in Colombo for three days and that's a fairly accurate assesment of
how things are around here. It's just like it used to be but different.
1. My grandfather's dead and the entire house feels so eerie.
After the funeral we re-arranged the furniture, changed some of the
light fixtures and tried to make it a bit different for the sake of my
grandmother. The thing is, it's still the same furniture! It's the
same furniture from when aiya & I were kids living in Colombo. Every
corner of this house is steeped in some memory of him. I was telling
Johnny Bappa on the ride in from the airport that it's strange to
think he won't be around.
My grandfather didn't talk much, it's not the conversations that we
miss, it's his presence. The routine of his life that we all had to
conform to, he did things in away you could set a watch too. Since he
died the cat refuses to sleep in the house, but everyday sharp at 6:30
am he'll jump through my bedroom window, make some kind of awful
racket & head to the kitchen. My grandfather used to be up at 6:00
everyday, he'd make his coffee, drink it in the yard, play with the
cat for a bit and then give him his breakfast at 6:30 sharp.
We would eat our breakfast at exactly 8, lunch at 12, tea at 4, soup
at 6 and dinner at 8. All these meals would happen promptly on the
hour. I've noticed that my grandmother, despite dealing with this
routine for 59 years, does not give a shit about it. We eat when
we're hungry now, which is what normal people do, but somehow it feels
so wrong.
I know my grandmother misses him terribly, but she's so resilient and
strong. She seems to go through periods of loneliness, the evenings
are the hardest. He used to go for an early evening walk after tea
and over their cup of soup fill her in on all the neighbourhood gossip.
As tedious as I sometimes find this whole thing I'm glad I'm here, at
least for her sake.
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