My family and other people

Every kid should have a bald-headed grandpa with a white moustache and twinkling eyes who is a fount of stories. I had one like that. He was my mother's uncle. He spoke in a low voice as if he was giving away secrets and carried with him a whiff of mystery and adventure. He had had many adventures. Sandow dadu had grown up in Nairobi, Kenya and, in his youth, had been a self-taught geologist who had wandered around in jungles. We went to dinner at his house one or twice a year when  we visited my paternal grandparents in Santiniketan. The houses of Santiniketan each sat in a large garden ringed with a flowering hedge.  As dusk gathered around the crowns of the trees and shrubs below, the air grew cool and still and fragrant with night scents and the dimly lit houses stood far apart from each other like islands in the darkness. My mother and I would walk up the crunchy gravel path through light and shadow up to the veranda of the Sandow dadu's house. Sandow dadu's wife...

When I arrived in the morning to get her, aunty was pale and stressed out. "I've had loose motions all morning," she said. She was scheduled to meet with social security and they were going to reevaluate her benefits. The letter said, "If you don't show up for the interview, your benefits could be cancelled." That is their standard lingo, but it made aunty very nervous. She was solemn and quiet as we loaded her walker into my car and as we waited in the lobby of the social security office. When her name was finally called, I went with her and told the lady at the counter that she was hard of hearing. Some of the questions I relayed to aunty by yelling in her ear. For the rest we had to call her out-of-town daughter Dushy who had been on stand by for just such an eventuality. The counter lady was kind, aunty's benefits were re-approved and we were done quite fast. What a relief! There was a new spring in aunty's step, a new gleam in her eye. A...

Now that Vino aunty is gone, I miss her more than I ever expected to. She was rushed to the hospital and came back so many times - even the time the chaplain came and solemnly intoned "she is on her way home"  -  that I thought she was going to make it to a hundred. We first met her when we were moving into an apartment in Novi. (This was when we were still new to Michigan and before our children were born.) It was a Saturday morning and with help from our friends we were hauling boxes and furniture up the stairs to the new apartment. An elderly lady came out from one of the downstairs doors and offered to make us lunch. "You must be so tired! Please tell me. I can make sandwiches for you." Of course we politely refused. But early the next day there was aunty on our doorstep carrying a bowl of hot fried lentil fritters. "I have brought some hot vades for you." That was the beginning of aunty feeding us for years and years, even long after we had stop...

In the small South Indian town in which I grew up, my father was a doctor at the local mission hospital and my mother was the principal of the only English medium school. When my parents visited someone's house together, the terrified children couldn't get to their hiding places fast enough. In those days the doctor was a convenient bogeyman armed with a large needle. And everyone knows about school principals. On the rare occasions on which we went to the movies, the manager would fold his hands together and refuse payment. He would only accept, very reluctantly, when my dad insisted. We knew we would pay, he knew we would pay - the ritual refusal was meant as a show of respect. (In fact, in the India in which I grew up, the offering and giving and taking of money was a delicate undertaking. If someone did you a favor, it was considered rude to offer them money. It was not only doubting that person's generosity, it was also suggesting that something as priceless as hel...