Precious memories

Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of knowing my paternal grandmother. She left this earth long before I entered it.

To me she remains a one-dimensional image of a regal, stern-faced matriarch frozen in shades of sepia, sitting on a grand ornamental chair.

I will never know for sure if it was her nature to be stern and formal or was it the visage one was expected to sport in her time when sitting for a photograph?

While practising the perfect pose, did she ever imagine that almost 80 years later, a grandchild would form an impression based on the frozen relic of a click and flash?

I will never know, first hand, which of her traits or mannerisms got filtered down to me via the genes that now form my personality. A cloud of mystery will always surround her image.

The memory of my maternal grandmother, on the other hand, is a kaleidoscope of changing colours and expressions. One eyebrow raised meant disapproval, a slight twist of her mouth meant disdain, an open laugh meant thorough enjoyment of a joke. Hundreds of photographs taken of her draped in pastel chiffons wearing her signature pearls, form a multifaceted collage in my memory.

Her presence influenced my life in ways that affect me daily. My belief in the use of natural products is a result of watching her pamper her perfect complexion with a concoction of simple kitchen cosmetics.

A voracious appetite for reading comes from the many summers sitting on the wooden bench in her garden, listening to her read from favourite novels spanning centuries of customs and rituals of Red Indians, Russian Cossacks or Japanese Samurai.

In the motion picture of my childhood, she deserves an award for so many supporting rolls — the ‘guardian' on my boarding school forms; the face I looked for at the railway station during school holidays and the person I waved goodbye to at the airport when I flew off to see my parents. Her home was my finishing school where I was taught how to set a table correctly, eat with a fork and knife and keep elbows off the table.

Today when I step into a bookstore, my mind meanders to days, so long ago, when a grandmother would plan a fortnightly day trip with her granddaughter.

Therapeutic silence

Starting with breakfast at a small café that served the best scrambled eggs in town, we would go across the city to the quaint familiar bookstore my grandmother frequented as a child! We would browse in therapeutic silence through wooden shelves of fresh new paperbacks, rich hard cover classics and old encyclopaedias. Then, clutching large brown bags filled with adventure, we would stagger out intoxicated by the woody smell of paper and antique wood.

Our favourite restaurant was a 10- minute walk across noisy, bustling narrow streets. It was a popular and extremely busy haunt that served divine spicy chicken curry and steaming hot butter naans accompanied with thick cold sweet buttermilk in clay mugs.

Completely satiated, we would walk across to the park, take out each book and read the synopsis to decide which adventure to jump into first.

Invariably our reading would start right away, oblivious to the stray dogs, the sweaty joggers or loud hawkers around us.

At sunset, we would begin our long taxi journey home, deliciously exhausted and anxious to snuggle into bed and continue our magic with the written word.

- Almas Menon is a freelance writer based in Dubai.