Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
I remember thinking: ‘I am a full four years old, why does everyone treat me as if I’m younger than I am? I am quite ‘adult-y’ and smart. But granny never treats me like a child. We can sit together with our cups of tea (my tea is actually mango juice in a tea cup) and discuss for hours about the world, the family history, fictional stories, her past and our future.
She is my best friend and I can confide everything in her. I know she will not tell another living soul. I came last at racing today, she wipes my tears as she wisely quotes in Urdu: “Only the brave hoisted on horseback fall in the battlefield, how can a child who crawls on his knees fall?”
Her phone, a Nokia X2 handset was the only thing ancient about her. That, and her hair graduating from grey to white.
She grows older by the year but it’s like she is an Android phone, updating from Nougat to Oreo and onwards. Instead of living in the past like most old people, she lives in the future. Many people approach her for advice, to share their problems and talk to her. She is like the female Albus Dumbledore with infinite knowledge, oodles of imagination, immeasurable empathy and endless hope in life’.
It’s been three years since we lost her and there hasn’t passed a day that I haven’t thought of her. This week marked our graduation from school and the release of exam results of Indian schools, the air is about change and evolution but, today, I want to treasure the past.
As the current Youth Talk scribe, I have written about things I believed in, I just wanted to share a little about somebody who believed in me more than anyone else.
