Grandpa's tree

Remembering a beloved grandparent

(Versions of this were published in the Hindu newspaper in March 1995, and also in in Udayam, A publication of the South India Cultural Association of the Maritimes, Canada, in April 1995.)

They say the dog knew. Kaiser howled piteously and lay down in front of the car, they tell me, refusing to budge even when his master rebuked him sternly. Did he see the miasma of death around Grandfather? Did Kaiser know he would never come back?

Grandpa was coming to our house in the city, to go to the hospital. It would be a minor operation, his friend the village doctor had told him. I wonder if he knew, too: did he have a premonition that he would never return to the house that he had built, with the pond in the backyard and the paddy fields front and back, and the long pathway, still unpaved today, that he had carved out of the fields so that cars could come to his doorstep.

Maybe he looked around, at the pandanus hedges with their formidable thorns, the sacred grove out amongst the paddies, the shady canopy of the moovandan mango tree, and the lush young shoots in the rice-paddies, blindingly beautiful in their unnamed shade of green.

Maybe he tried to imprint them in his memory, the way I do now, whenever I go back. Just like I try to remember Grandpa, a small, white-haired man, clean-shaven and with thick tortoiseshell glasses; a little plump, and not at all stern like his brother, the Judge, whom I got to know much later.

“Come here, my little one”, he’d say, “I have a treat for you.” And he always had goodies in his pocket for me. I was his first grandchild, and definitely his favorite.

Grandpa’s house was where I spent the summer vacations. My aunt would take me there, as she too was unoccupied whereas my parents were busy. Grandpa liked having his daughter and grandson around, because he was a widower and lived by himself, except for a servant.

I loved grandpa’s house because he had cattle, and a dog and the pond. We didn’t have any of these in my parents’ house in the city. I liked the pond best of all, although my aunt, who was a young college student, liked to frighten me with stories of water snakes. Sometimes my cousin would come by, and we’d entertain ourselves by catching dragonflies and tying them on a string. They would then try to fly away, but we could always get them back, like little buzzing captive airplanes.

And when it was time for me to return to the city, Grandpa would always give me a big hug. “For the bus fare”, he’d say, and give me a big, shiny, one-rupee coin. My aunt would tease me and say I’d have to pay for my own bus ticket, but of course I would hold the coin in my sweaty palm until we reached my parents’ house and I could give it safely to my mother.

There was always company, because Grandpa had lots of friends. He was a retired bureaucrat and a gentleman farmer: he reckoned he’d earned his rest. He’d sit on the front veranda, or on the long cool open porch in the back. Sometimes he’d lie on his easy chair, with his legs propped up on the long leg-rests, and read his newspaper. Now and then he and his friends would play checkers, and they would make their pieces fresh from banana stems. Occasionally they’d play cards, but mostly they talked. Grandpa was politically inclined, and so they always had plenty of arguments about everything.

But I liked it best when Grandpa would tell me stories. At night, we’d turn our old hurricane lamps on, the ones with the bulbous glass and the thin, smoky yellow flame. Grandpa was old-fashioned, and he preferred lamplight to new-fangled electricity. So we’d sit in the courtyard, the nalukettu open to the heavens in the middle of the house, and we’d have dinner, usually kanji, rice gruel, that we ate off large brass vessels.

For spoons we’d use a freshly fallen jackfruit leaf, twisted in the shape of a spoon, and pinned together with the stem from a coconut frond. We would have tapioca, and sometimes hot and sour curried fish, and it would be a royal repast. The lamplight would dance, making bulky shadows of our bodies on the granary walls behind. Occasionally it rained, and it was nice to watch the raindrops, golden in the lamplight, fall harmlessly onto the soft grey earth of the courtyard.

Then Grandpa would put me in his lap and tell me stories. I guess all grandpas are born story-tellers. He would tell me stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, tales of valiant Abhimanyu and wicked Kaikeyi. He told me once about Surpanakha, and how Rama cut off her nose and her breasts. I didn’t know what breasts were, and Grandpa explained patiently.

Grandpa was a Sanskrit scholar, and he wanted me to learn Malayalam “properly”, as he put it. One auspicious day he brought home an asan, a teacher, and with Grandpa presiding over the ceremonies, the asan initiated me into the secrets of written language.

After I washed and did obeisance to Ganesha, the asan piled some rice on the floor, and carefully traced my forefinger through it. Om Hari Sri Ganapathaye Namah: Then he traced the entire Malayalam alphabet with my finger in the rice, and gave me a present — the alphabet in a tawny-golden palm leaf manuscript. “Just like we all learned fifty years ago”, he said, the thin, bespectacled asan, who was a bit hard of hearing.

Scored on the palm-life with a stylus, and then with lamp-black pressed into it, the letters of the alphabet were beautiful and mysterious. “Tomorrow we’ll do the letters again, this time on sand, until you can become a big scholar like your Grandpa”, he said, smiling. And so for that entire summer, when I was four, I studied Malayalam, the pretty, curlicued letters finally making sense to me.

Two years later, after the mid-summer heat, Grandpa came to our house in the city. He had to go to the hospital — they wanted him to have a prostate operation. “It’s a minor operation, very routine, and we’ll have him out of here in no time at all”, said the surgeon, who was one of Grandpa’s distant nephews.

To my father, though, he said something a little different: “The old man is in good shape, but you know that even the most benign surgery can be dangerous. Uncle should be just fine, but there are some risks. I’m also sure he remembers his wife died in hospital. And he may be a little nervous. You should try to get him to relax”.

