Thank you, dadi

My grandmother and spices...they shared a great chemistry. She could easily give top-class French chefs a run for their money! 

I will always remember how fondly she cooked delicious mutton stew each time we visited her during our vacations. While the rest of the family gobbled up her sumptuous dish with traditional Indian rotis , I preferred Anglicised ways and chose hot buttered bread. Because of her age, dadi was more comfortable eating soft chapatis , yet she always told me, "Meghee, make just one toast for me too." 

It was most likely her own way of giving me company...something I will surely miss. Dadi would spend long hours in the kitchen, making jams and jellies and murabb a, which she would subsequently send out to all the members in the family. We both shared a common love for basking in the sun. Many a winter afternoon was spent with me and Ma lying on a folding bed and dadi in a plastic chair in theaangan , munching peanuts and enjoying the sun while discussing exactly why I have so many pimples on my face! 

Not long ago, as I sat near dadi's body, just before the cremation, I remembered how she had congratulated me earlier in the year when I had told her of my being appointed the English editor of my school. 

It was then that she told me that she too had held that very post at school in her time. The knowledge that I was, in a way, carrying forward a family tradition made me feel really proud. 

I also remember how she has once told me that it would be nice if I wrote an article about what she meant to me. So, as I sit doing just that, my sense of loss has slowly been overcome by a sense of duty, which I am trying to fulfill. 

I feel sad, but also very respectful towards my grandparents, without whom my own family and the generations to come would be impossible. 

For now, I cling to her memories and to the pullover she knitted for me, which incidentally, is the warmest pullover in my wardrobe...literally and figuratively.