WHEN I WAS four, I spent several months living in the home of my maternal grandparents in Sri Lanka. My memories of that time, however, do not really feature them. I remember suffering badly from prickly heat and yowling as servants covered my body in freshly boiled leaves that were supposed to alleviate the symptoms.
I remember the well in their park-sized garden, and the huge iguanas that lumbered through. At the front were jackfruit trees, sugar cane that would be cut down and given to me to chew, and a pale yellow Morris Minor parked away from the verandah. At some point during my stay, my father joined us and devil dancers were called to perform a ceremony on him. Were they happy days? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
My paternal grandparents, Alice and Alexander Perera, were already dead when my parents married. In the family album there is a faded sepia photograph of them with their children: Noel, Oliver, Irene and Gregory. I rarely look at it and, because my parents separated in England a few months after that devil dance of distant memory, I know nothing about them.
My mother’s parents, Don Charles and Dona Milina Wijesinghe, had spent all their lives in the southern hamlet of Getamana. I know they were caring and dutiful towards their five daughters and their twelve other grandchildren, but the huge distances between us meant I had no sense of engagement with them. I saw them only once after settling in London. I was eighteen and on a three-week visit. They were small, sweet and indescribably foreign. They cried when they saw me and I stood, smiling but embarrassed, feeling self-conscious and awkward under their inspection. It is only now, seeing how much my own children benefit from their extremely close relationship with my mother, and regular and lively contact with their father’s parents, that I realise what I might have had – and what I might have learned.
The most important lesson, beyond the safe place offered by grandparents; beyond the kindness, the love, the time and the treats given; is a respect and affection for older members of society. I grew up with only my mother for adult company; as a result I regarded anyone older as an authority figure to be either challenged or, later, going through school, obeyed and feared. My daughters see them as better-informed, interesting and helpful companions on the road that they themselves travel. They are appreciative, deferential and interested in what all elders – myself included – have to offer; in other words, they have grown to be better-rounded, kinder and more socially competent members of the community.
To me, then, the contribution of a grandparent is not limited to the well-being of the child, or to babysitting or making fancy dress outfits or sponsoring their grandchildren in races and tasks, it is about preparing the young to take on the world, which means understanding their part in a society where every right-thinking individual plays, and continues to play a part, right to the end.
Shyama Perera is a novelist, journalist and columnist.