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Always in spotless white, she was like the winter landscape in the mountains, an expanse of pure white serenity breathing peace and contentment.”

Khushwant Singh’s words about his grandmother remind me of my own. I called her Rukmini Patti. Like most old women, she was frail, religious, occasionally grumpy and forever willing to help. Even the scores of fairytales — mostly concocted — she told me, were those of kind princes and princesses, even demons with hearts of gold.

What these stories she told me pointed to, as I now realise, was her innate kind nature, which inhibited her from imagining hatred even in tales. Let me cite another instance, which not only proves her benevolent nature, but is emblematic of the benevolence of an entire generation, which one finds woefully lacking today.

In the small decrepit town of Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, I spent two years of my childhood at my grand parents’ house. It had a small hand pump outside for passerby to drink water from. Come dusk, I saw her put out three containers — one filled with left-over rice, the other two with buttermilk and pickle.

Every morning, I would see the containers empty and the utensils washed clean and kept right where they were kept the previous night. Must be the dogs, I initially thought. Soon, it dawned on me that dogs may be good at eating, but aren’t good dishwashers.
Which is when I came to know that my grandmother was doing this regularly, despite the fact that sometimes we had less food to eat, for weary travellers who came from villages late at night and had to spend the night at the bus stand before catching a bus the next morning.

Since the bus stand was bang opposite our locality, it had long been a custom for my grandmother to keep food for unknown passengers, who relished the food, washed the dishes, kept them in the same spot and left with blessings on their lips.

Maybe, the blessings worked. What was invested in this selfless ritual came back from unexpected quarters. Almost every week, some unknown person or distant relative from adjacent villages would send in sacks full of rice or vegetables or pulses, which more than made up for what was spent in feeding unknown passengers.

Now what would you call it: divine intervention or plain coincidence? I would like to see it as nature’s cyclical order of things — selfless gestures never go in vain. Let’s not dismiss it with the wishy-washy logic of generation gap. Times don’t change by themselves, we change them. Be kind to others and savour the kindness showered in return.
N Raghuraman is an editor with DNA