My Grandpa and Goodbye

Goodbye is such a temporary word. The soul doesn't adhere to it and the mind plays games with it. When you're young you think you can leave places and people, but later, much later, you know you never can and never did. All you did was played with time and space.

How often have you said goodbye to some one who had died several years ago only to find him or her come upon you at breakfast one fine morning? How often have you said goodbye to a friend when your paths had diverged and you had parted company, only to find that you have never really left him or her behind? For that matter, how often have you kissed a situation goodbye but it keeps playing over and over again in your head? In fact it would seem that the more determined you are to walk away from it all the more obsessive these thoughts and remembrances become. We carry the baggage ever so carefully, keeping it out of sight and pretend that it is gone. Forgotten. But is it ever deleted like the pixels on your screen, leaving no trace behind? I have discovered that nothing is ever deleted with any finality in life. Perhaps that IS the true essence of life….

Yesterday I went shopping to pick fittings for my new spa-bath for my newly renovated home and suddenly my late grandfather’s words kept ringing in my head - “Always purchase things that you need and never go for opulence.”

“Please Grandpa, how about a tad of luxury? I work damn hard and I want a dozen jets needling me at various shiatsu points, stimulating my rather protoplasmic body mass and if possible set my chi spots vibrating like a Harley Davidson’s twelve stroke engine in the midst of a thick Burmese jungle track.” You think he heard me?

My grandfather (bless his soul) had a tremendous impact on me. Although a lot of my behavioural patterns were in defiance of his authority I think the area where he had the greatest impact was my thinking. He sits there, right between my two visible eyes, smack on where my Third Eye would be if I had been spiritual enough to have ‘opened’ it through consistent yogic meditation or regular tantric sex. But as it is, for lack of both of these, Grandpa is my Third Eye and sees all. He still dictates the way I dress (with cleavage revealed or not), the way I style my hair, (highlighters and all), or the way I sit cross-legged on a highchair (especially with side-slits going all the way up to my thighs). But all of these are the smaller remnant memories which were basically the outpourings of our love-hate relationship.

The most profound of all Grandpa’s intrusion in my present day life is when I have to make decisions, both momentous and trivial ones. While he was alive and kicking we were often on collision courses and I would habitually wallow in misery and anguish for days on end when I felt that my freedom and spontaneity were curtailed for no good reason. In retrospect it was the healthiest thing he ever thought me – to trample the mind’s terrain turning it inside out, exposing the entrails of purpose, agenda, self-interest, common good and objective, before arriving at a decision. He cut my impulses in half, nay, into a million pieces and made me ponder and ruminate grudgingly before I would act on them. He definitely added another dimension to my angst and I would fume that much more and fret that much worse. Expletives too, often borrowed from the white man, would decorate my angry thinking. I felt glad he never understood these words because he was a Tamil scholar and had little use for English. But hindsight does what it is meant to do and I know Grandpa gave me many an important lesson.

Now that he is no more, I sometimes feel like a ship without a steady rudder - for a good while when decisions have to be made. Then I come home with not only a steely rudder but anchor steadfastly, feet resting decisively on solid ground. Thank you, Grandpa.

For example, yesterday when I eyed the Villeroy Boch bath suite with the slimmest of gold trimmings, I closed my eyes and imagined myself luxuriating in warm lavender scented water strewn with soft petals…then I woke up rudely to Grandpa’s peering gaze reflected in the gold trimmed wall-sized beveled Italian smoke-finished mirror. My Third Eye is a sore point, I tell you!

Grandpa was very down to earth and always reminded us that opulence was for the ‘select few’. He never ridiculed or showed disdain but said it like as if he was stating Newton’s First Law of Motion. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. His messages were loud and clear and very relevant no matter how you looked at it. For example – “Your hard earned money could and should be put to better use.” Ah! Of course.

