Appacha

When I was 7, my grandfather was the tallest person in the world. He towered over the rest of the family when we gathered in the evening to pray; the patriarch of the house, starting every prayer as we followed along and setting the tempo as we sang. However, when my brother started shooting up as well, I started to realize that I was mistaken. Having friends who were so tall, my neck hurt to look at their faces further drove home the realization. It never hurt to look at Appacha. His face was stern when he wasn’t doing anything but he still radiated kindness. Shy toddlers who hid behind their mothers when approached by any of us would happily swing their feet next to Appacha, and he would engage with them with equal vigour. He was a man who was universally liked, a man without a selfish bone in his body, who had never said an unkind word about anyone in all the years I had known him.

To the imagination of a child, Appacha was something like a gentle giant. His movements were slow and purposeful, and whenever he did stir, his actions were significant undertakings that enthralled my childish senses. Take, for instance, ironing day, when he would spread a large thick sheet over the dining table and iron sarees and shirts and mundus and make me stand at the other end of the living room holding one end of the warm saree as he folded it methodically. Or the time he used potassium permanganate to clean the well and my brother and I lost ourselves in the deep purple crystals. Or when he and my grandmother would spend an entire afternoon baking cakes (regular and an eggless cake made specially for me, the queen of allergies) for us to take back with us to Bahrain. He was meticulous to a fault; he would carefully spread a newspaper in the storeroom and sift the baking powder and flour together for what seemed to me like an eternity. Surely it didn’t matter that much? This impatience is probably why I can never be a good baker. I am not sure who inherited Appacha’s endless reservoir of patience in our family, perhaps it is something that life beats into you. He was diplomatic in all regards; unlike my grandmother, he never took sides when my brother and I fought. He never raised his voice against the man who mistreated his only daughter for years either. My mother says this is a symptom of a weak personality, to always see the good in people despite their actions. Did Jesus have a weak personality too?

Most of my memories of summer vacations in Kottarakara swirl around his figure, sometimes seated in his favorite cane chair solving a sudoku, other times returning from an evening walk in a spotless white mundu. He is omnipresent in this house - I cannot look at a doorway or a corner or a spot in the garden and not see him standing there in a polo t-shirt and a kaili folded at the knee. He used to stand on the steps to the porch and greet us when we came to visit. Later on, as his mobility decreased, he would sit in the giant rosewood chair by the door. The last few times we came to see him, he was seated on his bed, hunched over. But despite where he was or how bad his health was, his cloudy grey eyes would light up when we walked through the door, and his mouth would curve upwards, revealing a happy grin that warmed every corner of my body. When we were still in school and holiday homework was still a thing, he would make the arduous climb up the stairs just to call us down for lunch. He would go through magazines in the evening to prepare bedtime stories to tell me at night that I could never remember the next morning. There are very few things I am certain of in this world and one of them is that Appacha loved his grandchildren. I cannot fathom the endless summer of childhood spent without knowing unconditional love like that. I don’t think I would be the same person I am today if I never knew it.

He had a bookshelf full of Malayalam encyclopedias, classic Russian literature and American noir novels and yet I never saw him read anything other than the newspaper. He had pithy sayings he would let out during conversations, but the most enduring one was him telling us to always keep things in their right place. His skin was extraordinarily soft but his toenails grossed me out. When I ruffled his hair, it stood up white and fluffy and I would laugh and call him Albert Einstein. I used to love it when he took his dentures out and his chuckles turned toothless, like a newborn baby. He still carried scars from a road accident he had gotten into when he was about to enter university. He once told me a story of how his town had gotten flooded and he had to swim home but the details and truth of the incident escape me now. He loved sweets - my grandmother would make sarcastic remarks about how he would probably dip his halwa in honey - but he somehow never faced problems with his blood sugar. Some things can better be explained as blessings.

I come from a family of teachers. My mother trained to be a Physics teacher - the fact that she didn’t is a different matter altogether. My paternal grandfather was a school headmaster. My maternal grandmother was a professor of Botany in a nearby college. And Appacha was a teacher of teachers. He was a professor in a B.Ed. college, a place people went to become teachers, so I obviously thought he was the smartest of the lot. My precocious nature ensured that the relentless passage of time caused me a great of anxiety from a very young age, and so teaching never had much appeal to me. I hated the thought of being stuck in the same place as my students crossed the threshold of my classroom to reach heights in the world I would never see. But seeing my grandparents’ old students devotedly come to visit them with news and gifts and wedding invitations, an assembly of old friends who thought the world of you, who shared your youth with you and made sure you weren’t forgotten - perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all?

Even as Appacha’s body grew weak with age, he worked hard to keep his mind young. He religiously solved the sudoku from The Hindu every day, he taught me to play checkers and unlike my grandmother, was always amenable to learning new technology. When I was still a child who hadn’t been disillusioned by the realities of how my family worked, I had birthdays where I would wake up to my family softly singing “Happy birthday” around me while presents that had been hidden in my parents’ bedroom for weeks would lie scattered on my bed. Christmases carried a similar magic, with sparkly presents appearing under the decked-up tree. Yet, equally exciting as the presents was a little gift I would receive in my inbox - an animated greeting card from 123greetings.com carefully selected and sent from my grandfather’s email. I didn’t spend September or December in India but my grandfather still managed to be a part of those rosy echoes of childhood.

There are people who are so intertwined with your childhood memories that their death feels like the death of your childhood. I was lying next to Appacha one night when I felt the pangs of puberty materialize as two bony mounds under my chest. My mother tells me I got scared and asked him what it was but I no longer remember that. It frightens me that I can’t remember words and names and faces as well as everyone else. Sometimes, life feels like a dream that is slipping through the sieve of my memory. I try and try to hold on but it feels like trapping air with my bare hands. So I write. To capture the sensation for a bit longer. To remember how it felt to hold Appacha’s smooth hand and squeeze it and feel my hand get squeezed back with his old strength even as he lay helpless in bed. To etch into my brain the weight of his body as I pushed him up so he could drink water without choking in his final few days. To keep in my heart the last time I ever gave him a kiss goodnight before he left this world for a happier place.

At 5 AM on 15th July 2025, I watched them measure Appacha from head to toe for his coffin with a piece of black thread. They gave me the thread for safe-keeping. My grandfather, once the tallest person in the world, now fit in the space between my closed fist and my beating heart.