Through them, in those sad days, we managed to fill the black and white spaces of our grandfather’s silence with the rosy colours of imagined conversations. A little leather booklet of negative slides we found showed him with his wife in Kashmir in their 30s, smiling, hugging and enjoying life. A couple of leather-bound tomes also emerged; his poetry in fountain pen scrawls, some drawings and scribbles in Latin from his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. After qualifying as an engineer and marrying, my grandfather travelled the world with Burma Shell, settling variously in London, Accra, Bombay and Muscat until finally, he found his way to Dubai, where his two sons followed and where I was born.
I often wondered how the world of my father’s ancestors, that of Hindu Brahmins from the unstable Valley of Kashmir, came to reconcile itself with the dusty, expatriate-filled quarters of flat sand and hazy sunsets in the Emirates. I’m sure my father’s – and before him, his father’s – move to a land filled with stories of the Bedouin and their romanticised itinerancy led me to follow suit. Like my grandfather, I studied in India and England and then came back to Dubai with a wife. After six years in that booming, vertical metropolis, and with two children in tow, we moved to the perfect antithesis of New Delhi.
Now after four years here, we are moving again, to Colombo – in search of more adventure and more stories to pack into our future cargo boxes. With each move, we’ve had to take stock of our lives via our possessions. What do we keep and what do we throw away? We had begun to amass so many small bookmarks of our journeys that I often thought of the Bedouin and wished that like them, we could be more ruthless about what we shed.
All this moving around has made me understand my grandfather a little better. By the time he was done with the Middle East and had decided to settle in Bangalore, a city almost diametrically opposed in feel and location to his beloved Kashmir, he seemed to have accumulated so much detritus from his life that it had all become too much for him to worry about. “Let it sit in a cupboard somewhere, for someone else to worry about,” he must have thought. “I’d rather sit on my sofa and smoke a cigar.”
The experience has led me to think about what mementoes I should leave behind for my children and their children, for the sake of sentimentality. Those my grandfather left behind encompassed almost every stage of his life; ancient electricity bills and cheque stubs, custom-made shoes from England, mouldering school books, even his university coat and tie. From cobwebbed cupboards, unopened boxes of china and decanters spilled forth, seeing the light for the first time since my grandparents had them shipped from Africa, decades before.
When my wife and I eventually enter our twilight years, I cannot imagine what we might hold on to and store for our children to pore over, or pass on. What we have done already is to set up email addresses for them and every so often, during our frenetic family email exchanges, we include them, building a cache of electronic memories for the future. Photographs of them crying at birthday parties or videos of their cousins in London playing the French Horn will hopefully last until they begin to use e-mail themselves.
This way, when our children and their children come across our generational inbox many years from now, they should be able to find what they’re looking for – or get rid of what they believe to be junk – with a simple click of a mouse.
