My grandfather passed away last night, at the age of 86. I only met him three times — the summer of 1998, when I spent my fifth birthday at his house in Jammu; a week or two in 2006, when I was 13; and last in 2018, when his illness had progressed to the point where we could no longer have conversations.
So I instead knew him mostly through stories. Stories of him growing up as a British colonial subject in what is now Pakistan, and as a 13-year-old being forced to flee to the Indian side of the Partition and leave everything behind; stories of the loyalty he earned from the soldiers under his command when he stood up to corruption in the Indian army that hurt them, even at the expense of his own career; stories of how, as a man with white skin, hazel eyes, and orange hair, taxi drivers mistook him for a foreigner and tried to overcharge him until he calmly told them in Punjabi he’d have them arrested if they did so; stories of his radical feminism by mid-20th century Indian standards, quashing all attempts to “marry off” my mother and my aunt as teenagers (as was common, even among his own family) and insisting they go to college and build careers of their own; stories of his poetry translations among the four languages he spoke.
The memories I do have are conversations about politics, world affairs, and the violence and instability that rocked his adopted home state of Jammu & Kashmir; visits to the mango grove in his backyard, where we picked them off the trees together; hearing his deep voice flit effortlessly between English, Hindi, and Punjabi; the sight of him standing outside the house waiting for me to arrive on my second visit, with “WELCOME GAUTAM” written in chalk on the driveway; the stacks and stacks of books in his personal library, from which, at his insistence, I took as many books as I wanted back with me to America.
His legacy lives on in my middle name and in the faintest of orange highlights that can be seen in my hair under just the right light; the stories will live on as an aspiration to meet his example of integrity, dignity, and quiet but firm resistance against any who would mistreat those under his care, be they his soldiers or his daughters. Rest in peace, Nana.