"Used to be one and a half annas a day," aaji says recounting tales from an era that's close to being bygone. "Just one and half?" I ask, one half of me genuinely surprised and the other half wanting to make sure aaji doesn't think I am bored by her tales.
"Ho. He was there for something like eighteen, nineteen days." She considers this for a moment, looking at the tiled floor. Then, "Almost a month."
At that moment, we were in the late 60s or possibly early 70s, when my grandpa was admitted to what is popularly called the Stanley Hospital which is one of the oldest hospitals in the city. Sixteen annas made one modern-day rupee and annas were the paisas of those times (till we decided to shift to the metric, base-100 system). For one-and-half annas a day, you could be in the general ward of the hospital and you'd get a bunch of fruits, milk and other necessities to get you back in shape.
I don't know wherefrom the story arcs appear in my grandma's eighty-four-year-old brain but every day, at various points of time, she holds an impromptu 'tales from the past' session. Some of them are very interesting, some not so much. Some of the tales are peppered with excruciating detail from the 1930s, a period when she must have been hardly ten or twelve years, and in those instances - which are very frequent - the surprising powers of the human brain astound me. On one evening, in a tale where she was just nine, living in Dadar with her mechanical engineer father and a petite, fragile mother (my great-grandma), she could recollect the names of the neighbors. There is a hundred-year-old harmonium, gifted by the said neighbors, on which she learnt music and on which, as luck would have it, I learnt the basics of harmony.
Not surprisingly, one memory links to another and within minutes, she'd have covered a vast ground, often diving between time periods spread across a couple of decades. Sometimes, she's in the early 80s, speaking about my eldest cousin, then hardly five years old and in the next instant, she's in the early 90s, telling me about my childhood.
It's not a nostalgic trip all the time. There are large patches when she's slightly boastful or a slice of vanity slips through the veil of humility.
But then there are other patches too when a genuinely humble story of human experience almost opens up the waterworks. And it's in those times that I realize how lucky I am.