Random snippets and remembrances about my grandfather

Sitting in a folding chair, the hand fan oscillating nonstop for over an hour. 1^st rank vanganum. A clucking sound produced by the mouth in collaboration with the tongue. Anju veralayum vayula pottukoyan.¹ Handing me the newspaper with "Nee pathutu kudu." Chakravarthy periyappa hugging him with a loud Kanna. Going to see an S.Ve. Shekar drama along with Thatha in which saliva and spitting were such prominent subjects that I started squirming. Chinna vayasula avalavu azhaga iruppa.² His permanent uniform of white dhoti and white baniyan when in the house. His atrociously indecipherable handwriting.³ Flinging ice cream into his mouth so that his tongue or lips didn’t come in contact with the spoon. His mini-flashes of anger.⁴ Shivering uncontrollably after potfuls of cold water were poured over him and Paati for his 80^th birthday. Paduthukongo, maa. Asking those of us playing the card game Mail to go to bed because it was past 1 a.m. Thatha dressed in a cream-colored half-sleeve shirt, with grey pants setting off in the noonday heat. Konjam kadaikkum bank-kum poittu varen. Watching from the Thiruvanmiyur balcony his unique gait, which can only be described as shuffling, as he walked away

This long-distance bereavement is a strange thing. When I am alone and thinking about it, I am ruing the passing away of my paternal grandfather. Then, in one moment, I am back attending to the querulous demands of my daily life. Partly because of this dichotomy, and partly because I always look for answers in books, I decided to read up a little on the subject of death and mourning.

I was very surprised -- though not unpleasantly and not in retrospect -- to learn that there is a whole genre dubbed Bereavement Lit, which is flourishing wildly. (Isn't that ironic?)

Buried among the Best American Essays of 2001 is a gem called The Work of Mourning. In it, the author mentions the mistaken "euphoria of burying the ancestral past rather than burying the dead." Then, the author talks about a "memory-destroying dance" that people in denial go through.

Now that he is no more, Thatha appears to me as a series of images, like one of those montages that they assemble when bestowing the Lifetime Achievement Award during the Oscars. Nearly10,000 years ago, Homer is said to have written that life's principal fear is the disgrace of being insufficiently mourned. I can only hope that Thatha did not have this fear.