My grandfather was a man of two worlds — educated in the city, a lawyer by training, but steeped in the ways of the village where he was raised. Sometime around middle age, he gave up on his life in the city and returned to the village where everyone knew each other and time flowed differently.
I arrived a few years later and spent the early years of my life in this place where most people couldn’t read or write. They communicated in a river of never-ending stories. Nowhere else to be and possessed with all the attention in the world. My grandfather was in his element there, and he taught me everything I know about Indian mythology.
He was the anti-Hemingway. Economy of expression was not a priority. I remember sitting in his lap with my eyes closed, imagining every scene as though it were happening in the room. There were always subplots worth a meander. Side characters who were barely sketched out in the original text got full backstories. They were three-dimensional people with their own stakes. And their stories deserved to be told. By the time we got back to the main thread, I was riveted, primed for the action, because I understood it in five dimensions.
Decades have passed since those stories. I’m nearly the same age as my grandfather was, and I find myself thinking about what we’ve lost. There’s no village left to retreat to. Time caught up with them and they’ve discovered smartphones and social media.
Other things have changed too. There were two television channels in India for most of my childhood. We all watched the same shows, the same evening news, and we all had the same cultural anchors. Shared narrative threads.
Fast forward to the present moment where I live in a megalopolis, where I hardly see my neighbors, much less commune with them, where I spend more time deciding what to watch than watching the actual thing, where my newsfeeds show me all the same shit on different days. I mindlessly oblige because it takes too much effort to resist. But I feel nothing. And every so often, I wonder where the time has gone. I miss the stories. And I miss my imagination. And I know I’m not alone.