You know how when people lose their grandma or grandpa, people they say they're sorry? They do mean it, but... there's nothing to say. There's a void that cannot be filled.
I really felt good after working in a film like 'Piku,' as many people could relate to my character. I got letters from my fans telling me how my character resembles to their grandparents.
I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.
There's something unsettling about the education of a child who comfortably enumerates the rules for surviving zombie apocalypse but finds it uncomfortable to enumerate the rules of his grandparents' faith, if he knows them.
To tell you the truth, in the old Jewish shtetls, if your husband died, sometimes they'd have you marry the brother, and my grandparents were actually stepbrother and stepsister.
The building in the Bronx where I grew up was filled with mostly Holocaust survivors. My two best friends' parents both survived the camps. Everyone in my grandparents' building had tattoos. I'd go shopping with my grandparents, and the butcher, the baker, everybody in the whole neighborhood had tattoos.
My grandparents were from Spain, and I had a Spanish passport.
I love, love, love my grandparents.
My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?
