My earliest memories of my grandfather involve his voice. He had this deep register, tinged with cigars and whiskey. It had this drone to it like an engine. Words were offered sparingly, so when they were there it was like a luxury good. I coveted the ability to hear him cough on the phone all the way from Delhi. Like all great artists: his reading voice and his speaking voice were one in the same. He didn’t have to pretend to perform, he just was.
Before I could understand him as my “grandfather,” I experienced him as safety. He used to read me bed time stories as a little kid. His voice rang like a God, so he became an omniscient narrator — a disembodied voice that guided me everywhere I went.
After grandpa’s stroke last year, we invited some actors to read one of his plays. He was supposed to read the narrator. But he couldn’t do it. So he asked me to. I had been preparing for this role my entire life. The play was long, but he remained attentive. The way he smiled — no words.
As his cognitive abilities declined, he lost one of his final loves — the ability to read. He would hold his books like orphans. It was the closest I saw to him crying.
So, I would read his books to him. I knew he couldn’t really understand what I was saying because I would skip around just to check. It mattered more that it was my voice, that it was me. Sometimes — I would weep while reading. At this point, he was so far gone he didn’t even notice I was crying.
I cried because when I looked at him — so small, so meek — he looked like a child. He felt like my child. And here we were 25 years later with the tables turned — me reading to him on his bed. I’d like to think that my voice offered him the same comfort he offered me: that its melody and din reached him in a place beyond comprehension.
The doctors said the final thing to go would be his hearing. So at the hospital I whispered into his ear: “good bye” the same way he used to tell me “good night.”
