Confessions Of A Remorseful Granddaughter

Two apogeal moods make me want to write. It doesn't matter if the scrawl makes a good writeup or is a mumbo jumbo of disconnected words that I have spewed on the paper thus advertising the state of my mind. But jubilation and distress do bring out the essayist in me.

I spent the evening today sitting on my window sill alternating between reading a Japanese best-seller and watching the sun's rays permeate through gloomy cinereal clouds (I call these 'Fingers of God'). I am quite a deliberate reader; I hardly ever set an unfinished book aside even if it means reading through the night into the wee hours of morning. But today there was a whiff of melancholy in the air that let my mind go woolgathering. So absently was I perusing the pages that I had to sometimes stop, go back a line or two and read them again because the words had gone past unregistered.

Then all of a sudden this small passage managed to grab my attention. And so pertinently could I relate to this passage, especially to the last line about the granddaughter being an uncaring brat, that my eyes were stung with tears; tears of guilt and remorse. The smiling face of my grandmother danced in front of my watery eyes; the smile never leaving that face when I was being a pesky tyke. Of late I have moved from being that to being a rude, quick-tempered and an impatient granddaughter, but she remains the same adoring grandmother with the same smile embellishing her face and speaking volumes about her unconditional love.


My grandmother, numbering eighty summers, is a patient of Dementia and has the memory span of a goldfish. Her intelligence now is that of a child and with a toothless grin and vacant eyes, she resembles one too. She finds pleasures in mundane things like collecting baubles and trinkets such as hairpins and stowing them away in a little plastic container away from what she assumes to be prying eyes. She shows them off to some and lends them to no one. Her house, which has been her home since the time she got married and came to stay in Bombay in the 50s, is now a labyrinth. She has to discover her way about the house every single time; the topography taking a new shape each day in her mind. She keeps asking about the same things over and over and insists she has the memory of an elephant. A quarrel with my grandfather is always on the cards.

Yet of one thing, she needs no prompting; that I am her baby. I have been her baby ever since she first laid eyes on the newborn me; first born of her only daughter. Nothing really changed there when my mum met with an accident and was left bed-ridden for more than a year when I was just 3 months old; its still the same now when I am past 30. It was not as if she was in her prime youth then or in the best of health. But the untiring hours and efforts that she put in to raise me makes me picture her as one. At an age when people hang up their boots and enjoy their retired lives having done raising their offspring and seeing them settled, my grandmother was starting all over again.

I was difficult as a child, perhaps being weaned away from a mother at a time when we should have been inseparable, left its marks. Each day around midnight I would start howling and continue for hours together, sometimes through the night. Nothing could turn those wails to soblets or quietude. But at the very hint of a whimper there would be my grandmother ready to rock me, sing to me, walk me around the garden. And she would lay me down on my crib only after making sure that fatigue had taken over the insecurity and I had fallen asleep. As a child of working parents, my school going years were also spent in my grandparents' company. My grandmother, having studied in a convent herself, was my tutor throughout. I never had to resort to tution or classes; each day she would make sure to wind up the household chores before I returned from school so that I get her undivided attention be it in studies or as idle company. At an age when I should have been the one taking care of her frail aged being, she was tending to me in sickness (When I fall ill it always does reach the pinnacle of the disease and then curves down towards recovery) spending sleepless nights in a row. And I can go on and on about this and the likes. 

But today, and for quite some time now, I have been rude to this lady whom I owe my entire identity to. And all because her mind has gone fuzzy from a disease that is eating her memories away. And that she is trying real hard to at least grasp things whilst standing at the periphery of our real world and stringing together the exiguous remembrances by packing the void spaces with figments of her imagination. Today I find her incessant inquisition getting on my nerves, her off-the-wall reasoning to be vexatious and her ramblings to be unworthy of an audience or an antiphon. And today when she is the child who needs to be pampered, coddled, cosseted, listened to and loved beyond reason and condition, I, who should be first in line to try and repay an infinitesimal part of the debt, appear to be walking away. I shout, rant and scream at her which on most days she digests with the same smile though a tad dismal. Sometimes she quietly gets up and walks away muttering an apology. On rare occasions when perhaps her fortitude cracks at having the apple of her eye treat her with far less patience than she deserves and as an encumbrance, does a teardrop or two form in those forlorn eyes and roll down those wrinkled frail cheeks. But she brushes them aside just as she has been brushing aside every insolence of mine for the past how may months now. And each time it has left me feeling guilty and extremely ashen-faced, in a pool of tears! :'-(

P.S: My grandfather has an equal role in nurturing me. I am what I am today because of both my grandparents. But this post is dedicated to my grandmother specifically because of the passage from the book. I shall be writing a separate post on my Popshu (as I lovingly call him). I am working on keeping a rein on that irritable persona of mine for they mean the world to me and I do love them, a lotttttttt!!!!!