Memories of Grandparents-2
A twelve year old boy, village-bred and very shy
Having but token familiarity with buses, routes and places
Escorts his mom’s mom, very sick and about to die
To the town forty kms and four hours away those days
Involving three buses, two junctions needing directions
And a km on foot, where her other two daughters lived.
She sat on the road and vomited, so bad was her condition,
The boy waited without a thought till she once again moved.
Finally on reaching the house wanted, everyone there was aghast
On how we two made it and critical of my mother’s foolishness
In entrusting a boy who knew next to nothing with such a task.
(But mom with none to help did what she thought right in all seriousness)
Grand ma gets promptly admitted in a hospital nearby.
Along with others, the boy goes to see her daily. On the third
She pleads with him to stay back with her that night
But, no, he runs away because he wanted to play with the other kids.
He never knew she was going to die that night till he was woken up
To board the ambulance which was taking her dead
Back to her native village, and the boy who sat with her was I.
My dad’s dad was dead before I was born
But about him I used to hear a lot all through my life
Because he was a big landlord who owned a village
Of twelve hundred acres, as the head of a joint family
He was a monarch of sorts, albeit, without a sceptre and crown.
Trained in herbal medicines, which he dispensed for free,
And a scholar in astrology and all those esoteric things
And a man of great virtues, he was much sought after.
Then suddenly the rules changed and the system
Of joint families went and after partitioning his estates
Among his kinsfolk , without taking an inch of land for himself,
He shifted to his wife’s place where too they fed a hundred daily
But they fell on hard times with the litigations that followed
The new laws which ruined families and my grandpa died poorer .
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