In Loving Memory

Deepika Khatri
Nov 3 · 6 min read
Archway leading into a graveyard in Agra, Uttar Pradesh
Archway leading into a graveyard in Agra, Uttar Pradesh
Entrance to the graveyard, Agra

Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

— David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words


Over the past few months, I’ve had an overpowering urge to visit my grandfather.

As a child, it was an annual affair, driving from Delhi to Agra to call on him. My sister would pack her paintbrushes and black paint, my grandmother her candles, Amma would buy flowers and I would carry bottles of water. We’d drive to the Army Cantonment, our car waved past the barricades when we said we were there to visit the kabristaan. It was usually late afternoon, the summer heat stifling as we’d wait by the arched entrance for the caretaker to make his way to the bright blue gate. Taking an immediate right as soon as we entered, we’d walk along a whitewashed wall, down a gravelly path overgrown with wild grass. Darting between graves, my sister and I would look up dates on the graves we walked past. Some of the oldest dated back to the 1800s and were made of red sandstone — the same material used to build Agra city and the Delhi Fort. Interspersed with them were ornate marble graves on elaborately carved plinths. The newest additions were made of cement.

Stepping off the path, we’d then carefully skirt around graves as we’d cut across the graveyard to reach my grandfather’s resting spot under a tree. The epitaph read:

In
Loving Memory of
CAPT P.V. VENKAT A.O.C.
BORN: 26–11–1928
DIED: 2–6–1957

The first order of business was an assessment the state of the lettering on the headstone. My sister would begin work touching up the faded lettering while Amma and I would set to work brushing away dried leaves and clearing some of the undergrowth that had made inroads since our last visit. Washed down, flowers laid and candles lit, we’d survey our collective handiwork. My grandmother would say a prayer as we stood beside her. Ceremony complete, we’d sit under the tree under whose branches he lay.


Each time we’d visit, I’d do the same math: 1957 minus 1928. He’d died a few months short of his 29th birthday, 10 days before my mother’s first birthday.

Wedding photograph of Pat and Mavis Venkat
Wedding photograph of Pat and Mavis Venkat
Pat and Mavis Venkat

Yet, for a man I was never to meet, he had a central role to play in my early imaginings of romance. My grandmother met Pat, as she refers to him, at one of Gandhi’s rallies that they attended as students in Kerala in the years leading up to India’s independence. They’d had words. But a few days later he came to seek her out at college and so began their story. ‘He wanted us to have a child for every pip on his shoulder’, my grandmother would say. She’d speak of how easily he befriended anyone he met, often bringing them home for dinner. When Strauss’ The Blue Danube would play, she’d reminisce about how he loved to dance. At army balls they attended, the first and last dance of the evening was always with him.

From the stories she shared, the contours of a person had taken shape. Even in his physical absence, he was a part of our lives. He appeared to me a man in love with life itself.

Less forthcoming were stories of his family. Born into an Brahmin household in Kerala, he was disowned by his family when he decided to marry my grandmother, raised in a Catholic home. Neither family had approved, but his had cut him off.

The daredevilry of that detail had always appealed to my imagination as a child. He’d chosen love and to hell with what the world thought of it. Their wedding was organised by the Commandant under whom my grandfather was serving in the army, who then became godfather to my mother and aunt. As I grew older, there were more questions about my grandfather’s family, his roots, and by extension, mine. I learnt that his family hadn’t attended his funeral. That they’d never met their two granddaughters. Familial connection had been wholly severed.

I’ve never quite been able to sit with that part of the story. Over the years, I’d circle back to the same question: What elicits this depth of animosity? What makes a singular identity and affiliation to a community take precedence over a multiplicity of other identities?


When I began studying history, I found the language and literature to explore some of these questions. In every act of communitarian violence was evidence of a sense of belonging to a primary social group to which identity was closely linked. Amartya Sen writes in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, ‘A strong — and exclusive — sense of belonging to one group can in many cases carry with it the perception of distance and divergence from other groups. Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord.’

By all accounts, Pat sounds like a person I want to know. In choosing his own story though, he’d been excluded by those who he had once called his own.

As a young adult, I began asking my mother more frequently about whether she’d tried to find her father’s family. There must still be someone there who remembers, I’d insist. I was curious about his family. I wondered whether they regretted their response, if they would they like to meet the women their granddaughters had grown into. Or did membership to the community offer some sort of solace for his absence in their lives?

A few years ago, at a government-run institution for girls in Rajasthan, I met a 17-year old who had been burnt by her older brother for falling in love with a boy from another community. She was counting down the days till she was 18 and could leave the institution to be with him. As I was leaving, I muttered a silent prayer to the universe for her safety, for the freedom to choose her journey.

Increasingly, the fault lines between communities have become visible. Interfaith, intercaste, anything that challenges the idea of singular, immutable identity is up for attack in what feels like an environment that is breeding hatred. When I read and hear of incidents of violence, how systematic and commonplace they have become, I am struck anew by the violent fallout that the often accompanies this idea of an exclusive sense of belonging. The pain, loss and grief that follows from one generation to the next.

Oddly, my grandparents love story feels closer at hand than it ever has. I want to celebrate them and their love for each other. In freeing themselves of social mores they inadvertently made matters simple for me — I was unfettered to choose who to love. To be this and that and everything in between.


Grave of P.V. Venkat dressed in bright yellow-and-orange genda flowers. Agra
Grave of P.V. Venkat dressed in bright yellow-and-orange genda flowers. Agra
Diwali with Patrick Venkat, Agra

This Diwali, A and I travelled to Agra to visit my grandfather. We went prepared with an armload of genda. It felt fitting to celebrate with him. A tribute-of-sorts to his roots.

Sitting under the tree overlooking his grave, I could feel the warmth of the sun on my left cheek. The world around us was humming with sounds of life — screeching parrots, the wingbeat of black kites, cicadas and the odd firecracker in the distance. In the stillness, I felt a softening inside, gratitude for the legacy of my grandparents.

Deepika Khatri

Written by

Learning to lean in and pay attention to everyday wonder

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