Cerebration

GRANDMA'S TALES: SUDHANSHU BHANDARI

Sudhanshu Bhandari is a historian by professional training having done his Masters and MPhil from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has also pursued a Journalism diploma from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai and taught at prestigious schools in India like the Doon school, Dehradun. The author has several publications in research journals and magazines like Mainstream, Geopolitics et al. In addition to his lifelong passion for English Literature, his love for the Masters of Russian and Spanish literature is also deep and abiding.

 

 

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In a cold winter’s evening with the fire burning bright;

My grandma’s eyes glowed like those embers in a charcoal fire;

We boys and girls would huddle around her in a circle tight;

 Which tapered off towards the epicentre of warmth and desire.

 

Hers was a wrinkled face hardened with the toil of three score years and more;

Her snow-white hair, it fell across her shoulders, like a skein of silk from head to toe;

She a frail, feeble figure with a pair of teeth missing here and there;

Yet, her voice had that magic to send you in a tizzy, or put you to tears.

 

Her thin wiry fingers created a panorama from dark and light;

Those chiaroscuro stratagems would be any shadow-puppeteer’s delight;

She gesticulated frantically and created a magical fantasy;

Her myriad figures leapt and danced in a tumult of wild ecstasy.

 

Those fleeting shadows across the wall did something more than just enthral;

They reinforced a bond of love from a passing generation to an upcoming;

When her deep, sonorous voice recreated a dragon’s voice;

It led us children scurrying for cover in each other’s embrace uniting our hearts and mind.

 

Those joys and terror that we shared as we lay mesmerized by our grandma’s tales;

Still reverberate in my mind’s eye, a I stand today with an adult’s vision;

They speak to me in muted tones of a Way of Life no more shall be;

Of innocence, simple elegance,  of shared values unencumbered by reason.

 

Now as I stand alone in that self-same hall;

Its musty, desolate, time-wrecked walls;

Aiming to recreate those long-lost years;

I fail to capture that ambience clear.

 

The mirror is there before my eyes;

Yet I fail to see the image bright;

The mirror cracks from side to side;

Proclaims of lost innocence and adult’s pride.

 

 

 

 


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