I Rediscovered Who My Grandfather Was by Reading His Book

When I was a little girl, there was a strange book on my parents’ bookshelves that always evoked my curiosity. Unlike the hardcovers that had their titles spelled out on their spines, this was a plain book with no cover or title. The color was a tannish brown, reminiscent of wet sand. The reason this book intrigued me is because it had my baby photo on the first page.

My fascination with this mysterious object helped spark my interest in all the tomes lining my parents’ shelves, and eventually my love for books and reading. When I got older, I learned that the book was written by Thatha—my grandfather, Srinivasan Kandriga.

In December 1978, my mother’s parents traveled to New Jersey from Bangalore, India, to be present for the birth of their third grandchild. And so Thatha, who had recently retired from India’s civil aviation department, took up a new hobby: writing. His first book was a travel diary, chronicling his and Avva’s—my grandmother—trip to the US to stay with us in the months after I was born; then on to Europe, visiting the UK, Italy, and several more countries. When they returned to Bangalore after their travels, Thatha wrote up recollections of his experiences on his typewriter, typing one finger at a time. Then he took those pages to the printer to have them handbound.

Years later, I finally understood that the reason the strange book opened with my photograph—a picture of a giggly baby dressed in light blue to match the gingham background of the photo studio—was that Thatha had dedicated the book to me.

“Dedicated to my grand-daughter Kirthana,” he wrote, “to whom I owe my trip to the West.”

*

Thatha was a proud man, brilliant and difficult and stubborn. I didn’t see him very often when my family visited my mother’s relatives in Bangalore, and he never returned to the States after traveling for my birth. While my older brother, sister, and I were all very close to Avva, our relationship with Thatha was more strained. When we did spend time with him, it was almost always perfunctory and awkward. Thatha had a great respect for my dad, who received most of his attention. The rest of us got only the occasional small talk. Thatha liked to talk the most about golf. In fact, he played golf until near the end of his life; he had won a tournament for the eighty-plus age group three years before he slipped, fell, and didn’t recover. He died at the age of ninety-three.

The last time I saw him was in December 2011. He had a recurrence of prostate cancer after having been diagnosed several years earlier. Given his age and his illness, my siblings and I knew that our visit could be the last. As if he were thinking the same thing, Thatha gave each of us something: black and white family photographs for my sister; golf memorabilia for my brother; and two books for me. Books he had written and bound himself.

One of these was his travel diary, the one dedicated to me. I was quite surprised to receive this. For some reason, I had thought that my parents had the only copy. But he had made several copies, which he had distributed to family members. What he was giving me was his own—the original. What surprised me even more was that there was a different baby photo of mine between the title and dedication page. This picture featured both me and Thatha, his stern expression and the ghost of a smile on his lips contrasting with my alert eyes and bright grin.

On the title page, written in blue ink, along with his name and the date of our visit: Dear Kirthana, with love and good wishes.

As a child, I never read my parents’ copy of the book because, for all my admittedly self-absorbed interest with Thatha’s travel diary, it seemed pretty boring. As an adult, the opposite held true. His gift to me felt too profound and special to just read casually. It needed the right moment, and I didn’t know when that would come.

Until the day after my wedding in February 2013, when I learned Thatha was in a coma at a hospital in Bangalore. I was with my mother in California, and we called him via Skype to say goodbye. A few weeks later, I was alone in my apartment and unsure how to feel. I didn’t know how to properly mourn him without the emotional release of a funeral or memorial service. And, to my shame, I had really barely known him.

So I finally pulled out Thatha’s book—the one he gave me when we last met. Reading Thatha’s book was like directly stepping inside his brain. Alive, he was such an enigmatic figure to me that it was astounding to see the world through his eyes—a world I was just born into, one I could never have known.

His gift to me felt too profound and special to just read casually.

He wrote about marveling at the efficiency of highway travel and seeing snow for the first time; about his boredom with suburban life, especially after retiring from a thirty-five year career and traveling around India and, on occasion, to the Middle East.

“I was not used to a lazy life,” Thatha writes in the book. “So I started looking for odd jobs at home; anything from carpet cleaning to car-washing.” He repaired a basement window, a tape recorder, a cuckoo clock, a stereo amplifier, the television, the leaky kitchen tap. I was amused by his specificity and admired his industriousness.

Thatha also included a description of the day I was born. In the book, he underlined the sentence that stated the time I was born, as well as my birth weight, in the same blue ink he used to dedicate the book to me. Thatha had reread the book before giving it to me, underlining all the passages in which he mentioned me and my birth. Each time I think about it, my breath catches.

