Mortal beings, immortal memories

It is four years since my grandmother left for the journey to her eternal abode. She passed away after drifting into a delirious state of mind, where she called for no one but my grandfather.

Since then, every year, around this time, memories of my grandmother and our last meeting overshadow all else. Ten days before she died, I met her for the last time.

I was leaving the country the next day and went to say goodbye. As I kissed her, my tears wet her wrinkled forehead, sunken cheeks and hands that were all skin and bones. Even in her semi-conscious condition, this was enough to upset her. She touched my cheek, barely aware of who I was, and asked: “Why are you crying?”

I did not have the heart to tell her that I knew this was farewell forever, because she was going on a journey to reach a much better place than we are all in.

My train of thoughts takes the clock back to when we were all much younger — and our grandmother formed the epicentre of our lives. A mere sprinkling of the white powder in her drawer took away the pain of almost every injury incurred while playing and it was to her that we ran to when our mothers threatened to punish us.

My grandmother also had a knack for telling the most wonderful stories and most of her grandchildren spent their childhoods in beautiful make-believe worlds that were her making. She weaved a new tale everyday — about kings and queens, fairies and ogres.

As we grew older, the stories became more biographical, for she had lived through the 1947 partition of the subcontinent — a division that took her from her country of birth to Pakistan, where she would spend the rest of her life. She did have much to tell us.

She spoke of her precarious train journey to the new country, with children in tow, and then a life of sparsity in the government quarters allotted to migrants from India. She told us about her patrons in those hard times and relatives she took under her wings, as they all struggled to settle into a new life experience. And she never forgot to explain how valuable five paisas were in her times. Oh, how I loved this — my very own window into the past!

My grandmother was strong-headed and very righteous. Clad in the black cloak that was near to obligatory for respectable women of her era, she fought her way into government offices, filling land claim forms for what she knew was her right.

The land she won gave us a house where we made wonderful memories. Built at a snail’s pace in bits and pieces, as and when there was money to spare, to this day, it remains home to all of us — no matter where our lives and livelihoods have taken us.

There were lessons to be learnt throughout my grandmother’s life journey and most of us were smart enough to pick them up on the way. Yet, she never honed upon them — wise enough to know what made a story boring for young people.

We are a closely-knit extended family — and a bunch of writers too. So each year, someone has a tribute to pay to my grandmother — a poem that will make us cry, a word of advice that we recall or a shared picture on Facebook that is a reminder of happier times.

Yet, in our hearts, there are regrets that we live with — the daughter who could not take her back “home” in her last days, the son who was too far away to return for her funeral and the granddaughter who craves to lie by her side so she can mesmerise her with her life stories.

I can’t recall a time in her life when I grew tired of asking her questions or she of answering them. Yet, my greatest regret remains not spending more time with her in those last years. I know that she had much more to tell me, and I, a lot more to learn.

Rabia Alavi is a Dubai-based writer. You can follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RabiaAlavi