The Gift of Grandparents

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle” – Jane Austen

It is an odd sensation to finally recognize that what I am most grateful for in my life is the fact that I have seldom been able to depend unequivocally on familial security.

Traditionally, broken family syndromes tend to swing one of two ways: they can make you or break you …so to speak. In my case they have done both. I have mended, after meticulous effort over the years, what was once broken and whether or not I can admit it to myself yet I have had plenty of help in the more recent past.

There has been plenty of pity too but I have discovered that even I am able to summon enough bite to deflect pity when the need arises. Mostly I have been blessed over the past eight years with the presence of grandparents. I realize that this is an odd thing to feel grateful for when one happens to be a twenty-something forced to abide by curfews and eat the blandest food known to man. By some odd lilt of serendipity my battered and bruised soul managed to find its particular flavour of chicken soup in the company of an independent, artistic, eternally concerned polymath of a grandmother and a quiet, contemplative, bashful yet brilliant grandfather.

Like all mismatched pairings it took a while to get used to; the occasional fight; the one-off tantrum and many a frustrated sigh but years later I know better than to be glib about this entirely unanticipated gift  that I finally received after years of loneliness and tears. A gift of being loved simply because they needed someone to love and I happened to be there.

 I don’t know of many people my age who seek company outside their own age, beyond parties and crowds in a quiet home with two people so different from one another they might as well be opposing magnetic poles.  There is definitely something to be said for the distance that old age provides though. All the cliché’s of guidance and experience aside, the real gift lies in the fact that every single thing out of both their mouths comes with a story set in a time I know nothing about. I am thereby a perennial student of split accounts pertaining to a rather one-dimensional version of history, philosophy and home keeping.  I have always loved old things. Having been raised on a steady diet of classical literature where all good things are set amid antiquity I still find myself seeking beauty and meaning in old buildings, old clothes, old music, old furniture and occasionally old ideals. Ironically though, I am told that my ‘thinking’ is far too 'modern' ...excusing everyone but myself.

Perhaps what I love most about living with Nano and Abbi is how they wear every one of their days in the folds of their skin. Odd as it is, I relish the glaze that covers their eyes every time they recall a past that might put them somewhere in the same temporal vicinity as me.

My grandmother is what anyone would call a polymath. A woman who knows far too much about far too much; a tireless worker; a stubborn survivor and very often bitter about the hand she has been dealt by a life that was too slow to catch up with her. She had to wait for me to love her though and it has taken me years to get there. My grandmother needs to be loved and told it often, which is a small price for the sheer showering of affection she constantly directs upon my ever-reluctant person but it is still something I have trouble expressing even though I have felt it for years. 
She is a 73- year-old woman who has spent the past summer making quilts out of old silk shirts, shalwars and dupatta’s. She has managed over 33 quilts in the past two and half months and each masterpiece embodies the sheer stubbornness of her inextinguishable talent. I have watched her spend entire nights piecing together scraps of ancient fabrics simply because she cannot sit idle and her talent and intractability often leave me ashamed.

She and I are finally able to have conversations that span entire nights where nothing is left unsaid. I recognize how odd it is to live with a woman nearly four times one’s age who wants to hear the details of your consistently vacant love life; your research interests and your opinion on her latest colour scheming as she hangs on your every word just to make you feel important.  Perhaps, what I love most about her is the fact that every time she sees me get into my car she says “Beta Ayat-ul-kursi parh lena.” Then as I watch her through my review mirror, she sighs and murmurs it under her breath on my behalf.

Then of course there is my Abbi, the man I consider in large part to be my moral compass. An old, frail and quiet being who lives almost entirely in a world he has created from his books which I have always dreamed of doing some day…to the eternal dismay of my grandmother. He and I seldom need words to have conversations. It is the best thing about living in the same house as him - the conversation is ever-present and ever-evolving.

Perhaps it is the rather morbid pitiable juncture of being back in Pakistan that has led me to question and contemplate nearly everything that surrounds me, above all the misery of somehow having been pushed back in time and experience. It has made me re-evaluate what is real and what is surreal in this mid-life I now lead.

But for once I am sure about something. I am confident of these most unexpected constants in my life.

Which is why the fact that they may not be here for long terrifies me more than I can admit ... or accept.