The Weight of My Grandmother’s Hands

Author......shahjhan

The first time I noticed my grandmother’s hands, I was six years old and sitting on the kitchen floor, playing with marbles while she stirred something on the stove. The scent of onions and cumin filled the air, and the rhythm of her wooden spoon striking the pot became the soundtrack of my childhood. But it was her hands I remember most—creased, dark, callused in places I didn’t yet understand.

She had hands that knew things.

They were not delicate or soft, like the hands of the television mothers I watched in Saturday morning reruns. Her hands were stained with turmeric and the ghost of garden soil. She wore no rings. Her nails were short and uneven. The veins stood out like rivers on an old map. If you looked closely, you could trace them and get lost in the geography of her life.

It took me years to realize that everything I am began in those hands.

I used to think "the weight of someone's hands" referred to heaviness, physicality. But that’s not what her hands carried. They held histories.

My grandmother was born in 1941, in a village that no longer exists except in stories. A border was drawn, and her childhood home found itself on the wrong side of it. She was ten when she became a refugee. Ten years old and already holding her younger brother on her hip as she walked across lands she didn’t recognize, her family chasing whispers of safety. That was the first time, she told me, her hands began to ache.

She carried water for miles, ground grain between stones, and nursed sick elders with crushed leaves and whispered prayers. Her palms became the family ledger: blistered by firewood, split open during harvests, callused by years of hand washing clothes in cold rivers. Even when she came to the city, her hands never forgot the fields.

I remember when I was fifteen and angry at everything. Angry at school, at my parents, at myself for not knowing who I was supposed to be. I snapped at her once—rolled my eyes when she asked me for help peeling garlic. “You have two hands, don’t you?” I muttered.

She didn’t say anything at the time. She just gave me the cloves and walked away.

Later that night, I found her sitting alone in her room, rubbing coconut oil into her knuckles. I noticed, for the first time, how her thumb bent slightly sideways. “It never healed right,” she said softly, without looking up. “I broke it during the riots when your uncle was a baby. I had to climb through a window with him in one arm and a kitchen knife in the other.”

I wanted to say something—apologize, cry, hug her. But all I did was sit beside her and hold her hand. She let me.

My grandmother was not a woman of many words. She had a silence that said more than most people’s speeches. But her hands were never still. They stitched clothes, cooked meals, planted basil in tin cans, tucked in blankets, made offerings at dawn.

There’s a photo of her on my desk now. She’s not looking at the camera. Instead, her gaze is fixed on something off-frame—maybe a memory, maybe a prayer. But her hands are clasped in her lap, still and strong. Even in the photo, they seem to pulse with life.

When she passed, the last thing I did before they closed the casket was hold her hands.

They were lighter than I remembered.

Sometimes, I still feel the weight of her hands. Not as burden, but as legacy.

I feel them when I chop onions without flinching. When I hem my pants by hand because I still don’t trust machines. When I rub balm on my mother’s feet. When I hold my baby niece and instinctively rock her in the same rhythm my grandmother used to rock me.

Her hands were not just hands—they were language, history, labor, protection, faith. They were the first place I ever felt safe. And now, they live in mine.



A few weeks ago, I had a dream. In it, I was back in her kitchen, marbles on the floor, the same smell of cumin in the air. She was stirring a pot and humming. I looked down at my hands and saw hers.