My grandmother has long doted on me with her eyes. The mesmerising lilac ring around the pupil, cataracts of course, would squint at me with the warmth of a thousand Punjabi suns. Staring into my face in my earlier years, she would search for some meaning as I spoke. We both spoke a number of languages, but none overlapped and words were never an option. Still, we held countless conversations that transcended words entirely. I’m sure that we spoke about forgiveness and spirituality the day I was born, when she laid her eyes on me despite my bastard nature. To this day we speak only the language of myth, primal and supernatural messages inferred from one almond eye to the next.
I’m only human. The desire for immediate knowledge started to supersede the power of the primal and supernatural; I grew impatient and reached out for more direct communication. In a series of handwritten letters, my cousin became our medium. Asking her my questions, translating and recording her prolonged responses. Since I had never been acquainted with her words before, it was hard to distinguish what flavour of the writing might be his addition. I began to distinguish a certain hue, lilac too: the aftertaste of her gaze was being whispered through my cousin’s perfect handwriting. Though I’d never asked about him, she primarily spoke about my deceased grandfather. She said to me that during wartime he had lived in the jungle. Without the slightest hint of exaggeration, a woman that I had never spoken to calmly explained that I was descended from a man who rode tigers, fought snakes and survived on nothing but coconuts. I reread the letters several times, searching for a hint to decode this mystical account of my grandfather, but the nonchalance rendered the tale almost banal. Once I accepted that I was descended from a legendary figure, I began to gain powers of my own. I would wake up in the night and fly over the city, performing my own incredible feats of survival. It’s easy to overcome earthly anxieties when your grandfather rode tigers.
Last Christmas I agreed to babysit my neighbour’s young children. It’d been a few years since I'd harnessed my grandfather’s powers. We played with freshly unpacked superhero figurines. I obligingly performed a dramatic defeat when the children flew the figurines one by one into my face. As I lay in a dramatic slouch, eyes rolled back and tongue out, I was told all about the superheroes. “Spiderman si arrampica” (Spiderman climbs), said the children. Unlike my grandmother and I, we shared at least two languages. “Hulk è molto forte” (Hulk is very strong). The little boy pauses and turns to look at his sister gravely. “Ma il nonno di Kiran è il più forte”: But Kiran’s grandfather is the strongest. I fought against my instinct to laugh in disbelief. Switching to english, he asked me “Is it true that he is taller than the Christmas tree?”, “Is it true that he fought in the jungle?”, “Is it true that he was the first human to ever walk the earth?”. Each question I answered in a mixture of languages with a marvellous demonstration of how he had performed these feats, leading to a more and more fantastical picture. I left the children as they begged me to explain how my grandfather might have eaten dinosaurs. Their parents, besides themselves with laughter, told me I had once spoken about my cousin’s letters in front of the children. Since then, my grandfather had become an urban legend amongst the children and their playmates. I left the house with mince pies and an immense sense of amusement with the universe, thinking of a group of strangers’ sons and daughters who reenacted the feats of my Punjabi grandfather in their Church of England school.