Grandparents & Grandkids

Once there was an old man. You could say that he had a natural predisposition towards crankiness. He did not get along with most grown-ups but he had a granddaughter who stayed along with her parents in the house of her grandparents. And this granddaughter was the apple of her grandpa’s eyes.

Both grandfather and granddaughter would spend every available moment together playing, singing or going out for walks. At that time, the granddaughter could not have been more than 3 years old and she had just started playschool. Every morning before going off to school, she would rush over to her grandparents’ room, coax her grandfather out of bed and get him a glass of water. After she returned, both the old man and the young granddaughter would play their own peculiar games. One of the games was pretend-fishing, the duo would spread out pages of old newspapers on the living room floor; and then both grandfather and granddaughter would take out cane sticks with threads attached and pretend that the scattered paper was indeed fish, and proceed fishing. They would pretend to put their fish in a bag so that they could carry their catch home. Another game was bashing stuff; the old man would take out old cups of china, clay pots and other odds and ends of breakable stuff, and lay it out before the young kid like a veritable spread. The granddaughter would then pick up any object that caught her fancy and go thunk-thunk, disintegrating and scattering little bits of broken stuff all over the living room. All this noise and mess would anger the grandmother who would loudly admonish the frolicking duo. The grandfather would then reply, “She’s just a kid; she’s supposed to break things, It’s OK.”

One day while having his customary morning glass of water offered by the granddaughter, the old man was pointing out a lizard on the wall. He was talking to his granddaughter about the lizard and its life (what it ate, how he could grow back its tail even if it fell off, etc.) and walking towards the lizard, looking up and still holding his glass of water. He struck the arm of a chair and fell down on the floor. He took a nasty fall and the family took him to a hospital. The old man never returned home.

Sometime later the garlanded portrait of the old man was put up on a bureau in the grandparents’ old room. Every morning brought an inexplicable puddle of water on the bureau-top just beneath the portrait till the family found out what was causing it. You see, every morning before leaving off for school, the young granddaughter would still fill out a glass of water, stand up on a chair and hold it to her grandfather’s portrait. She would put the glass to her grandfather’s lips in the portrait and try to make him drink.