My grandfather was an artist. Whenever I used to go to my grandparents’ house, he used to let me play with all his paints, crayons and brushes, making colourful messes wherever I chose. At a very young age, he started to show me all his canvases, telling me stories about the people he had painted and how to how mix oil into pigment. Among all his colourful sketchbooks, I remember being thoroughly unimpressed by one of his works. It was made on a large paper, full of rectangles and tiny numbers and the only colours on it were red and blue. Yet, it was this work that he seemed to be the proudest of. He never let me touch it and after showing it to me, he folded it carefully and put it inside a locked drawer.

Only at the age of seven did I understand that it was the blueprint of the house they lived in. My grandfather had designed the entire house, even though he was not an architect. Every column, beam and pillar had been designed by him after being inspired by various paintings and painstaking research on architecture. After a lifetime of hard work, he had been able to secure the finances to begin the construction of his dream house in the 1990s.

However, he wasn’t able to complete all the features of the house at one go. Every other year, during the summer, construction used to start on some external features of the house. Often, the lovely garden at his place seemed to be littered with yellow UltraTech Cement bags. Finally, in 2003, he started to get a porch build in the backyard of the house. This was the last, final touch of his house.

There used to be small mountains of dry cement all around the back yard. I loved pretending that the cement was the sand of a beach and used to make sand castles using the cement. Once, I added water to solidify the “castle” I had made, not realising the effect it would have on the cement. I got a huge scolding from my mother for doing so. All the cement that had solidified in the backyard had to be broken down which cost extra money. But my grandfather saved the “sand castle” I had made and let it remain in the backyard. He even designed and added small boundary around it, so that it looked like it was an intentional part of his blueprint.

It seems I have inherited a tiny part of his artistic talents. During my undergrad in 2014, I wanted the English Club of my college to host a competition during the college’s annual cultural festival. However, being the treasurer of the club, I knew that convincing the college authorities to sponsor the event would be next to an impossible task. Thus, I decided to use my artistic skills to fund the event.

With the help of my club members, we decided to set up a stall during the first day of the cultural fest. I gave some craft classes to the club members who volunteered to use their skills to make things to sell at the stall. Within a month, we were ready with the merchandise to sell at our stall. We made items like bookmarks, soft toys, pop-culture and literature inspired paintings, cups, notebooks and t-shirts. Along with these items, we also baked various goodies like cookies, muffins, breads and cakes. We thoroughly advertised our products on our Facebook page, making sure to specially mark items which were vegan or recycled. We offered great discounts and combo offers and waited for the first day of the fest with bated breath.

On the day of the festival, we were gobsmacked by the number of people who turned up. All our items, both crafts and baked goods, sold like hot cakes. Many of the people said that they had specially come to the fest only because of our stall. At the end of the day, our profits amounted to over 10,000 rupees. With some of this money, we rushed out of the college to buy the things needed for the competition we wanted to host the next day. After buying the things, me and three of my friends spent hours setting up the rooms for the competition. We finished by one in the morning. Since the college wasn’t a residential campus, we ended up sleeping in the car of one my friends.

The next morning, the four of us, with sleepy eyes, started the registration process of the competition. Our drowsiness was quickly replaced by exhilaration when we realised that students even from colleges our college had never advertised at were turning up for our competition. After the competition, many students said that they loved the experience and would definitely come next year. Because of our huge profits at the stall, we were able to reward more deserving participants than we had anticipated. In the end, all our hard work paid off and the English Club, which we had just formed that year, won the respect of the college.

Sreoshi

My Grandfather’s Legacy_IMI New Delhi