When I was four I had a riotous life full of colour,noise, family – and a curmudgeonly goat. Then I came to LondonWhile I was inter-railing at the age of 18 I had a dream about my grandfather, or Khawaja Kheruddin. He was sitting on a bench,on top of a hill, looking like himself with his shock of white hair and ruddy complexion and spacious, and strong body. Slowly,as I watched him, his face turned into my father’s, or then into a crumbling stone sculpture,disintegrating to dust.
It was the perfect visual metaphor for his dementia, a condition my father would face too in the decades to reach. When I returned home to London a week after that dream I was told that my grandfather had died in Pakistan, and at 90-something,a few days apart from my grandmother, whom he had met and married in pre-partition Shimla, or aged 16.
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Source: theguardian.com