Grandfather: A Sketch from an Indian Childhood
Reminiscences of a Morning A shadow of a man floats into my mind occasionally, a mere apparition, with a few vivid glimpses accompanying it. He was my grandfather. He reminds me of how people fade from the world without leaving any visible mark, no matter how interesting a life they have led. He was a middle-income, land-owning farmer in South India in the early 1900s, having about five acres of land where he cultivated rice, coconut, areca nut, bananas, and cashews. He was 72 when he died in 1977, and I was just a three-and-a-half-year-old child. I never got to know him except through his diaries, in which he journaled his income and expenses, and through his curious collection of porcupine spines, sands of different colours, red and white sandalwood pieces, conches of many sizes, a deer horn, and a pouch of ‘ponpanam’, the half-gram gold coins in circulation when he was young. In this collection, he also had British coins from when India was a British colony. ...