When my father’s father died a year ago, even though he was my first grandparent to pass, I wasn’t emotional. His was a slow slipping: first his professorial mind decayed, jumbling his memories and mixing the files in which he stored Shakespeare and Tennyson, then his body, which he refused to care for because he was too proud to admit he needed help. In his final years, I think we were all hoping he would let go soon, and find peace.
Everyone expected me to have a close relationship with him. He was an English professor, and I was the only grandchild who inherited his literary gene. But we were on different sides of the world, growing old and older on opposing paths: when he tried to engage me in discussions on Dickens and The Great Writers, I was still reading fantasy chapter books from the kids section; when I was finally reading his favorites in my college classes, his once-active mind could no longer hold an academic conversation. Or maybe we couldn’t talk because I was too scared of speaking in my rudimentary Malayalam, my status as a bilingual crumbling because I didn’t practice my parents’ language at home in Dallas. I know from pictures that I have his profile, and from stories that I have his anger and his passion, but that’s where our connection ends.
Over a dinner of idli and sambar celebrating my dad’s return from his most recent trip to India, my mom brought out her father’s latest (and probably last, due to his failing eyesight) book (he’s a religious writer, moderately well-known in a tiny pocket of Kerala Christians). In its final chapter, he accepts his old age and reflects on his life, telling stories that my mom translates for me and my siblings so that we can have a sense of history. In the middle of her retelling of yet another way God intervened in her father’s life, my dad brought out a worn, blue book. “I don’t know if you can make sense of this, but this was Velidaddy’s…”
The binding was shot and the pages, made with the thick paper of yesteryear, were chewed at the edges from that time the termites invaded his shelves. While Mom rattled on about another time Jesus saved Pappa when he moved to the US (have I mentioned that she idolizes her father?), I drank the familiar mildewy musk of old books and delicately flipped through MODERN LITERARY ESSAYS.
Published in 1932 with scholarly articles by A.C. Bradley, R.W. Chapman, and other forgotten academics, the anthology was a college textbook passed between brothers. Both my grandfather and great-uncle signed their names throughout the book, whether to remind borrowers that it was theirs or to show the world that they were there. Both brothers annotated in the margins like good students should, but I couldn’t tell the difference between their hands. Their handwriting shares the familial relationship that I see in mine and my sister’s, and the unexpected similarity to my mother’s cursive suggests that there may be such a thing as Indian Handwriting and, like my mom, they were probably meticulous students who followed every curve their grade-school teachers taught them.
I searched for him in every page. I hoped that something would give me a hint to who he was, something beyond what I’d heard and seen, some link between us. But the notes were what you would expect of students’ annotation: translations of Latin phrases, summaries of dense passages, definitions of idioms that British assumed everyone understood. There were no doodles, but there was a random signature at the end of a paragraph. The essay on Shakespeare (which would have been the first thing I read), though check-marked in the list of authors at the beginning of the book, was neglected. The most heavily studied and annotated was “Some Historians” by Philip Guedalla (meh) and “Tennyson’s Diction” by John Drinkwater (another meh).
I could say that the way he underlines and numbers the main points of an essay at the end is similar to mine, but I think the only link between us is that we’re both nerds. We both want to ace the class. We both have a hunger to deeply understand literature. We both need touch pen to paper and write to understand the abstract.
My dad thought I would like the book because of the essays—he thinks they were great writers of the past who can help me as a teacher and scholar. He let me keep it, and said he can bring back even more on his next trip. I’m elated to have this and any others he can give me, but I’m not planning on actually reading the essays. I just want to see my grandfather’s handwriting.
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