Grandpa died when I was five. He had been under the weather for a few months before suffering a stroke. I remember Daddy taking me to the hospital to meet him.

“When will the doctor let you go home, Grandpa?” I asked, jumping up and down on his bed.

“Who are you?” he asked me. I said my name out loud.

“No, you’re not. You are somebody else. Where is my G? Where is she?” Grandpa teased me. He always did that. It was a game we played.

This is one of the few memories I have of him. To this day, when I’m playing with a kid that I really like, I do the same.

There’s another vivid memory – Grandpa, Granny, and all my paternal aunts, uncles and cousins were at our home for lunch one day. I had already been fed along with the other kids and was asked by my mother not to disturb the elders while they ate. But I wanted to watch Grandpa eat.

Grandpa was the oldest person I knew, so he fascinated me. Granny was much younger, and she was always telling me what to do. I did not like her too much.

I snuck into the living room and hid under the dining table. Then all the elders sat down to eat. I recognised Grandpa’s trouser legs and crawled closer to get a look. I snuck my head out and watched him eat. Then I giggled out loud.

My Dad, who was sitting next to Grandpa, dismissed me lovingly, “Don’t do that love. Go out and play.”

I refused to come out and crawled back under the table. Dad reached in, caught me by the scruff of my neck and dragged me out. I knew that there had to be a reason my father is so good with dogs!

I had to go into the bedroom and play with the other kids. “Where were you?” My cousin asked.

“I was watching Grandpa eat.”

“Okay, come we’re playing shipwrecked.”

“You know how Grandpa eats?”

“How? Get on the ship (bed) fast before the storm (my brother) comes…”

“It’s funny. His ears move. When he eats, you know…”

“Shut up.”

“No… see like this… Grandpa’s ears move. I saw.”

And that was probably the last time I saw Grandpa at home.

Then came the days at the hospital, where Dad took me a couple of times.

Once, after we left the hospital, I saw a man selling dolls on the pavement outside. I wanted one. The doll had jet black hair, blue eyes and was wearing a huge Victorian style gown, made of thin pieces of red sponge held together by tiny gold coloured sequins!

“No,” Daddy shouted, “You always want trash.” He still says that, by the way. What trash you read, what trash you eat, what trash you talk, guttersnipe!

I ran back inside the hospital, into Grandpa’s ward, and complained.

Three of us returned back home that evening; Daddy, me, and my new doll Rosie.

A couple of weeks later, Dad came home looking really sad. He was still in his white uniform when he asked my brother and me to sit on the couch, and said, “Grandpa died today.”

“Okay,” I said, “When will you take me to the hospital again? I want to play with him.”

“Shut up, stupid,” my brother pinched me.

“What?”

“He’s dead, you duffer. Now you can’t play with him. No one can.”

“Daddy, what does dead mean?”

The next day I attended my first funeral.

There were too many people in Grandpa’s house and we didn’t have place to sit, or even stand. The band and my Granny took turns.

First, the band played loud trumpets and drums. When they stopped, Granny cried out loud. Then she stopped and the band took over. This went on all day.

In between, the neighbour’s parrot kept shouting out, “Hello Dolly! Mona Lisa! Mona Lisa!”

My cousin and I ran around till we got dizzy.

When it was time to take the body to the church, they made us all stand around it and someone took pictures. He held the camera in one hand and a big flash in the other.

I couldn’t see, so I kept pushing my tall brother to try and get ahead.

“Baby, stop moving,” said the man with the camera and big flash.

We still have the pictures. In one of them, my cousin and I are looking at each other and smiling. Everyone around us looks forlorn and sad, and Grandma has tears streaming down her face.

Later, someone packed all the kids in a cab and took us home. When the rest of them returned home after burying him, we were already asleep.

It was 30 years ago and unfortunately, it’s the day that stands out the strongest among my memories of Grandpa. I think about him often and am always asking Dad questions about him.

Dad is reticent most of the time because the truth is; he didn’t know his father too well. Grandpa, you see, was a bit of a recluse. He spoke very little, and to very few people. Mom tells me more, but her stories are always about how she was his favourite daughter-in-law. Beyond that, she remembers nothing.

My brother spent the most time with him, out of all the grandchildren. But even if he remembers, he doesn’t say much. My brother is really a man of few words. He says precisely 25 words to me every year and once he reaches the limit, he stops talking.

My brother wears Grandpa’s watch sometimes. Nobody gave it to him; he just took it one day along with Grandpa’s air rifle.

I have Grandpa’s chair. My brother took it from my parents’ home when he got married and bought a house of his own. A couple of years back he came to me with it and asked me to keep it. His wife probably asked him to get rid of “junk”. My mother is also like that; anything old is junk!

I don’t know how old the chair actually is but Grandpa brought it to Bombay from Goa, when the family moved here in 1953. So it has to be much older because Dad remembers it from when he was a little kid in Goa.

If Granny was still alive, she would have told me how much it had cost back then. She remembered the prices of everything. Based on what she used to tell me, I would put the price at 5 or 6 rupees.