Lucy, I’m home! 

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Desi Arnaz’s signature line echoed from my parents’ room, which held the only television in our two-bedroom townhouse, and traveled down to the kitchen. I pulled a chair over to the kitchen counter and climbed on top, flexing onto the tips of my toes to reach for the floral teacups sitting on the highest shelf.

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I assembled three cups and a tupperware packed with Parle-G biscuits onto the kitchen tray. Dadi moved a small silver sieve over the cups and let a waterfall of masala chai spill from the copper saucepan, filling the kitchen with steam and the scent of ginger and cardamom. 

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The laughs and cheers coming from the studio audience on the television upstairs were getting louder. I tugged at Dadi’s kurti and pleaded, “Come on, it’s starting! We have to see what Lucy did or else the episode’s not gonna make any sense.” 

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Dadi threw her head back and let out a laugh, her eyes twinkling as she ran her always-manicured fingers over my forehead to relax my furrowed brow. She smiled at me, “You go up, beta. I’ll bring the tray. And don’t get so bothered by the little things, or those lines will never go away.”

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I half-skipped, half-ran up the staircase, rounded the corner past my bedroom (which became Dadi and Dadu’s whenever they came to visit), and rushed into my parents’ room. Dadu was sitting on the bed, the morning newspaper folded in one hand and the television remote in the other. 

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“Where’s the chai?” he asked.

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“Dadi has it!” I said, my eyes glued to the screen the whole time as I crossed over the air mattress that served as my temporary bedroom during their summer visits and settled cross-legged onto the center of my parents’ bed.

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I watched Lucy and Ethel fail miserably (and hilariously) at their new jobs on the assembly line of a candy factory. Dadi walked in a few moments later and handed me and Dadu our chai--a packet of Splenda for Dadu, three spoons of sugar for me. She sat down on the other side of me and stretched her legs out in front of her with a sigh, the kind of deep exhale that comes after a morning spent looking after a child who has no siblings and no pets and requires constant entertainment.

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Our cable provider didn’t show the Hindi channels that Dadu would watch back in New Delhi, and cable news had little chance of standing up to my non-existent attention span. My grandparents and I found common ground with the classic black-and-white sitcoms and westerns shown on the TV Land channel. The nostalgia of these programs held my curiosity, and they were familiar enough to my grandparents because they were also broadcast back in India. So I spent my summers watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza--not the typical shows of choice for a nine year old, but I was hooked.

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***

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After Dadi was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, Dadu and Dadi stopped their summer visits. Delhi is a fourteen hour plane ride from New Jersey that my parents just couldn’t afford. The ten hour time difference and Dadi’s diminishing physical capabilities made our phone calls infrequent and sparse in substance. Dadu’s days were occupied with supervising the household staff back in Delhi, making calls to any doctor who could shed some light on Dadi’s diagnosis, and savoring the few good days she had left. I didn’t watch much I Love Lucy after that. 

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Dadi’s doctors said she had nine months to live from her first diagnosis. Ten years later, she was confined to a wheelchair and required around-the-clock at home nursing care; she could no longer speak or move most of her muscles; but she was still alive. I moved to Michigan for college, no longer able to hop onto my parents’ FaceTime calls to Dadu. Against Dadi’s better judgment, I became increasingly bothered by the little things. I spent so much time on arbitrary classwork and superficial drama between fake friends that I managed to avoid spending any energy on my family. On the few occasions that I remembered to set aside school and my social life to reach out to my own parents, they urged me to call Dadu instead. 

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“Beta, when did you last speak with Dadu?”

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“A few weeks ago.”

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“Call him. I’m sure he’s missing you, and it will be good for Dadi to see your face.”

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“I’ll do it later, okay?”

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I was back home in New Jersey the summer after sophomore year of college, sitting in the living room and scrolling through Twitter while my parents watched CNN. We had moved into this house when I was in high school; it had a TV in the living room, unlike our old townhouse, and enough bedrooms that I would never have to spend a summer on an air mattress again. Still, since Dadu and Dadi didn’t visit, the guest bedrooms stayed mostly empty. 

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At 10 o’clock that night, Dadu called, and the landline’s sharp ring broke through the drone of the nightly news. Mama and Papa shared an uneasy glance; it was only 7:30AM India time--Dadu never called at this hour. 

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***

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We booked the last three seats on AirIndia’s 8AM direct flight from JFK to Indira Gandhi National Airport in order to make it to Delhi in time for Dadi’s cremation ceremony the next day. I mostly slept and stared out the window during that plane ride. I scrolled through the entertainment options, searching for something that could numb the snowball of emotions steadily amassing in my chest. The child in the seat in front of mine had leaned his chair so far back that the small, rectangular screen was inches from my face.

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My eyes lingered over a particular episode title: “Lucy Tells the Truth.” I paused for a moment, then pressed play. For thirty minutes, the small black-and-white figures of Lucy and Ricky on the screen in front of me fell into one improbable scenario after another, and I found myself smiling at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. I thought about Dadu, sitting alone in front of his TV in Delhi with no one to look after anymore, waiting for us to arrive. 

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I thought about Dadi. The extra years she had hung onto and the way her fingernails were always painted with maroon polish. I wondered if she could reach her hand out and push away the worry lines that had been slowly creeping onto my forehead over the past ten years. I ran my own fingers over my forehead; those lines seemed to have settled into a permanent home in the past ten hours. 

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I thought about Dadi’s laugh--how it could have easily dissolved the clump of emotions that had now risen from my chest to my throat, like three spoons of sugar in hot chai.