It’s our first real day in Bombay, and I’m seeing my grandparents for the first time in at least a year. The couch I’m sitting on sinks a little too much for comfort, but the room is full of sunlight and the even kind of warmth you find only in the tropics. Everyone sits down around me, and my Pati is all smiles and my Ajji looks fond and my Thatha seems content again. I look around the room, at the faces of the people who raised me.
My dad is happy to be in his city again, it’s obvious, and my mum keeps touching Ajji’s knee, and though she doesn’t let it show on her face, I know how happy she is. I stay out of the conversation for the moment, just listening to these voices that are as familiar as my own. These faces have aged over the years, but the new worry lines and wrinkles don’t render them strange. I wonder how my face looks to them, wonder what scars the past nineteen years have added, wonder what parts have finally filled out and what remains the same.
It’s funny. We all think of each other in stand-still time. To my grandparents I am forever five years old, running around their knees, clutching at their hands, swimming in their sarees that I begged to wear. To my parents I am myself, no matter what age I am; simultaneously the wailing newborn and the argumentative eight year old and the eighteen year old walking past the gates of her college.
To me, they are the people who raised me.
A Wide Eyed Wanderer 