My happiest memory goes back many years to a time when I was a child, carefree and still innocent of the ways of the world and what the future would have in store. For one blissful year of my childhood, I lived with my grandparents on a large dairy farm in India. Our ancient home was a haveli surrounded by a cluster of flowering and fruit trees – Indian almond and mango, coconut and palm, papaya, and casuarinas and hibiscus and frangipani.  It was an idyllic time, a bucolic dream which was punctuated with the sublime ordinariness of every day chores. 

It was a charmed time in my life. I was the favourite. How precious that is. It would never happen again.

Afternoon naps meant lying across my grandfather’s barrel chest and nibbling on his earlobes like a calf. “What is this nonsense,” he’d pretend to grumble. He was grossly embarrassed yet charmed by this tiny act of shared intimacy that was solely ours. On the occasions, when my naughtiness deserved some retribution, I could always find safety within the flowery cotton fortress of my grandmother’s voluminous day gowns. She would throw off the scent by swearing she hadn’t seen me while I remained inside her skirts, holding onto her thighs, trying to not giggle and give myself away.

Breakfasts comprised fresh milk and cream from the dairy. Birthdays meant a stove-cooked cake with icing made from hand-churned butter and ice cream that my grandmother made herself using a steampunk-like hand-processing machine. I remember never feeling the cold or the heat of those days. What love is there like that of grandparents? It is a cocoon. A spider’s web of calm. It brings to mind the Urdu word, “sukoon”, a Sufi term referring to an elevated state of mind that combines peace, wisdom, and contentment. What does a child know of such things, except in their absence? 

The day finally did arrive when my parents took me back to live with them. I remember it as a day of incredible grief. That’s the way it is, isn’t it? For every happiest memory there must be the corollary of the opposite. It was 1980. Bombay’s Sahar airport. I was travelling as an unaccompanied minor, at that point refusing to let go of my grandfather’s trouser legs. My grandfather – a giant bull of a man – heaving tears. My grandmother, my Bibi, red-eyed and sniffling into her handkerchief, unable to let go of my little hand. The stewardess in a conundrum. “I am so sorry, but we have to go if we are going to make this flight.” 

I went back many times in the years to come, spending my summers at the old house. Of course, it was never the same. I grew up. Too old to hide under Bibi’s skirts. Too old for afternoon naps and shared secrets. Old enough for memories.