The idea of Dadi Nani stories stemmed following a conversation I was having at a lunch with my friend, Devan.
I met Devan through work, and because there was an instant friendship, we could easily share our thoughts about the city of Dubai, our career struggles, what truly matters, and how perhaps, if we kept working hard, some results would eventually come.
Eventually, all our strategies to make money took a backseat, and our friendship, our stories, and the common ground in how we looked at life and humanity came to the forefront. We became chai friends; we became dosa friends. And when you are Indian, such chai friendships often turn out to be surprisingly therapeutic.
It was during one such dosa lunch that Devan told me that one of the happiest days of his life was when he bought his car and took his grandmother for a ride. He said he loved his grandma a lot: a feeling I could relate to, having grown up with loving grandparents too.
But what stayed with me even more was an episode from his grandmother’s life that he shared. It instantly captured my heart, and I wanted to save that story somewhere so that many more hearts could rejoice in it.
In fact, it gave me an idea: perhaps I could collect many such Dadi-Nani stories (grandmothers’ stories) from people in my life, particularly stories remembered by those now above fifty, taking us back to the 1970s and 1980s. I was fascinated by the thought of how many different cultures, homes, routines, and ways of living we might come across, while discovering that human affection somehow remains constant across them all.
But we will begin with Devan’s grandma’s story: a simple story of how she made a long journey to deliver a jackfruit.
An anecdote that is difficult to imagine in today’s changed times.
Read Devan’s story here: The Weight of a Jackfruit, The Weight of Love