And so whether it is syphonic, or wash down or a healthy mixture of both ‘movements’ ( the salesgirl said ‘movement’ like as if she was talking about the revered workings of a Rolex timepiece) I decided that I wasn’t going to put hubby’s hard-earned bucks on a toilet device, the water closet, where the family’s bowel deposits were to be made, even if sh*t-gazing is considered an avant garde art form in some crazy, idiosyncratic circles. No matter how well-formed, it is still going down the tube, right?

I so miss Grandpa and it is definitely a good time to remember him. Do you know that a three-in-one could cost anything between eighty to a hundred and fifty grand? I ain’t talking about an exotic orgy experience replete with a Jamaican stud and a Thai beauty but about a whirlpool-cum-steambath-cum shower. (Excuse me for the ‘cum’ used in such close proximity with orgy and whirlpool but I don’t know of any substitute word).

Recording devices weren’t really omnipresent in those good old rubber-estate days and I can’t recall Grandpa’s voice anymore after some twenty years or so. But I can say confidently that the distant memory evokes images from an image bank you think you have long misplaced or forgotten. I so miss Grandpa. My eyes mist when I recall how he would stand by my desk and make me recite by rote the simple holy verses every morning without fail. I used to feel rebellious and would insist with so much controlled anger that I will learn all of it in my own time. I would even sneer at him saying that memorizing them wasn’t going to make me a better person. Of course, I NEVER uttered any of these angry retorts to his face although I learnt the verses and how to chant them with a certain intonation. I was too timid and woefully shy of not only my grandfather but also most people. The words meant for him would run livid with angry emotions in some corner of my brain, like weeds in an untended corner of a wild, verdant garden. Yes, this corner of my brain was untended for a very long time and poor Grandpa must never know all the things that ‘grew’ like wild lallang there.

In actual fact Grandpa was none the wiser for the turbulent thoughts I had harboured. It is poor me because today I squirm and agonize at what horrid a person I was with Grandpa. How absolutely unappreciative and so wrong. Why was I such blustering fool? And you know what aches most? That I never made my peace with him. So now I suffer my past juvenile behaviour and ill manners, often stoically, wishing that I had made my peace with Grandpa before he had passed away when his kidneys had failed him.

Well, I did go to see him when he was very ill but I just couldn’t get myself to say anything. How could I when his glazed eyes looked at me beseechingly trying to explain why he had been with me the way he had been. I could see he wanted to make peace because he knew that years later I would be the one to suffer. He knew too well that I would be the one who would be tormented by memories and of a goodbye that wasn’t said properly. Oh Grandpa! Why wasn’t I wiser? Silly stupid me!

But you know what, my Grandpa has never really left me. That has been one of the most healing discoveries I have made over the last couple of years. He has become a living presence, a presence I used to think that the dead can’t be! My Grandpa is definitely more alive in me and my life today than he ever was. Funny, how we think we can measure the nature of our hearts and shape our life according to what we want, but in actual fact we are a mystery unto ourselves. And I am thankful for this mystery for it brings my Grandpa closer to me now than he ever was.

Although I was a full fledged adult by the time Grandpa died, I was never strong enough to accept him fully then. I chose and picked what I wanted to see and feel and dismissed other aspects of him, editing my experiences of our life together. But today I feel a generosity of spirit towards him that never seemed to have been there when we shared the same home during his last years. Sometimes I used to find his presence downright irritating and I had often wished he would go away and live with my other aunts or uncle. I am so ashamed by this.

Among so many other things he did for me, Grandpa tried hard to cultivate in me a love for Tamil literature and language which I had foolishly resisted. I still remember how he would make me sit cross-legged on the cement floor in the living room of the big white-washed estate house, staring moodily at shelves lined with Tamil books, and take dictation. It was a daily ritual and as he corrected my mistakes he would explain the rudiments of Tamil grammar and literature. Today they ring so clearly in my ears and I want very much for him to sit by me and read with me the wonderful epic Silappathikaram. I want so badly for him to help me understand the nuances of the verses that tell the story of Kovalan and Kannagi, told by Elango Adigal almost a millennium ago (between 100 – 500AD). I can still remember how that magnificent book stood proudly on the top shelf of Grandpa’s bookshelf. It is now on my nightstand and every now and then when a strange sentimentality knocks at my heart, I turn its pages and think of Grandpa.

