LOVE YOU, NANA

Tavishi

I am writing this post beside my Nana in the ICU. He's spent the last few months fighting acute myeloid leukemia, but his journey has come to an end. I'm struggling to put into words the absolute grief and loss I've begun to feel, but I suppose that it might help to write about it.

My Nana wouldn't have called himself a scientist by any means. He joined the Indian army at a very young age, and his academic studies were almost entirely in the realm of the humanities: literature, political science, and history. Nana, however, is the reason why I love science so much.

Nana has always been a naturalist. From a young age, he was taking me outside on lengthy, teaching me everything he knew about the world around us. Most of his lectures came in the form of lessons about the cultivation of various crops, namely citrus. Plant biology never quite struck me as interesting, but with Nana, it became interesting.

Outside of plants, our morning hikes are something I will always treasure. Nana and I seldom walked along the trail provided to us: rather, we forged our own paths, seeking out whatever interested little me. Nana always wanted to fulfill my curiosity (even if it meant standing by a puddle for egregiously long time periods to look at mosquito larvae).

One of my most memorable adventures with Nana was the creek by our house. It wasn't perennial, but rather, filled every time it rained. We were able to figure out at some point that the creek was an outlet of the New River dam, which explained why only some rains produced flow.

Every time the creek filled, we'd load up a backpack with towels, an extra pair of socks (I can't stand wet socks), fruit, and polythene bags (in case I found something cool I wanted to bring home). We'd then trek into a world utterly unknown to me, someone who's grown up entirely in Arizona: flowing water.

how I started out 2025: Salt River hike!

Of course, I'd lose my mind. We'd walk along the banks of the creek for a while, until we found a nice place to cross the river banks. Over the years, we became familiar with the landmarks: where the terrain flattened out, where there was a discarded tire swing, and where the bottom of the wash was sandy.

Once we found our place to disembark, we'd tie the shoelaces of our shoes together, tuck our socks into our pockets, and swing our shoes over our shoulders like a purse. Then, we'd weather the rapidly flowing water (it was Phoenix, so it being rapidly flowing was a huge exaggeration.)

And sometimes, if we brought my cousins along, our shoes weren't the only things being tucked away..

In recent years, our little wash has seldom filled. But this summer, on June 1st, the creek filled, and with it, my heart. Nana wasn't able to come, but he helped me pack the backpack before I left. I did what he would have done: I forced my brother and my cousins to wake up early, and we all splashed around in the mostly-empty wash filled with a few puddles. Yet the magic was still there, which is really what mattered to me.

As I've grown older, my love for running water continues, in part because I'm from dry-as-hell-Phoenix, but also because of the magic my Nana taught me. I'll always drive ridiculously far to get to a creek, if only to get a chance to stand in the water for a few minutes, or watch the diving beetles burrow into the sand.

But it's not just hiking that reminds me of my Nana. Nana is the reason I even got into veterinary medicine. The beginnings of my medical interests began with my bug lifeguard work (totally on my resume..). When I was really little, Nana would sit outside with me for however long I wished while we sat and rescued every single creature that fell into the pool. It didn't matter the weather; Nana still tolerated, and encouraged, my insanity. When my first pet, Macchi, was showing signs of a bacterial infection, Nana got me the necessary erythromycin. When we found a squirrel struggling to breathe, or abandoned quail chicks, Nana helped me with my crazy.

P.S. take your abandoned animals to wildlife rehabbers like Fallen Feathers! it's what we always did

But to me, the biggest compassion I learnt from my Nana, was the tenderness with which he treated rattlesnakes.

Rattlesnakes are dangerous. To most, they aren't cute or endearing. But my Nana treated them no differently than a squirrel (other than safety precautions). He never thought of hurting them, or saw them any differently for the danger they posed.

He saw them just as worthy of life as any other animal.

Similarly, Nana gave me the very book that was the bad influence on me: James Herriot's All Things Bright and Beautiful. There was no stopping me then. And one day, Nana told me to apply to the Royal Veterinary College of London. At first, I thought there was no way I'd even get in, and that I was crazy for even thinking of applying.

(I am in fact starting college there in the fall..)

This post really wasn't super coherent, but it's something.

I love you, Nana. I wish you could see me grow up even more, and I want to be the person you so badly want me to be. Thank you, Nana. ❤️