![]() ![]() Her eyes were often lined with the black kohl that she made by burning charcoal over the fire. My grandmother’s hands felt coarse when she held mine, roughened by years of cooking and cleaning for her thirteen children. I would watch with fascination as she twisted her wiry hair into a bun and twirled a string of Jasmine flowers around it, shifting between chanting prayers and humming Telugu movie songs as she went about her work. ![]() She was a woman who commanded attention with every movement she made. My earliest memories of my grandmother consist of her daily routine. During my visits, I would often find her sitting on her bed, bangles clinking as she adjusted her dark-colored sari falling on the pages of her prayer book. My grandmother lived in Hyderabad, a South Indian city two hours away from Delhi by flight. It was only when guilt and fear of my mother’s wrath kicked in that I thought of checking the neighborhood park, a space that my grandmother often said gave her a sense of peace. My first instinct was to run around the block a couple of times and in the event that I didn’t find her, hope that she would return home before I missed too much of the latest Bollywood blockbuster. I could barely understand her breathless outpour as she told me I needed to search for a 70-year-old woman, lost in a sea of people who didn’t speak the same language as her. I was on my way to watch a movie when my mother called me. My grandmother, out for her regular afternoon walk, hadn’t returned home after the usual hour. She was visiting our new home in the fast-paced cosmopolitan that is Delhi, where no one spoke a word of our native Telugu. It was the kind of day that reminded me of the shirtless joggers in the neighborhood park and the shouts of joy filling the air as children licked dripping ice-cream cones handed to them by the vendors lined outside. My grandmother went missing on a bright summer day. ![]()
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