Nani
After writing letters honoring , I’d like to do the same for my last living grandparent, my maternal grandmother that I call Nani.
Home isn’t just one place. It’s where my family is, where my parents are, where my brother is, where my Nani is. Home was a house in Georgia but it was also the apartment in Jacksonville where my Nani and Nana lived and we’d eat aloo parathas and I’d get chai with Parle G in the short wide cup with the blue checkered pattern.
What I mostly saw of Nani when I was small was a woman who made incredible food and seemed to have an endless supply of perfectly sliced fruit to give to me at any time. Despite the fact that we lived in the suburbs of Georgia and Nana and Nani lived in Jacksonville, we’d see them often, taking nearly monthly road trips down I-75 to see them.
I fondly remember her taking the time to meticulously tear a loaf of bread to pieces and sit by the pond by the apartment, throwing pieces for the ducks to eat. Back then and even know, she always seemed to be reading a book about something or another and to my four or five year old self, they looked like the biggest books in the world. She was often in and out of the hospital and I would help her pass the time with thrilling games of Uno. My Hindi wasn’t very good then and it’s worse now, but that didn’t really matter when it came to the time we spent together thanks to our shared one word of Spanish. And after our games, we’d relish ice cream with equal joy, with an appreciation that can only be genetic.
Later, I’d learn that she’d worked a whole career before she came to the States. She’d not only gotten her Bachelor’s, but also her Master’s degree — the most educated person in her family to this day (more than me for sure). She used those degrees to become a teacher, then a principal. And she was the breadwinner of the family, earning most of the wages while still cooking most of the meals, doing most of the chores, running the household and sending her two daughters to private school.
Before that, she was just a ten-year-old girl living in Lahore, India, until the country was suddenly divided into two parts — Pakistan for the Muslims and India for the non-Muslims, and her family of Hindus was on the wrong side of the border. Then they were all moving to new places: a village called Adliwala and then a city called Delhi. She was going to a social welfare center before they found a school and then she was learning how to read and write Hindi because they didn’t teach that in Lahore. I wonder if that young version of my Nani could’ve ever imagined how much she would learn, how much she would achieve. Could she even begin to think of all that she would accomplish? That she would change countries again and see her daughters raise families of their own?
When I go home, I don’t get to spend enough time with her, or communicate as much with her as I’d like given her hearing and the language barrier, but she always says “khush raho” — “stay happy.” As I reflect on all that she’s lived through, on how her life led to my mother’s and led to mine, I can’t be anything but grateful that my life has turned out the way it has.
Is it any wonder that with a grandmother like her I ended up the way that I am today? Is there any universe where I didn’t breeze through school, become obsessed with reading and eventually become a prolific writer? Where I still have a weakness for ice cream, just like her? Main bahut khush hoon.
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - Renaissance by Beyonce - i'm late but this album is pretty good
ARTICLE - "Extremely Hardcore" by Zoe Schiffer - great deep dive into all of the chaos Twitter has gone through during Elon Musk's reign
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Khush raho,
Nikhil