JOIN USRemembering thatha
When I was eight years old, I fell in the middle of an alley and skinned my knee. There was blood and lots of tears. When I finally picked myself up and trudged to my grandparents’ house, I’m sure I was met with sympathy and someone cleaned me up. I don’t recall the details of that.
What I do remember is that my grandpa—thatha as we called him—took my little hand in his and gently walked me back up the street. “Is this the spot?” he asked as we stood over the offending area of concrete. With my tear-streaked face and quivering lip, I nodded. (Surely this was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened in the history of mankind!)
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do…” His kind eyes were twinkling. He picked up his foot stomped hard on the evil piece of concrete. Then he started chastising the concrete, encouraging me to also stomp at it with my uninjured leg. There was much stomping, light yelling, and even some spitting at the malicious concrete that had caused all the crying.
It only lasted a few minutes (and I can’t even remember if I stopped crying after that), but it’s a memory that has a permanent spot in my brain. It is a memory that always elicits warm feelings, albeit with a tinge of grief now that he has passed.
Thatha was a good man. It is a cliché to say that about the departed, but there really is no better way to sum up his essence than with the word “good.”
He wasn’t the most enlightened or progressive person—which is par for the course for most people, and especially men, from that generation. He held fast to his ideas of gender, class, and caste roles. Within the confines of these rules, he was as generous as they come. He gave money, time, love, good humour, and infinite patience to those who needed it and those who didn’t. I’m not sure which of those categories my sister and I fell into, but he showered us with all of it anyway.
We lived outside of India and away from my grandparents for much of our lives but we visited them every summer. Most of these summers are lost in the haze of failing human memory, but certain moments like the skinned knee—or how thatha saved every issue of the newspaper’s children’s section “Open Sesame” throughout the year to give to us in the summers—have stayed with me.