the keeper of the stories

There is a moment that arrives in most lives without ceremony: you reach for a detail — which year did we shift from the old house, what was the name of nani's village — and realize the person who always knew is no longer sure. Or no longer here. And the answer, if it exists anywhere now, exists in you.

The archive has changed hands. Nobody rang a bell.

This is not a card about grief. It is about the quiet promotion that comes before it, usually decades before. Somewhere in your thirties or forties you stop being a reader of the family's stories and become a keeper of them — often while your own parents are still alive and telling, which is precisely the window in which the stories can still be checked, completed, asked about.

The window is ordinary and open right now. It looks like a Sunday phone call where, instead of the usual traffic report of health and weather, you ask: acha, tell me properly — how did you two actually meet? It looks like letting a story run past the point where you usually say "haan, I know this one."

You do know it. That is not the point. The point is that stories, unlike facts, are kept alive by being told — and the telling needs two people.