When I was a kid, we filmed everything. My parents had moved to the US, but the rest of our extended family was still in India, and we wanted our grandparents to be able to binge-watch us grow up.
Being so far away, my parents wanted to document every movement we made, just in case we needed it. Just in case suddenly, out of nowhere, I became interesting.
There are hours of material from every major event of our childhoods – birthdays, cultural programs, general moments when we were awake. We’re in the process of digitizing them, but right now our old toy boxes are filled with huge VHS tapes – and we keep a giant video player that serves the sole purpose of playing these home videos.
In India, my parents grew up in joint families – which technically means there were three or more generations under one roof. Everyone had eyes on you, you shared a bed with siblings, you couldn’t slam your bedroom door because that wasn’t just your bedroom – it was maybe five other kids’ bedroom, too. For the introvert this was hell, but for the seeker in hide and seek, it was really convenient.
Growing up, my parents knew every single person related to them within 15 generations. I think they probably got married because they’re the first people either had met that they weren’t related to.
When I was 11 years old, in 2005, my grandpa came to the US to spend the final months of his life with us. Most evenings, I would quietly snuggle up to him while he told me about his favorite places he’d traveled to and what kind of stuff my dad would get in trouble for (Kabul and riding a motorcycle, respectively).
During those months, we were watching home movies a lot. It was a sentimental time, and he asked my parents if they could find one video in particular that he remembered every beat of. In it, I am a toddler, singing to my mom, while clutching a little stuffed bunny. My sister says my name in a sing-songy way, and for some reason I think she’s mocking me. I turn and look away, and a single tear rolls down my face. No one sees it but my dad, filming. It’s a deeply strange video – first of all, the turning away for a toddler is an odd move. Why did I know shame this early? The single tear is just dramatic. My grandpa was obsessed with every moment in this video and he wanted to experience that again, but we couldn’t find it before he died.
I understand exactly what my grandpa felt. I love watching videos of my friends as babies and I love videos of their babies now. I cannot get enough of seeing adults I know employing crazy high-pitched voices to cheer their toddlers on as they walk for the first time. Whenever I tell my friends to send me pictures of their kids, they say, “Are you sure?”
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We record our lives a lot now. I have probably 70 hours of footage of my dog doing an amazing job tilting his head. I have a million videos of my husband doing a bit, babies laughing. But they’re all intentional – I know when I take out my phone, I am recording something for a reason. The thing about the olden times was that if something interesting happened in front of you, you couldn’t just pull out your phone and start recording it. The setting up had to happen before “the interesting thing”. You had to pull out a stand, assemble a huge camera, put in a new small tape, hit record, and then just pray that this was going to be worth it. Most of the time, it wasn’t. But sometimes it was, and when it was, you were on America’s Funniest Home Videos and adults in the audience with teased bangs laughed at your son getting hit in the crotch.
I love home videos because of their unpredictability – because they are so often so boring. They’re a gamble: are you going to capture an interesting moment from your child, or is she just going to suck her thumb and then look leftduring a 15-minute clip? There was always the sweet voice of my parents behind the camera, asking me to sing or, at the bare minimum, look in their general direction. But the thing about children is that they don’t listen. And the thing about very small children is that they don’t listen, and they’re taking off their clothes for some reason.
When my grandparents came to visit us in the US, it was often for months at a time, or that million-hour journey wouldn’t have been worth it.
When they’d come to stay with us, they were the most entrenched in our home movies, both as an audience and as subjects. Our interactions – two generations apart, two entirely different cultures – were constantly recorded. We took my grandparents to New York City, where they got to see the Statue of Liberty; we took them to Niagara Falls; we took them everywhere. My parents wanted to see them enjoying America so we taped it. My parents wanted to see them enjoying us, so we taped it.
One of my favorite videos is of my grandmother making plans with my mom while I don’t really pay attention and keep coloring poorly. But I like it because it’s super boring. My grandma seems bored talking, but the mundanity of the situation is what makes her come back alive to me nearly 15 years after her death. A similar video of my grandpa trying to call after me while I wander off in another direction affects me this way. He just says my name a few times before accepting that I’ll probably keep toddling one way until, not unlike in the game Pong, I bump into something that ricochets me in another direction. Both videos should be viral. Grandma Makes Plans and Grandpa Says Granddaughter’s Name. Boom, big numbers. Everyone’s doing the Grandma Challenge (making plans with my mom) or the Grandpa Challenge (saying my name).
Though my grandparents were here for months at a time whenever they would visit, they were mostly not in my life. None of my extended family was. As much as these videos were to fill them in on what was going on with us, they were also to re-create the joint family-ness of my parents’ childhoods. They were to immortalize those moments for us kids so we could look back at running around with 15 cousins and feel like they and my grandparents were with us. My grandparents would keep a lot of the tapes of our childhoods with them in India, I think to feel like we were with them too.
Something else I love about these home videos is seeing my parents grow up, too. Objectively I know that my parents were once young – it’s one of the prerequisites for becoming old – but it feels cool to see them in this way, as a young couple, new parents just trying to figure out what the deal with Bertucci’s is and how Christmas and Santa operate. It feels strange to see these people you have always looked to as stalwarts of your life actually just be young adults. So, the million-dollar question is – am I also to become a “stalwart” to a tiny child? That would feel crazy to me! I’m only 51% sure I’m using “stalwart” right.
There’s one video where we are on the Wellesley College campus and us little ones are running around – you can see my parents’ awe at the greenery, the huge library, everything that makes it such a beautiful institution. I ended up going to Wellesley, and it’s hard to not rewatch that video and think about how, perhaps, it was some kind of dream fulfilled for me to go there. I mean, sure, that might have been the case at every university campus we saw, but still the dreaminess of those moments is wonderful – possibilities are endless when you’re young and everywhere becomes part of a dream for the future.
I am now approaching the age my parents were when they came to the US, where they decided to build a family. I find that, when I watch these videos, I put my husband and myself in these moments. Sure, we aren’t immigrants, but we’re looking to build a family and it’s scary and confusing. It’s also exciting. As you get older, there’s a moment you realize your parents are people outside of you – that the anxieties, anger and insecurities you’re experiencing now, your mom at one time experienced too. Maybe you’re more similar than you thought, and maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
Fifteen years after my grandpa died, my mom FaceTimed me and said, “I found something.” She turned the camera around to face our TV, and there it was – my grandpa’s favorite video. Up until then I couldn’t appreciate every element of my grandpa’s review of it – the memory of this video had been taken over by the fact that we couldn’t find it when he wanted it. Now, I was suddenly seeing this thing he loved and had described in a remarkable amount of detail.
I still don’t remember doing anything in the video – feeling sad, singing a song, etc. But it’s become my favorite video too. Because now, every time I watch it, I think of how – nine years after this was filmed – a sweet grandpa would tell his granddaughter every minute detail of a strange, hilarious, melodramatic moment in her toddler life.
