It is Tuesday, 11:40 at night, in the hostel, and I have just put down a call with Dada in which he told me the whole 1969 moon story, and I realised I have heard it perhaps six times and this is the first time I listened. He was seventeen. I am nineteen. He was standing outside a shop, holding a bicycle wheel, listening to a radio. I am lying in bed holding a phone with more computing power than the machine that went to the moon. And, honestly, his night sounds better than mine.

When I gave Dada his first smartphone in 2019 he held it as if it were wet. He asked where the buttons had gone. Then he found the camera and took forty photographs of the shop shutter. Only the shutter, from different angles. When I asked why, he said: this shutter I have pulled down eleven thousand times, let it be in the phone also. I did the arithmetic later, thirty-two years at six days a week, and it came to closer to ten thousand. I never told him. Eleven thousand sounds like Dada.

In first year I failed thermodynamics and told nobody. My roommate Faizan found out because the results were pinned to the notice board. He said nothing. He went and bought two plates of chowmein, sat on the end of my bed, ate with me, and said: bhai, second attempt is a thing. That was the whole of it. It is the reason I passed.

Everyone in my batch wants to go abroad. I want to build something in Gorakhpur with my grandfather's name on it that nobody laughs at. That is the dream. It is embarrassing, and I am putting it here so that I cannot take it back. My mother built a bridge. Dada built a shop. I do not yet know what mine is. But it will stand in Gorakhpur, and somewhere in it there will be a number fifteen spanner.

That I asked. I very nearly did not. My grandmother has stood in that kitchen for the whole of my life and I never once asked her anything but what was for dinner. Last month, through this app, I asked her what she regretted. She answered about her mother's bangles. I read it in the hostel at midnight and had to go out and walk. I am grateful that there was still time to ask. That is all.