I have lost the best teacher in the whole wide world and it pains me deeply that I had not appreciated what Grandpa was trying to give me. Still, I had grudgingly boasted to my friends at school that my Grandpa was the best storyteller in all land and had felt mighty smug about it.

The fact his, when I was beginning to feel the stirrings of passion in my heart and corresponding warmth in my body, Grandpa seemed like a dictator telling me what I should and should not feel. He disapproved of every guy who showed some sort of interest in me (although I never was interested in any of them). I allowed a certain kind of anger to simmer and boil over. I never understood why he felt so cloyingly protective over me. I should have because one of his daughters, my aunt S, messed up her life when she married a useless man whom my Grandpa had seen right through and had disapproved. But I had rebelled with much hatred, often with my body producing greenish-yellow bile that brought so much distaste, both organically and otherwise!

I flew away from the nest, off to college in another city, another country, far far away from Grandpa and thought how wonderful life had become. To be away from his watchful eyes and live my own life the way I wanted to, brought a certain kind of euphoria. But the irony is he followed me there too, in ways I had challenged and lost. The letters would arrive with regular reminders on what was important in life and how I should let both time and space add perspective to my impulsive wants and desires. Decisions, he said must always be well thought out. Yes Grandpa, I never forgot those even when I tried to forget you!

When I came back after my studies, met a wonderful man and promptly married I assumed Grandpa would disapprove anyway. So I stayed out of his life and made sure he was out of mine too. In retrospect, that was a disturbing period for me, a period mixed with happiness but laced generously with a wistful sadness I refuse to analyze and understand. I would cringe inwardly every time I had a family member visit me and give me some sad news about Grandpa. And for that terrible shortcoming, I carried the grief of Grandpa’s death secretly with me for a long, long time. Ever so often it would reach me in the stillness of a twilight day and spread over me, blanketing my sleep for that night. I cried soft sad tears into my pillow and begged for forgiveness. Forgiveness from all of my uncaring deeds. In the morning I felt better until the next time it happened……

“People come alive within us after they die with all their selves, all their open and hidden aspects, rather than just the selves we tried carefully to select as they lived.”

I read this somewhere and those deep and timely words liberated me. From that time onwards I started to remember Grandpa, not as a tyrant who tried to spoil my childhood and teenage years with a regimentation I baulked at, but as a man with qualities I admire in a good man. Because he was a very good man - by any stringent standard that anyone would define goodness.

While he had been alive, I had shut out aspects of our own lives, facets of his personality, times when he manifested his good side; but dead now, he seems to have given me chance to see him better, the complete Grandpa. He even helps me enter parts of me that I have never known about and I feel a benevolence that makes me smile more than shed sorry tears. In fact some of the worst memories are now passageways into parts of me that I hadn't been able to enter.

Now I know that my Grandpa was a man of considerable charm and intelligence and humor and grace. What I experienced with him and the qualities I mentioned seemed utterly apart then, but I know now that it is possible to have all these qualities and yet not reflect them in your behaviour with certain people for any number of reasons.

These days I smile a lot and remember kindly whatever Grandpa had wanted to teach me. Finally I have become a good student I should think and I know he will be proud of me. Logically you can think there is no afterlife and that once your loved one is dead they are gone from your life forever, but I insist on the contrary. Like my Grandpa, they are never out of your life. In fact, far from it, they are just a heartbeat away. I bet my Grandpa can hear me for he speaks to me even when I don’t want his comments.

“Just go with the rainshower, Maya.”

“Yes Grandpa, I thought of that too,” I tell him. Once when I would vehemently disagree with almost anything he had to say, today ‘we’ speak with one voice……

I love you Grandpa. You live with me and mine with a vividness that encompasses all the paradoxes of our lives both past and future. The present is beautiful because you are here now and I thank you with all my heart. I will always know that there will be no goodbye between us, ever.