It was a sultry evening in Bombay, sometime in the 1960s. On the way home from school I had walked into my maternal grandmother’s house, to find her in a foul mood. Usually, Granny’s little kitchen reverberated with the cheerful hum of old melodies. But that day, she was muttering to herself, punching the chapati dough with undisguised ferocity. From the other room, I could hear sounds resembling a muted radio commentary. That was my grandpa, Militao Furtado, seated at the dining table, reading Ian Fleming’s Dr. No – aloud!
Grandpa had a habit of putting his finger below every word as he read line after line and page after page of any book… always aloud. Sometimes, he went back a few lines to read a sentence one more time to understand it better. Grandpa was crazy about books. No matter if they were penned by writers as different as Edgar Wallace, Zane Grey or A. J. Cronin, he devoured them all. Always immersed in his books, his hold on the real world was, to put it mildly, not very firm. But it was not just Grandpa’s reading habits, almost everything about the man annoyed Granny.
That evening, sensing her fury, I asked, ‘What’s wrong, Granny?’
Jabbing a floury finger in the direction of Grandpa’s voice, she retorted, ‘Can you hear that droning? It’s driving me crazy!’
‘You’re always angry with Grandpa,’ I said, in the poor man’s defence. ‘Didn’t you like him when you married him?’
‘There was no question of not liking him,’ she snapped.
‘You mean you had to marry him?’ was my horrified reaction.
‘Well, no…’ she conceded after a brief pause. ‘I knew him as a distant relative and my parents had approved of him.’
She knocked the dough around some more and went on, ‘But he was much older than me.’ And for good measure she added, ‘I used to call him Uncle.’
Uncle? This was weird. ‘What do you mean you used to call him Uncle?’ I asked.
‘Well, when we got married, I was just 15. He was 30.’
Granny was just fifteen when she got married? I’ll still be in school at fifteen, I thought to myself, speechless with disbelief.
Excerpted from Granny’s Goa in the anthology – Inside Out: New Writing from Goa.
