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Generations

Posted on June 30, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

My grandfather used to say, the dead should take their secrets with them. I might have been the only one who heard him while everyone else, including my mother, his daughter, dismissed his words as the ramblings of a senile man. It’s true my grandfather was old, it’s also true that he had once roamed the city streets for over an hour on a rainy day without any pants on but that didn’t mean that all his words were meant to be ignored.

At least I didn’t think so.

He didn’t believe in much, my grandfather but he did believe that a man’s underarms should be shaved. I have no idea why. He would often go days without saying anything to anyone and then suddenly because he had caught sight of my teenage growth spurt manifested as underarm hair he would instruct my mother to tell me to shave. Even though I was standing right there.

To say that my grandfather was indirect was to say that the Earth orbited the sun, as if you’d only just found out.

So granddad said a few other things in moments of lucidity that parted the clouds in his broken mind. No one could say exactly what it was that broke his mind. Perhaps it was the loss of his wife, perhaps it was the realization that the unstoppable march towards the end of his life had begun or perhaps it was something else, a secret that kept him going just as sure as it held him back. I didn’t know. And I was too wrapped up in my own life to try and find out.

If no one has said this yet, I will. If it’s been said already, the person who spoke the words was a smart one. We don’t see the great stories living in our own homes, we don’t watch the great dramas unfolding before our own eyes and we don’t enjoy the comedies enacted for us by the ones we love and even funnier still, the ones we hate. If we saw life for what it was, we would never need movies.

So I guess it’s a good thing for filmmakers and their employers that we don’t allow life to entertain us.

I didn’t allow life to entertain me either but I did have the good sense to ask if my grandfather had requested for any things to be buried with him when he died. My father was a little surprised at the question but he nodded and said that grandfather had requested that a box in which he stored a few childhood mementoes be buried with him. Though I looked for it several times, I was never able to find this box so I had no idea of how my parents were supposed to honour my grandfather’s wish. I dared not ask any more questions about the box though because they were certain to be suspicious about my intentions if I drew too much attention to my interest in this box.

So I went about life as I knew it and it was exactly the empty unsatisfying shell I expected it to be.

And then, one April morning, my grandfather died. In the middle of all the ceremonies associated with burying my grandfather I saw it, the box, the one he wanted to take with him into the ground and beyond. The first thought I had was that it was wrong for me to, in any way, attempt to find out what secrets Grandpa wanted to take with him to his grave. I figured it really couldn’t be anything huge because we happened to be the most boring family I have ever known.

Even our fights are little more than disagreements and as far as I can remember, no one I am related to, has ever been involved in a screaming match. Both my parents approach everything with the formal rigour normally associated with martial arts expertise or army training. I would not have been in the least bit surprised to find that they had a penciled-in time slot for when they were supposed to have fun in an average week. So what secret could my grandfather have that was better off in his grave than borne by another member of the family?

Whatever it was, I could handle it.

So I swiped the box while no one was looking and opened it to find…some papers in an aged envelope and little else. I kept the envelope and let the little metal toy cyclist and some photographs remain in the box. At the very last moment I decided to grab the only other piece of metal in the box. It was a key and though I had no idea of what it unlocked it felt like a good idea to keep it, maybe to start a collection of strange looking keys.

We buried my grandfather in the family plot and our local church and embarked upon the one year of mourning to commemorate his passing. There would be no Christmas or birthday celebrations in the household and it occurred to me that it was a good thing none of my siblings, or I, were having a landmark birthday that year.

For some time I had forgotten all about envelope I had liberated from my grandfather’s box of personal treasures.

It took my finding out that the girl I had been using as a fumble toy was also messing around with other guys to finally keep me at home long enough to root through my stuff and rediscover the envelope and the key. I was angry. Not because I was in love with her or anything but it had taken a fairly long time for her to allow me to touch her breasts and I was making great progress towards getting my hand up the skirts she loved to wear. I wasn’t entirely sure that she wouldn’t have continued to let me work my way up but I found it distasteful to be putting my hands where another guy’s had probably already been. I also didn’t want to be in competition with some unknown guy to see who managed to go furthest with her first. So I sat at home, and sulked, and ignored her phone calls before I picked up the envelope and looked inside.

The first sheet of paper was a press clipping. The large article, the one I assumed my grandfather had wanted to save, told about some landmark ruling at the city High Court in July 1957. The small news item said something about a bank robbery and how the authorities seemed to have given up on catching the crooks behind the heist. The second sheet of paper, one of six held together by a rusted paper clip, bore the logo of an adoption agency.

What the hell did my grandfather need with an adoption agency?

The fourth sheet of paper was a birth certificate. My mother’s birth certificate. It listed her name but not her last name. I thought that was weird until I saw the next sheet of paper. It stated, in bluey-purple ballpoint ink that my mother was the adopted daughter of my grandparents.

What the hell?

It took me a while to realise that I wasn’t actually part D’Souza. Not by bloodline anyway. The old man we had laid into the ground a few months earlier was not related to me by genetics. It wasn’t one quarter his blood that ran through my veins.

In one single moment I had lost my identity, a part of it anyway. As far as I knew, my father was indeed my father but in a world where my mother is an adopted child, anything is possible.

The last piece of paper was a note to himself. I had never seen my grandfather’s handwriting before but I knew that it wasn’t from him that my mother got her beautiful handwriting. Which made more sense when I remembered that she was adopted. I was sure my mother didn’t know about this which is why my grandfather had felt comfortable taking the story to his grave. That he had failed said more about what I was capable of than it did about him. The note was dated July 6^th, 1957 and it said that they could not spend anymore of their ill-gotten gains, even if the newspapers had reported that the police would no longer pursue the robbers of the Grant National Bank. He swore to return to the bank what he had stolen from them even though he could never bring himself to confess that it was their wealth he was storing in one of their own lockers. He had his daughter to think of and he would not allow her to grow up without a father. He planned to simply wait out the time it took for them to force open the locker and lay claim to its contents when an owner hadn’t shown up for the appropriate amount of time.

As the shocks of surprise ran up and down my spine I realised that my grandfather had saved a press clipping detailing the aftermath of his exploits in so clever a way that no one who happened to only glance at the newspaper cutout would learn any more about him than they already knew. That was also when I realised that the key I had rescued from burial was probably the one that unlocked the safe deposit box he rented all those years ago.

I went to the bank the very next day and asked the very pretty receptionist whether there was any way for me to retrieve my grandfather’s safety deposit box. I confessed to not knowing the number but she merely turned the key over and showed me the spot where the number had been. It was almost rubbed clean from age (or perhaps by the ministrations of my grandfather) but when we squinted our eyes and turned the key this way and that we were able to make out the number 308. She led me down to the vault herself and left me alone when she had located the box. She told me it was a good thing I had come in when I had because the bank destroyed boxes that lay untouched for fifty years. She also let on that they planned to install a new system for the storage of valuables.

When we were alone, just the box and I, I waited an extra minute to see if the receptionist (maybe she was a bank teller) would return or if I would have any qualms about opening the box to see what was inside. The minute passed and I had neither qualms nor company so I slid the key into the lock, wiggled it about a bit and opened it.

Bloody hell!

I didn’t think I would ever see so many rubies in one place. Yet there they were.

It took me five years to be able to figure out ways to sell those rubies.

But I did and now I’m rich.

Like I always say to my grandpa even though he never answers me back, “Some secrets are better off in the open.”

­Fortunately thus far, the crimes of the grandfather have not been visited upon the grandson and my parents and the world at large thinks I made my fortunes in IT and the stock market.

Whatever helps people sleep easy at night right?

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