​​​​​​​On Crows, Bees, and Home Remedies

I never met my father’s father, so it’s hard for me to call him my grandfather, because the term comes with the baggage of all the things one imagines a grandfather would do. Like tell implausible but believable stories of the world that was, and how much kinder, cosier and more full of fun it must have been in his time than it is in mine. I never heard those stories. But the rate at which the world has been changing in the last four decades, my father’s time seems a century removed from mine, when he talks about it. His childhood was filled with small glass marbles won in footpath competitions, kites stolen from neighbouring rooftops, ghosts of dead women in old Kalighat peepal trees, and being made to stand buck naked in the stairwell for missing school.

My childhood, on the other hand, had die-cast metal dinky cars, the rubber insides of Gold Spot and Limca bottle crown-caps with caricatures of cricket gods, balloons with seeds inside that went “shhick-shhickk” when shaken, “Johnny Soko and the Flying Robot” and six straight full attendance awards between the first and the sixth standard.