My nan died last Wednesday. I can’t focus on much else right now, so I thought I’d tell you all about why I loved her so much.
‘Chafu’, and other early memories
One of my earliest memories is of my nan washing me in the bath at her house in Leicester, splashing water between my legs. ‘Chafu,’ she grumbled. ‘Chafu.’
‘What does chafu mean?’ I asked.
‘Dirty!’ she cackled. Aside from jambo (hello) and matata (fuss), it was the only Swahili word I learnt.
I remember Nana trying to teach me numbers in Gujarati - I can still recall ek, be, tran, char - but I was never much of a linguist.
My nan spoke with an Indian accent. She was born in Nairobi, Kenya; her first language was Gujarati, her second Swahili and her third English.
Often, she would speak a mix of the three. If she forgot a word in English, she would substitute the word in Gujarati or Swahili.
‘Stop making matata!’ she would tell me and my sister when we fought.
Like many Indians, she pronounced the letter v as w. As a naughty eight-year-old, I would ask her to say ‘That’s a very nice vase’, because I found it funny that she’d say ‘That’s a werry nice wase.’
When really, as a monoglot, I should just have been respectful and impressed that she was fluent in three languages.
Shirin, the beauty queen
My nan was born on 25th June 1925. She always claimed to have been born in 1926, possibly because she wanted to be the same age as Queen Elizabeth II (who she would go on to outlive). She always refused to give her real age to me when I asked - ‘I am as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth!’ she would laugh.
She had an amazing laugh, like a high-pitched Muttley the cartoon dog. I loved making her laugh.
She married my grandfather, Papa, in February 1945, when she was 19. They moved to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to start a family. My mother came along in February 1948, and her sister Nilufer in September 1952. My nan was a housewife for most of her life, but in her thirties, while the children were young, she got into beauty and ran a slimming clinic.
I didn’t become aware of Nana until she was about 60, by which time she looked like a glamorous old lady, and had put on weight - she was well-padded when I knew her, until she lost a lot of weight due to dementia. But she was very beautiful in her youth. She won a local beauty contest in Nairobi when she was young; around 55 years later, I would follow in her footsteps and win Miss Harrow.
Until the ravages of dementia took over in her mid-90s, she kept up appearances. She would wake up at 8am, switch on the radio and apply her makeup at her dressing table. She would always wear bright pink or red lipstick, always bought from the Avon lady (I still have a couple of the Avon lipsticks she gave me in my makeup boxes).
She had plucked her eyebrows to a thin line a long while back, so would apply eyebrow pencil, and eye liner, and mascara, and foundation, with her hair dyed dark brown and backcombed into an old lady perm.
Despite being fully Parsi Zoroastrian (Indian-Iranian) and me being half-white, she was a lot paler than I was - pretty much white. Only her dark hair and eyes gave away that she was Asian. (My mother inherited her father’s dark skin, which she passed down to me.)
Nana loved bright clothes - always pillar box red and hot pink, coupled with black. I don’t recall her ever wearing anything else, just those colours. She knew what she looked good in - the exact same colours I look good in.
Her fingernails were long and thin and always painted the same shocking red or fuchsia pink.
I remember her giving me a makeover once when I was about ten, painting my finger nails and putting bright lipstick on me. ‘Dear Lord,’ my disapproving mother said, ‘you look like a little Indian child!’
I was confused: surely I was a little Indian child?!
But my mother never wore makeup, nail polish or jewellery. She found them all distasteful. She was cool where my nan was warm, standoffish where my nan was always happy to cuddle me, formal where my nan was easygoing, practical where my nan was emotional.
And Mum was skinny where my nan was plump. I loved my nan’s plumpness: in later life, she was a size 16 despite being tiny (maybe 4’8”?) and had a huge bosom and squashy tummy which I could bury myself in during cuddles. She was soft and squishy and comforting.
Most importantly, she was the only person out of her, my mum, dad, grandad and sister who had never been violent to me or threatened me with violence. She was pure love.
Card games and the fireplace
My grandparents, Nana and Papa, moved over to England in 1972 and settled in Leicester, where there were a lot of Asian immigrants. They lived at 21a Liberty Road, Glenfield. I would sometimes confuse Glenfield with Glendale, which was the town my dad was from in California.
I loved my grandparents, but I didn’t like the drive up to see them, because it would take over two hours on the M1 and I would get car sick. When we arrived, however, my grandparents would hug me. Their house smelt exotic and spicy and there was delicious food which I wasn’t allowed at home, because my mum suffered from orthorexia (an obsession with eating healthy food).
Papa would make doodh na puff, a Parsi Zoroastrian drink of whisked milk and sugar, which I thought was absolutely delicious. Nana would make lamb cutlets with coriander and tomato salsa - honestly, I wish you could have tried them, they were divine.
Nana would sometimes bustle around smiling, her bangles clinking on her wrists. But most of the time, she would sit in her big armchair in front of the telly, next to the fireplace. I would love warming myself in front of that fireplace in winter, as our house in London was always so cold.
I would ask to play the card game Rummy with Nana, and she would shuffle, her long finger nails clicking as she dealt out the cards. She was quick and sly and smiley and would nearly always win.
She wasn’t an educated woman - in the 1930s, women left school at 13 or so - but she was bright. She could follow the most complex knitting patterns and do all kinds of different stitches.
The house was full of kitsch, chintzy decor - brass roosters on the wall, along with bright tapestries Nana had woven. It was a place full of love, where I felt safe from my father’s wrath.
