Three decades ago, my grandmother washed her hands off people. She decided to wage a silent rebellion against the world. She made friends with plants and dogs. Wept over wilted flowers.

Every night she’d get high on Xanax and we’d listen to music together. I’d pester her for stories and she’d weave the most beautiful ones: but only if I promised to switch the tape when its side played out. A single thread ran through all her tales: she would take the mundane and make it magical: a broom would turn into a wizard, a book shelf would regale the wisdom of books kept on it, birds outside our window would chirp the song playing through our cassette tapes, her dog would become a bear that protected us from the night and all that it brought with it.

We’d lie in bed: me, eager to keep my end of the bargain; switching cassettes from Side A to Side B to Side A to Side B. Her: eyes glassy, words heavy, whirling and swirling through the summer air.

All neon technicolour. Despite the black of the night.

On some nights, she’d hum soft tunes to me. I’d force myself to stay awake until her eyes drooped and her breathing mellowed.

She refused to leave the house. She’d spend her days in her garden, watering her plants, whispering secrets to her flowers, caressing the buds and snipping off the wilts. I’d run behind her, never more than 2 feet away. To me, she was as ephemeral as her roses; her edges seemed hazy if she were too far away. I’d hold on to her pallu and vow to never let her go.

My mum would entice her to leave the house by promising trips to the neighbourhood plant nursery. I remember how her eyes would sparkle as we drove towards the saplings: her edges would thicken again, her elusive self would become concrete, more real than ever before or after our nursery trips. She’d buy saplings upon saplings; grab the gardener and pester him with questions: watering schedules, bud colours, rooting mediums, flowering seasons. Sometimes, when the gardener wasn’t watching, she’d steal a sapling with the glee of a child. She’d tuck it under the pleats of her saree and smile at me: our little secret. I’d grin back, chuffed to be included in her special world. My mum would frown, brows furrowed, lips pursed, she’d drag me out of the nursery and we’d wait in the car.

In the evenings, before she drank with my grandpa, before he shouted at her and us and locked all the doors, before the sound of his car entering the driveway sent tremors into our hearts, before the daily rigmarole of living with a madman, she would teach us how to paint. If she was having a good day, and if there was time left after cooking everyone’s favourite masala crabs and fried fish, she would paint with us. Her creations were just like the stories she told: mundane and magical.

What makes a soul troubled?

My grandma was an artist. She was a painter and a storyteller and a chef and a gardener. She had a fine arts degree from the most prestigious art school in India. She was all of these things before women were allowed to be anything. She brought things to life. She gave herself fully to them and there was only love.

My grandma was also an addict. She was clinically depressed. She was abused. She was suicidal. She was a hermit. She was all of these things before women were allowed to…allowed to just be. She locked herself in her world and only let her stories in. Everything else, she’d ignore. Reality was an illusion: only her illusions were real.

My mum calls her ‘troubled’. Even today, as her mind escapes her and her hands shake so much she can no longer hold a paint brush, no longer water her plants, even as she calls me by my mum’s name and she talks about her dead husband like he’s in her living room; even today, she is ‘troubled’.

I try to see her as troubled too. I try to recognise how the drugs made her loopy, I try to understand why hermitage isn’t an acceptable form of living.

I try.

But when I close my eyes, I can feel her soft cotton pallu on my fingertips. I can smell her crab curry and hear her cassette tapes in the dead of the night and I feel a sense of calm that is the opposite of troubled.

I can only feel love.

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