if I wanted to, that I could always catch up on our bonding time later, and now these windows are slamming shut. It feels like my bloodline is leaving me, even before they're actually dead.

It also feels like I'm too late. 

This week has been strange. I've written two blogposts almost entirely about death, only to remember that nobody has actually died yet -- not me, not my father, not my maternal grandparents. Of the few slivers of my religion I actively partake in, reincarnation has always been my personal favorite. I take great comfort in the thought of this corporeal form meaning almost nothing, but perhaps this is why I'm able to experience grief before the body is cold (or warm, for that matter). I'm grieving a mind I only ever partially knew, a devastating fact that is really only my fault. This is a truth I will have to reckon with, grapple with, probably for the rest of my life. So to close, I'll quote Fredrik Backman's And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer: 

"This would be my greatest fear: imagination giving up before the body does. I guess I'm not alone in this. Humans are a strange breed in the way our fear of getting old seems to be even greater than our fear of dying."