Have you noticed that when something tragic happens we cling on to tiny details? We scrounge around as if collecting fragments of broken glass, desperate to know everything.   Grieving silence is punctuated with the most irrelevant questions. What time of the day was it? What were her exact words, how did they sound? How did you hear of it? Today, I noticed that I needed to know the answers to all these questions. It is as if the bare truth alone is too much to bear; the sense of knowing every little detail and the ability to paint an accurate picture gives one a false sense of control. If I know everything may be it will make sense. Maybe hidden somewhere in all that detail is something that will help, something that will make it all better. So I sit here restless and hungry for information, information that can never change the cold fact of death.

I should just start a separate blog dedicated to archiving my grandmother's thoughts. So today after she reads my little write up on school for the website she says, I did not go to a school like that but I overcame my prejudices. Pause. True, I must have been a little influenced by my father. After all, he was a theosophist who believed in universal brotherhood. Pause. Then I picked up a lot from your father. After he married your mother who is from a different state and community, whatever prejudice may have been lurking got washed out. Also, I leant about the world outside Kerala from my conversations with your Appa when he would come home for his holidays. He explains things very well; in this way my mind became broader. It's rather sweet when parents admit to learning from their children, no? 

My grandmother insists on affectionately calling my brother's young British friend saa'ip, the term used by Malayalis to refer to the erstwhile colonial masters. When I give her a hug she says 'thank you, thank you, after the saa'ip came I say thank you'. She can't contain her laughter. The saa'ip is a nice guy, she says. She actually uses the the word 'guy', one of the words that she has received through the osmosis of vocabulary via intergenerational cross-flows. British people are nice, she mutters and then pauses, they did turn us into a colony however. Hers must be the last generation to carry living memories of that period, for whom the moment of Independence isn't a chapter in a textbook but a personal memory. My grandmother was thirteen and remembers the parade in her small town. She pumps her fist and in falsetto cries, 'gandhiji ki jai! jawaharlal nehru ki jai!' You know, I even remember seeing your grandfather's face in the crowd. He was nineteen. Of course I didn't talk to him. Who would talk to him anyway? She laughs, pleased with her joke about his rather grim demeanour. When I the marriage proposal came, I thought, why not? There was no reason to decline. And the horoscopes matched like crazy, promising perfect compatibility and what not...she breaks her ramble only to say that she also remembers Mr. Jones, her English teacher, whose accent she could understand.