The Veranda Was the First Universe

Kathmandu, Nepal

The first universe I knew was not the sky, but a veranda on the third floor, just outside the kitchen. My grandfather’s lap was the axis around which the world spun, his laughter carrying me farther than the airplanes I used to trace with my grandmother. Abundance was not money, or land, or even time, but the aroma of frying garlic rising from the stove. My grandparents’ love was never neutral. It was a climate: something that sheltered and seasoned me, like weather etched into my bones.

My grandmother’s footsteps stitched through our house like a secret rhythm. I was always running ahead of her, through cement rooms, up staircases, across kausis where fruits lay drying in the sun, just sweet enough before souring into pickles. 

Our rooftop carried delicate mythologies. White radishes spread across the slates, drying into sweetness just before their sharpness set in—like childhood itself, fleeting between sugar and ache. I ate them away before my grandmother could ferment them, savoring their crunch as her reprimands followed me down the stairs. Even hunger had its tenderness: warm donuts on temple mornings, black lentils I dreaded but which arrived faithfully on my plate like clockwork, like prayer.

I remember my grandmother’s purse, from which I would steal five rupees to buy Choco Fun and Wai Wai. I remember her urgency at my many milestones, white string in her hand, determined to pull a loose tooth. We do not have tooth fairies where I come from. We have grandmothers who turn thresholds into rituals, who catch our tiny fears in their palms and return them as talismans. 

We lived by rituals. The 4 a.m. temple bells still echo in my bones. Damp cement bites at my feet, incense unspooling into the half-light as dawn carries the first prayer. Monkeys darted across Pasupatinath, bold enough to snatch my slippers, while my grandmother chased them into submission. Faith, for me, was never in gods, but in her unwavering rites of care.

I remember sleeping beside her at night, her body a fortress no monster could scale. I remember running through the house to find her, always discovering her in some hidden corner, as though love enjoyed the game of being sought. Even now, I expect to turn a corner and hear her voice, to find her laughter folded into the air. Instead, the years delivered their cruelty. In New York’s bitter exile, the call arrived: her heart had given in. She was gone. 

When I came home seventeen years later, the house no longer held her. Silence clung to the walls where her footsteps once wandered. The veranda remembered me, but her absence fractured it. The radishes no longer dried on the roof.

My grandfather greeted me if I were still a child, still weightless. He carried my name through the narrow streets of Kumarigal, telling his friends about his granddaughter who had crossed oceans. Pride rang from his voice like temple bells. In a deeply patriarchal society, his love made no distinction. I will never forget the taste of the goat he prepared with his own hands, his tenderness folded in every bite. His love lived in these gestures, and in quiet moments too.

One afternoon, we sat on the marble steps leading to our courtyard. I asked him about our village, about the house he had built with his own hands. I watched his face as much as I listened, the small flickers of joy, the shadows of the things unsaid. The years pressed quietly between us, and I could not help but wonder how many stories had already slipped beyond my reach, how many more might vanish before I learned how to hold them.

It is impossible to separate my childhood from my grandparents. They were the architects of my earliest memories, the foundation of my belonging. They proved to me that love can be abundant in a body scarred by absence. Now, when I write, trying to thread meaning between exile and belonging, I am only repeating what they gave me: a veranda, a lap, a story, a plate of dahl bhaat tarkari, a temple bell, a safe night’s sleep.

From these fragments, art grows. If art is the evolution of memory, then this is its next step: not an elegy, but an altar. A place where their laughter is still architecture, where radishes are still sweet under the sun, and where every prayer curls upward like steam from a donut shared at dawn.