Everytime I see my hand I think of my grandfather. I can’t help it. Some stories from childhood are woven so tightly into the heartstrings that one can’t help but look at certain things through that fiter, that latticework of memory and familial mythmaking. So, what story is this? Well, my great-grandmother lost her eldest son too early, my mother lost her father, my beloved grandmother, her husband. Fighters that they are and were, they battled on through even while their loss baffled them. It removed the ground from beneath their feet until they fought and fought and then again, fought some more to regain it.
I came along. Far too late, some might say but that’s another story, for another day. I came along, and while holding me in her arms, my great-grandmother found some trace of her child in his grandaughter. Where did she look? At my fingers. Of all the things to inherit, she believed that I had inherited my Dadubhai’s fingers. So specific and so particular, the kind of thing that only a mother could notice. How often he must have lain in her lap, and how she must have pored over him, studying every line of this body which her’s had made and what a loss it must have been to know that in her own lifetime, she would see that body resting not on earth but in heaven. How peculiar it must have been to then find – so many years later- echoes of her child in his descendant, to know then that in spite of ourselves, we go on and on. So I look at my hands now, and I see the grandfather that I never saw. I explain away the peculiarity of my middle finger my ‘mummy finger’, to my son. I show him the crookedness of it, the way that the nailbed lies askew and I tell him that I have inherited it from the grandfather that I never knew but whose presence loomed large over my childhood.
My grandfather’s presence literally loomed large over my childhood. Not just in the metaphorical sense but in the literal sense. You see, my grandfather was the subject of a portrait which remains, to this day, the best portrait that I’ve ever seen from that time. It is a tight shot, capturing him almost exactly or so I’m told. Bespectacled and be-shawled, he is the very image of the bengali bhadrolok. In my eyes, he looks positively regal. This portrait hung over the bed in our old flat in Picnic Garden. Every summer I would come and sit beneath it again. I would look out of the window at the pond and the old garage, look towards my aunt’s home and there he would be too, above my head, arming my gaze. Flawless and faultless, my grandfather became, to me, the stuff of legend. His love of food, his fairness (I am talking of his judgement here), his love for his daughter, his wife, his family. He was the perfect grandfather in every sense, the only problem was that he was not here.
The Migratory Mum 