Author origins: ‘My grandmother and her way of mothering us by telling us stories made me a writer’

When I was a little girl, my grandmother became both my mother and grandmother, less mother, double the regular grandmother. My parents had recently separated and my sister and I were sent to boarding school in the hills of Simla. My grandmother was annoyed with my father, her eldest son, but he was not one to listen to his mother. I heard him tell her that he knew what was best for his daughters and that she had no business holding them back…or something close to that but equally dismissive. My grandmother was not one to be easily deterred. She convinced my grandfather to sacrifice their annual holiday with four other couples and buy a small apartment in Simla instead. “The girls need us now. If we don’t, who will?” I had heard her say in her low voice in Punjabi to her very staid and stoic husband, our Papaji, who mostly looked like he ran things… unless you knew what we did.

My grandmother, the mother

For as long as I knew my grandmother, she wore salwar kurtas in a simply tailored style, fitted around the chest and straight down her sides with slits that went halfway up her thigh. The kurta length...

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