Grandma had died of complications following her last pregnancy, many years ago. My mother had then become the responsible one, looking after her siblings, although she was only a teenager herself. Grandpa had never remarried.

My mother and aunt took turns spending time with Grandpa in the hospital. My aunt was the only one at his side when he went — peacefully, in his sleep, she said later. His heart had failed in post-operative shock. The way I remember it is that when the call came, my father was getting ready to take a bath, and he had put oil in his hair, and he never got to finish the bath.

But I must be wrong, because we didn’t have a phone then, and neither did any of our neighbors. So maybe someone came by from the hospital and told us the news. Anyway, I was six years old, and I remember my father coming in, his sensible face grim, and my mother fainting when he told her gently. I had never seen my mother so distraught.

I don’t like hospitals. Even when, years later, my sister was studying to be a doctor at the same teaching hospital, I remember feeling claustrophobic: in those cheerful yellow corridors, I could imagine Death stalking, choosing a a victim here and there at random. So maybe I have blacked out my memories of going to the hospital, and taking Grandpa back to his home in the village, three hours away. We don’t have hearses, so maybe we took him back in an ambulance. I don’t remember. All I remember is the warm August day of his funeral.

Grandpa was to be cremated in his own yard. They chose a spot, as prescribed, on the southern side, and built a pyre east-west. There were several hundred people crowded into Grandpa’s small house. He was a respected man and he had plenty of relatives. Besides, funerals are for most Hindus social occasions, as we don’t have churches to socialize in.

We had a lot of people at the house, and as is customary, various experts in funeral rites suggested wildly contradictory things for us to do. The principal mourner was supposed to be my uncle, but he was away at college in Nagpur, and so I was pressed into service, even though I was only six, wearing a thorthu, the traditional local towel in lieu of a mundu, a dhoti. I should have felt confused and lost, but instead I felt oddly detached: like a robot obeying commands.

Grandpa lay in state. His eyes were closed, his body had been anointed with unguents and sandalwood, and a strip of cloth held his jaw closed. I noticed with surprise that his nose hairs were all white. I was reminded of one of Grandpa’s stories, when he told me about how the sleeping Kumbhakarna had been roused to do battle against Rama by the expedient of his nose-hairs being pulled by elephants.

One of the elders said we needed to take an imprint of Grandpa’s feet in sandalwood paste, so my mother carefully put the paste around his feet. I watched and wondered if it felt odd, touching a dead person. Then they held a small wooden board against his feet. We still have this foot imprint, and it reminds me of going to Kanyakumari and seeing the footprints of Swami Vivekananda on the rock.

Then it was time for Grandpa to be placed on the pyre that we had assembled in the yeard, close to the old three-year mango tree he had reared, and whose spreading branches I often climbed.

In my damp thorthu, I carried a clay pot of ghee to the pyre. I poured the ghee onto the stacks of wood, and I lit the pyre in several places with a torch someone handed me. Later, we picked up a few fragments of Grandpa’s bones and ashes, which Uncle would later take to Benares to immerse in the Ganga.

After the embers had cooled down, we planted a tree: a coconut tree, where my Grandpa had been cremated, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We chose a fine dwarf coconut tree, the kind that bears fruit after a very short time. My grandfather’s very own special tree.

Uncle, a lean young man in his thirties, went to Benares, to perform the last rituals for Grandpa. He must have haggled with the pandas on the ghats, and they must have murmured the sacraments indifferently for Grandpa. Uncle let his father’s ashes go in the Ganga, the River of Time. I wonder if he wept for his father then. Maybe he did. Uncle is a sentimental man.

Uncle brought us all back little brass goblets of Ganga water. We had the goblets for a while, but they tarnished, and we lost them in some house move.

Kaiser, the dog, never recovered. I remember him best as a frolicking young pup. One summer we had a plague of winged insects, driven out of their burrows by rain. We built a bonfire, and the insects fried themselves in the fire, and Kaiser grabbed them, singed, in mid-air. But after Grandpa was gone, he was not quite himself. He wasted away, and he just died one day. We buried him in the yard.

Uncle moved in, and the house became Uncle’s house, not Grandpa’s any more. Uncle married Auntie P, and along came Cousin P and Cousin D. And Uncle put in plumbing so that we didn’t have to draw water from the well by hand the old-fashioned way. He closed off both the back and front porches, for security, he said: the house lost it distinctive airiness. Uncle was right, though: the back porch, which was open and ran the length of the house, sometimes harbored snakes getting out of the rain.

I’m glad he’s not gotten rid of the nalukettu, the wonderful central courtyard open to the skies. Uncle likes electricity, and he now has a phone and TV as well. He also bought a car.

Now Uncle is retired, and young Cousin D is a vaidya. We go visit them now and then. Uncle presides over the family gathering, shirtless, no longer so slim. We eat, for breakfast, kanji and tapioca and fish curry next to the nalukettu and the granary. We don’t use jackfruit leaves any more — we use porcelain spoons from China. Unlike Grandpa, Uncle is not sold on the attractions of banana leaves as biodegradeable plates, so we have our lunch off steel or porcelain plates. Yes, progress.

Grandpa’s tree is still there. I don’t know if anyone pays any attention to it. I wonder if the men who come to pluck the coconuts from all the trees in the yard realize this handsome tree is different. It is my Grandpa’s tree. I wonder if the tree knows that the spirit of a kind and gentle old man is in it. Sometimes I go to the yard to look at the tree. Just for old times’ sake.