Grandpa comes to the city

Before you read. When our elders grow weak, we sometimes start controlling them without meaning to: don't go there, take this, sit here. To them it can feel suffocating. Keep that in mind: it is Grandpa's whole problem.

Who is who. Ravi lives in a city flat with his mother, Vidya. Grandpa is Vidya's father: Ravi's nana. Vidya wishes someone would invent 'Vitamin-M' (for memory) for old people. Her father, she says, cannot hear, see or remember well any more.

Three scares. Grandpa had moved in a month earlier, after:

• taking a double dose of his medicines and ending up in hospital;
• getting lost on a walk;
• and, at his own town house, falling in the garden while pottering and lying outside all night with no one to help.

Grandpa's side. A former lawyer of seventy-five, he had kept house alone since his wife died ten years before. He is angry at being forbidden to go out, and hates the noisy, crowded city and the poky (small, cramped) flat. He longs for his quiet brick house with its big mango tree, where you could hear a leaf fall at dusk.

The first day of the holidays. Vidya tells Ravi never to let Grandpa go out alone. Ravi winces at how loudly she speaks to Grandpa, as if to a small child who cannot understand.

The dilemma. Grandpa plays brilliant chess and remembers famous games by Karpov and Fischer, yet forgets names. He says he will just walk to the corner shop for the Tamil newspaper, and asks Ravi whether he too will treat him like a prisoner. Twirling his eagle-handled stick, he goes. If Ravi stops him, Grandpa is hurt; if he lets him go, Mother is furious. So Ravi chooses a third way: he follows him secretly.