Afternoon At Grandma’s

I can see the sun melting into the horizon. A slice of orange fire and purple behind my grandma's roof. It’s a small home, red brick and stone and barred windows with painted grills. It's getting cold, a slight breeze has picked up and I see the grass in her garden ruffle and sway. The dahlias, roses and marigolds are losing colour as the sun betrays us and they nod to me, readying for evening. I sit on the cot in the middle of her ancient garden, surrounded by wheat grain warm from the sun. Grandma sets it out that morning, kilos of brown shiny wheat on a pristine white sheet. I asked her why and she said, “Food needs love too.” So I sat among the wheat all day, listening to her stories, watching the morning embrace the wispy endless afternoon, until the day began to fade into soft twilight.

I had played with my red football, ridden my bicycle and climbed into the lone mango tree in her backyard. I had laid my head in her lap, dozing to stories of man-eating tigers chasing foolish young men who went to pee in the fields at night. I heard of the lone tiger who walked through her village, moaning from an old musket wound in its leg. How her father decided to put the poor beast out of its misery and sat up all night in a machan, only to watch as the tiger disappeared before his very eyes, just as he was about to pull the trigger. I shivered at tales of mysterious wood spirits, of ancient stones in forest clearings where nothing lived, of balls of light moving across sacred hills on haunted moonless nights. I saw my grandma smile and glimpsed the child in her, a little mischievous girl with neat ponytails and a gap toothed smile, gazing into a camera that made no sound and bleached her favorite flower-patterned frock of all colour. I knew she had heard these tales from her grandma and she from hers before and wondered how far back the stories went, to a brave grandma walking through the forest, staff in hand, ready and willing to fight off witches and goblins and nameless gods, to reach her children and her hut and close the wooden door firmly behind her. To light a fire for the evening meal and gather her children around, to tell them of her adventures so they would pass them on.

I saw her lined face and knew her secret; in the pink blush of a sudden twilight, I knew she was immortal. A being without time or form, living and dying between the spaces of now and then. She would smile and hold me and whisper her legends in my ear, and I would listen and remember and maybe pass them on…

When did that day end? For end it did, but in a way I can never recall. There was just me lying on the warm golden wheat staring at the twilight sky like an impressionist’s painting, hearing grandma call to the birds in a tongue I didn’t know -and still don’t - as they flew home to their nests. Then the day was gone, lost in a sudden stretch of time that brought me here.