A couple of years ago, perhaps seeing us typing with ferocity or looking at our growing shelf, our grandfather handed us a tattered Roget’s Pocket Thesaurus, an atlas, and a few pens and pencils. This was a time when my dreams of becoming a writer were growing. I was writing my first fanfiction, working on short stories, and always trying to come up with the perfect (read hipster or edgy) Instagram caption. This was when a time when the three of us had a new house to explore, leading to newer discoveries in our bond with our grandfather.
I understood why our grandfather would give us the thesaurus but the atlas was something we wondered about. The pens I understood, the postcards without any messages we did not quite understand then.
These days, more than ever, I think about the word inheritance. Of all the things we will possibly inherit from our grandparents in the coming years. Of all the things I would kill to inherit from them, such as the camera grandfather got back from his visit to Germany. The pickle shelf my grandmother got from her mother, which we used as a bookshelf for a few years. All of grandfather’s books. The ivory bangles her father gifted her when she was young. I would have liked to inherit the newspaper where the map of new India was printed for the first time but, alas, that was done away with on an irrational cleaning spree by our grandfather. A hoarder for fifty years and this is what he chooses to throw out when he cleans his house.
And then there are the other types of inheritances. The ones that cannot be passed down one summer afternoon or written for you in the will. This kind can only be passed on with time spent in each other’s company. By learning through observation and stories. So these days, more than ever, I think about things already inherited from our grandparents.
There is the love of reading, of spending one’s time with books, newspapers (I detest these more and more, unlike our grandparents), magazines. Of building your world with words. I remember us three kids being read a comic every Sunday from the regional newspaper by our grandmother. The comic followed the antics of a little girl whose name translated to ‘tiny’ too, narrating funny anecdotes of her life with her friends and family. I also remember trying to learn this language, difficult to read which is also perhaps why we lost interest in learning it. Twenty-year-old me, who was learning about ancient scripts, must have shaken her head with disappointment. Twenty five-year old me cried knowing that these words might die soon, tears spent over the language handed down to us by our grandparents. For a language that cannot be written down, for the language I first spoke in and speak less and less of with each passing day. The language that introduced me to storytelling and the one that I will probably fail to tell a story in. The language that is made of so many parts of our grandparents, of the different states they lived in, of their privilege and the lack of, of their English education, of the wars and battles won and lost by them. The inheritance most precious and the easiest one to die if not nourished with conversations.
There are the other inheritances. The most valuable: how to talk to the house help. How to be their friend, their daughter, their sister. How to respect them. How to give them the same things we consume without second thought. How to share, how to make them family. The least valuable: the anger. When I get angry, it is our grandfather’s anger I notice reflected in my actions. It is his stubbornness to back out of an argument that I have inherited. But, thankfully, we have a mother whose ways of dealing with tense situations are something I am trying to inherit. There is the one I am proud of: grandfather’s punctuality, better than every fascinating souvenir he has collected over the years.
There are things I am not sure I know fully yet to inherit them. Would I want to inherit his relationship with his siblings? Would I like the way my grandmother laughs? There are things I have inherited from them and shed. There are elements greater than me that will make sure I inherit some of my grandparents’ traits. The things I know someone else is waiting to snatch away from our hands. The helplessness over the loss of something is something I will inherit from them too perhaps.
These days, more than ever, I think about the word inheritance. I think of this word and I am fearful. It makes me wonder of the emptiness that will follow after we are bequeathed the material belongings of our grandparents. I think of the diamonds, the large atlas with the beautiful illustration of the moon, of the silk saris that will go to our mother and then us, and then someone else, and the fear enters my body. But while the fear and sadness will always exist, there is the hope of the inheritance of the stories lived through these objects. The inheritance of joy created together, of memories, of struggles. The hope of celebrating lives well lived, through anger and smiles. And of course, the hope of passing these on one day, if not to hypothetical grandchildren of our own but to someone, somewhere. To pass on tales, smiles and memories is another inheritance given to us by these two souls and to do the same (probably using different mediums, hopefully using the same language) will perhaps be the only right way to do justice to all the things inherited and the ones to be inherited. Only then will the emptiness will be filled, only then will the loss of them being taken away from us will make sense. Only then.
