Leela

From my childhood, I used to hear a lot of stories from my grandmother. The stories were of her childhood days, set in the rural village where she lived. Sometimes these stories felt as if she lived in a fantasy world. My favorite incident rewinds to her old days when she ran towards an angry cow that was about to attack the small kids playing around the paddy field. What would you say, then, to a woman who stood right in front of one in a mad state — and held her nerve — for half hour? My grandmother did not move and then caught the horn, and with all her strength, she pushed the cow backwards, and it ran away.

Though nothing dramatic happened in the story, it happened inside of me. Would I have done the same if I were in her place?

She was a voracious storyteller, the kind that made stories come alive like movies, and I became completely enraptured from a young age.

On her lap, she would tell me to enjoy life, fall in love, read, and that it’s okay to have a fantasy world, and I realized that she was one of those women who was ahead of her time.

In her entire day schedule, one hour she would lock herself. Leaving me and my brother more curious about that one hour, that mystery was kept locked, and she never talked about it.

Finally, one day, my brother kissed her last, and comfortably and peacefully she drifted off to sleep and into eternal rest. I could not go next to her, and even today, I disbelieve her death.

I went to her room and tried to feel her smell. I came across a trunk. I gathered myself to open it and saw that she had all her universe within the trunk. I came to know from where she learned to be happy, positive, ferocious, and independent. The trunk was full of books where she used to meet the handsome detective of "The Roman Hat Mystery," where she lived "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and behaved like Kamala Das from "My Storybook" at the age of 70. I sat there still for hours and hours, thinking about her one hour and how much she loved herself for that one hour that made her life worth living.

And then I remembered the words she used to always tell me from the book “My Story:”

"I am a sinner, I am a saint

I am the beloved and the betrayed

I have no joys that are not yours

No aches which are not yours

I too call myself I"

All these thoughts passed through me one after another spontaneously. In the end, I realized that everything is orchestrated and culminated to form a single thought.

She left me with many lessons. To be present now is the greatest gift and we are here to feel the earth with our bare feet, smell the air after rain, embrace our beloved. If this is not being lucky, then I don’t know what is.

Whenever we were low, she would sit next to me and my brother and whisper, “I know we are nothing compared to the infinitely vast cosmos. But out of all the odds, we are here. And it makes us special, a star made from stardust.”