Thatha’s writing demonstrated a wry sense of humor I don’t remember seeing in him in person. His observations would make me smile; for example, his thoughts upon seeing the White House during a visit to Washington DC: “[It] was somewhat disappointing compared to its International status and the impact its decisions make on world affairs. It is a moderate building with a beautiful lawn.”

Later, during a visit to the Smithsonian Museum (“one should never leave the US without seeing this marvelous museum, perhaps the greatest of its kind”), he wrote about touring the exhibits with my brother and sister. When he described looking up at the Saturn Rocket with my sister, awestruck by its massive size in relation to his tiny granddaughter, I burst into tears.

That passage answered the question I didn’t even know I had until I saw the typewritten words carefully tapped out on tissue-thin pages, until tears were streaming down my face. Thatha had been my only living grandfather; my father’s father had passed away before I was born, and my father’s mother died when I was very young. My siblings and I had one grandfather, but he never played the part, not in any way we could immediately see. The fact felt like a technicality, an asterisk.

Even though he had struggled to express it, I could now see through his writing how he cared for us, deeply. These pages were a poignant confirmation that, even though we did not see this side of him, he did see himself as our grandfather, our Thatha.

*

In his book’s preface, Thatha shared why he wrote his travel diary: “All I knew and practised during the last 35 years of my life was how to handle a screwdriver rather than handle a pen.” But he said he was motivated to record his personal experiences for “the children in our families.”

I am not sure, and can never really know, what changed in him. He was the person who wrote those words and kept this meticulous diary, which included family photographs, travel postcards, and even hand-drawn maps of the route he and my grandmother took on their European journey. But the man I met a handful of times was a near-stranger. To get a window into his interiority, to know him beyond the frail, serious man who struggled to make conversation with me and my siblings, was such a rare and incredible gift.

When I asked my mother what she remembered about her parents’ visit, she said that both she and my grandmother were so exasperated because Thatha just couldn’t sit still. He had to keep himself occupied constantly, she said, always underfoot and looking for something to do. And just like that, the perspective shifts. To her, Thatha was not the protagonist—the clever, well-meaning recent retiree looking to keep himself busy. My mother was twenty-five years old with three children under the age of three including a newborn, and her father was bringing more chaos into an already chaotic household.

It made me think about families and the assumptions we make when we see ourselves as the main characters of our own stories. Sometimes we don’t seek to really know who our relatives are beyond the perceptions we have of them. My grandfather’s book gave a part of my family history the sheen of a narrative, a first-person story that was very telling for what he hadn’t shared, as well as what he had.

Even though we did not see this side of him, he did see himself as our grandfather, our Thatha.

This was at the forefront of my mind as I developed what became my debut novel, Dava Shastri’s Last Day. In it, a wealthy and legacy-obsessed philanthropist named Dava learns she has a terminal illness, and decides to end her life with the help of medical assistance. But before she does so, she allows news of her death to leak early so she could read her obituaries and see how the world perceives her. This decision backfires when news coverage unearths two major secrets Dava had kept hidden from everyone, including her adult children. As they reconcile their idea of their mother with recent shocking revelations, Dava tries to make peace with her children, as well as her choices, with the limited time she has left.

While drafting my manuscript, I became a detective in my own family, quizzing my parents about their lives while growing up in India and after they moved to the States. My father went into his archives and shared old letters between family members. I even put together a list of questions for my parents and grandmother to answer, ranging from favorite books and movies to most cherished childhood memories. I wanted to find a way to record their stories for my siblings, my cousins, my niece, and myself.

In ruminating about Thatha and his book, while also at work on my own, I realized we were deeply connected. My grandfather started writing because he wanted to chronicle his journey to the States, which had been prompted by my impending birth. His book became the very first one that held sway over me, leading me to fall in love with books, and eventually inspire me to become a writer. More than forty years after grandfather had dedicated his book to me, I was able to reciprocate. My debut novel is dedicated to “my parents—and their parents.”

In Thatha’s book, there is one more underlined section, in which Thatha chronicled his and Avva’s last day in the US, three months after my birth. He sweetly described me as having a “million dollar smile,” which he illustrated with a photo I had never seen before, one of Avva holding me as I laugh in her arms, my smile so enormous it takes up most of my face. And while Thatha said he was sad to leave his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, at the same time, he noted, “one couldn’t complain; for life will always be so; we have to part sooner or later.”

In Dava Shastri’s Last Day, Dava’s children learn how little they truly knew about their mother, and find themselves wanting to figure out who she is beyond their own notions of her as her days draw to an end. After losing Thatha, I didn’t want to find myself in a mad scramble trying to better understand the people most important to me. While I do not think I’ll ever feel that I’ve learned enough, I’ll always keep trying, even when it feels like plunging my hands into sand and trying to keep all the grains in my grasp.

Especially because time is ticking away. We have to part sooner or later. Life will always be so.

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