Listening to my uncle speak about his father, suddenly, lyrical as a love letter, a sadness entered
my being. It was made of the weight of a stone thrown in water, and the calm anguish in the
certainty of a jellyfish sting. I had not known my grandfather and there was no way of meeting
him now. I was late to the event, almost like a 17th racer for a race that had already declared the
gold, silver and bronze medalists.

I felt loss surging through my veins. My uncle went on narrating episodes from my grandfather’s
life. If he had lived, I would have called him ‘Dada’. The rare chance to speak to my uncle,
however, had both him and I calling my grandfather, ‘Dada Abu’ in reference to me. This was
done in such a natural way, that it felt as if I really had a living grandfather. Remind me to thank
my uncle someday for this extravagance. For my uncle didn’t realize that this nonchalant
referentiality, actually made me live out a linguistic nearness which was, otherwise, a dead
option.

This uncle of mine, my Dada’s third child and second son, has an extremely fair complexion, and
so did my grandfather. It was my grandmother who was a dark beauty. I think I can safely say,
that my own skin tone (which once a puppet artisan creating my face mask for a theatre show
had pinned as ‘olive’) is a blending of the two lines. Come to think of it, no one has ever
commented on my skin color other than this puppet-maker. James Baldwin writes, “the one face
that one can never see is one’s own face.” So I wonder, what people see when they look at my
face.

And I don’t mean the sharp eyes, or the delicate lips, but rather something richer than even
passing expressions. I wonder what life there is behind my face, inside the skin. Could it be that
my grandfather would have made this kind of comment? Now that he is dead, I suppose I can
imagine all sorts of comments he could have made. A literature and theatre professor of mine,
did comment that I had a changing face. In fact, in a matter of four months, he had revealed that
my eyes were keener, my voice deeper.

The voice work makes more immediate logical sense, since I had been in a class called “Oral
Interpretation” where we conscientiously worked on the voice. But how do one’s eyes become
keener? I wrote a letter once to this professor of mine on the 24th of October, which was his
birthday. In this letter, I had spontaneously called him my ‘the grandfather I got to meet.’ I
implied a spiritual reincarnation, and a kindness in his form, both.

I got the chance to study with this professor for 3.5 years in the city of the hills, upstate NY in
my formative, early 20s. However, I lost him to death as well, and today, as I was hearing stories
about my late grandfather, I do not know who it was exactly that I missed. Perhaps it was both
my professor and my Dada, for over time, they have both somehow evolved in my mind to a
tender synchronicity.

 

Artwork by: Sergey Chekhonin