the poorer me

The thing with the death of a loved one is that it doesn't make you sad per se. It's when you remember small things in context and you realise how much it means to you, how much you miss it, and how little you appreciated it that a poignancy gushes out through the spillways that bereaved eyes can sometimes be.

These days my grandmother keeps visiting me in an image of a hapless old lady frantically looking for her grandson on a strange, long school corridor. A curfew had been imposed in town after communal riots had broken out post Babri Masjid demolition. The teachers were brainstorming about the students' safety when she hotfooted into and out of classrooms with an urgency only duplicated in labour rooms. I saw her on the corridor and shouted, without fear of the looming pedagogic figures, 'Aai'. And then the entire class screamed out at the top of their lungs 'Aaai'. She saw me, came running over, and hugged me tight with my face buried in the soft of her belly. That was it - an old, uneducated, and stupidly doting grandmother making a mockery of a curfew to come to her grandson and a roomful of boisterous schoolkids united with him for a moment in the love for their grandmothers that they each wished were there. I had won that day.

She lost a few days ago.

My life will be all the poorer for it.