Someday when he is old enough, I will regale my 3-week old grandson, Kavi, with a dramatic story of how his intrepid grandma thrashed her way to the East Coast to meet him, much as Chloe McCardel thrashed hers across the English Channel.
In truth, I offered no thrashing or heroics. The trip required not speed but patience; not quixotic abandon but deliberative care and diligence — traits not natural to me. To avoid becoming a carrier of the coronavirus delta variant to a newborn, I first isolated in Des Moines for a week, with a third, booster dose of Moderna under my belt. Then, double-masked, I caught two planes and a late-night taxi to a vacant house in an unfamiliar neighborhood in Brooklyn. After a two-night stay, thanks to a niece's vacant home, I holed up for two more nights in a Manhattan hotel room, got tested twice and made my first meeting with Kavi on the rooftop above the Manhattan apartment where he lives.
He slept the whole time.
My mother made it all the way from India in less time, to meet Raj, Kavi's daddy, in the hospital maternity ward when he was born. But it would be several more days before I could move in with him and my daughter-in-law, Aadhithi, and her parents, who'd flown in from Singapore.
By the time he hears the story of this journey, I hope little Kavi finds it archaic and laughable. By then, the ravages of COVID-19 should be a distant memory, with new infections kept at bay by annual booster shots that everyone is lining up to take.
"There are different kinds of love at first sight," I posted days later on Facebook. "There's the one you feel for the dog eagerly wagging its tail at you from a cage in the Animal Rescue League when the other ones are still. You just know you have to take her home. The one you experience on meeting the person who will become your soulmate. The crazy all-encompassing love you feel for your children, that makes you want to protect them, no matter how old.
"And then there's that delirious sense of falling in love the first time you lock eyes with your newborn grandchild. Mine, Kavi Padmanabhan Borsellino, entered the world Aug. 28, and in his thumb-sucking sweetness, lingering gazes, smiles, coos and delight in each new discovery, has transfixed all of us around him."
As one who works with words, I've struggled to find the right ones for these feelings. To describe the high of gazing into those intense brown eyes, cradling him in my arms and singing him love songs. To depict his obvious curiosity about everything and everyone around him, and his inherent trust. Even as lights shine above him and dump trucks, sirens, howling winds and torrential rails puncture the serenity, he takes it all in with equanimity.
Long after my two sons and my sister's two sons were born, our father told us, with no hint of self-consciousness, that his joy in becoming a grandparent had far exceeded that of becoming a new father to us. I wasn't sure whether to be insulted that we weren't as inherently enchanting as our offspring, or proud that our unique partnerships and labors had produced creatures even more delightful than ourselves.
But that was my father: irrepressibly honest, impassioned. "I'm a poet!" he would beam coyly when challenged.
In the years since, I've heard so many grandparents express similar amazement at the emotions that flooded them with the new baby's birth that I think it's more about where the adults are than the infants. When you're not in that fog of new parenthood yourself, you're free to imagine. Holding Kavi, whose name means poet in Sanskrit, I didn't want just a better world for him to inherit. I wanted to be better myself. To slow down and take everything in, as he does, instead of always running. I vowed to live in greater harmony with the creatures around me. When a fly buzzed around the bassinet, I had to temper my instinct to swat it, because what message would that send? That we should kill another innocent creature for his comfort? Internally I pledged to eat only healthy, sustainably raised food that nurtures rather than harms the environment, and to be more mindful of recycling bags.
But in the days before I could meet him, I had done a lot of pacing in different neighborhoods, passing inhospitable places where grated widows blocked entry to shuttered storefronts, their walls sometimes graffitied over in unreasonably fine art. I also passed sprawling health food stores and upscale designer boutiques and even a dog spa. Each anomaly made me wonder about Kavi's life to come. Would he share our love of dogs? Would these stark differences in income persist into his adulthood? Would he write poetry about them, become an activist?
I made him a playlist, choosing Indian and Western music, childhood and rock 'n' roll favorites. I've never made one for myself.
As a grandparent, you think of lineage and wonder if family members you've lost might reveal themselves in this little being. I thought about my late parents and glimpsed with glee a hint of my late husband's nose on Kavi's face. I imagined the adulation Rob would have showered on him. I thought sadly of our younger son, Romen, and other aunties and uncles longing to meet Kavi but kept at bay by the pandemic.
But I flew back to Des Moines filled with optimism about the village that will surround this little guy: his ever-attentive, if sleep-deprived, parents who don't miss a twitch; his mother's parents, originally from southern India, with whom I am permanently linked as Sambandhis. They're up at all hours, to feed and care for everyone, armed with wisdom from the ages and vegetarian recipes to bolster a nursing mother's health.
They even supplied the name by which Kavi will address me, when neither the Hindi nor English equivalents felt right.
I think of my father's poetry books on the shelves maybe someday inspiring his great-grandson's poems.
I think of how my half-Indian son, who will be "Daddy" to his son, helped lead me to my new identity as Kavi's Ajji.
And I savor the way things come around in life.