Michael Jackson and Dave Stewart
I wasn’t allowed to listen to pop music at home. But my nan loved pop music - especially Michael Jackson. I instantly loved his records too, and I think my obsession with pop music stems from that, as well as it being forbidden fruit. Nana would dance around the living room to MJ, sometimes in a floaty sari, her hands twirling above her head, bangles clinking on her wrists. The albums Bad (1987) and Dangerous (1991) became the soundtrack to our visits to Leicester.
Nana also really liked the 1989 instrumental track ‘Lily Was Here’ by Dave Stewart feat. Candy Dulfer, and would play it on repeat. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that I named my daughter Lily.
My nan: always proudly low-brow
You know those old women’s magazines like That’s Life, Take a Break, Chat and Bella? The kind with headlines like ‘I was raped by a ghost!’ and ‘My dead husband was reincarnated as a robin!’? My nan loved those. She also read Hello! and OK magazines, which were full of celebrities.
When I first became a massive Duran Duran fan back in 1993, I asked her to cut out any clippings of the band she came across in her magazines. In practice, this generally meant her cutting out pictures of their wives, Yasmin Le Bon and Amanda de Cadenet, at parties. I wasn’t so enamoured with them as with the actual band.
Anyhow, my nan was thoughtful and kind and very much internalised the fact that I was a Duran Duran fan - to the extent that she was still providing me with clippings of Yasmin and Amanda in my mid-thirties! I never had the heart to tell her I was no longer interested in them.
As well as her love of trashy magazines, my nan also adored low-brow telly. Her TV was always on, and was usually either tuned to ITV1 or Channel 5, except for when she watched EastEnders. When I was a kid, she was addicted to all the soaps and breakfast TV programmes; later, she became hooked on reality TV programmes like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Strictly Come Dancing.
‘I watch all the rubbish!’ she would say proudly.
Though there wasn’t really a class system in the community of her heritage, Nan would have been considered working class, whereas my mum educated herself out of the working classes, gaining two post-graduate degrees including a law degree.
They were so different: Nan never watched anything cultured if she could help it. She would have been bored and baffled by University Challenge, whereas Bamber Gascoigne boomed out of our telly at home when I was little. And Nana couldn’t have been less interested in history documentaries, while my parents were obsessed by them.
My parents were republicans, while Nan was fascinated by the royal family, especially Princess Diana. She loved drama and gossip, and would start her conversations with me with a wide-eyed, excited, ‘So, what have you got to tell me? What news?!’
Nana’s humour and the giant topiary bear
When my lovely papa sadly died in 2002, aged 81, Nana was understandably devastated, and felt a bit lost. My mum managed to sell the house in Leicester and buy Nana a second floor flat opposite my parents’ house in Pinner. Eventually, she settled in.
What I haven’t told you is that Nana had a naughty sense of humour. She used to tell me rude jokes from her magazines. I always think her humour skipped a generation: whenever I tried to tell my mother anything smutty, she would quip, ‘Tell your grandmother!’ (And, as though to back up my theory about it skipping generations, my daughter is as prim and proper as my mother.)
One day, I went to visit Nana. She took me over to the window, and pointed out into the next garden, where the hedge had been sculpted into a topiary bear.
‘Do you see that?’ she asked excitedly.
‘It’s a bear,’ I replied.
‘Look between the bear’s legs,’ Nana urged. ‘What do you see?’
I duly obeyed, and was shocked. ‘It has a willy!’ I gasped.
‘Yes, I knew it!’ Nan giggled mischievously. ‘Your mother said it was a tail. It is not a tail - it is a WILLY!’
Born in the 1920s, when women were meant to be demure, Nana had a cracking sense of humour to rival Sid James.
Her love of kitchen gadgets
Nana was very generous. Every time I visited her house, she would ply me with Indian food: generally poppadoms with mango chutney, or chapattis. But she would also insist I took away something with me.
Often, this would be a lipstick or a piece of jewellery. The jewellery wasn’t always to my taste, but I accepted it anyway, and often regifted it - as I explained in this comic Guardian column!
Nana was also a big fan of kitchen gadgets and a regular reader of the Innovations Catalogue. If a gadget chopped, diced or sliced then she wanted it. My mum said that when she went into care and they had to clear her flat, she found hundreds of these gadgets hoarded away in Nan’s spare room!
Nana and the African babies
Nana used to love knitting. She would constantly sit in front of the telly, knitting needles clanking together, and she wouldn’t even need to look at what she was doing, even if it was a difficult or specialised kind of stitch. When Lily was born, Nana knitted dozens of pink and white cardigans for her. I can’t find a picture of Lily in one of these cardigans now, alas.
One of Nana’s favourite TV programmes in later life was The Paul O’Grady Show. They launched an appeal for viewers to knit hats for African babies, as the temperature would drop at night and the babies were getting pneumonia. This appeal was right up big-hearted Nana’s street, so she knitted hundreds of hats.
In fact, she knitted so many hats that the show actually sent her a letter asking her to stop sending them in!
I wouldn’t have put it past her to knit hats for all the babies in Africa.
The sadness of dementia
When Nan first went into care when she was 93, she didn’t seem that confused or forgetful. I used to take Lily to visit her and we’d have lunch. To start with, she could feed herself; after a while, she wasn’t able to, so I’d feed her.
One day, I remember asking her, ‘What was it like in Tanzania, Nana? Was it sunny?’
‘Yes, you remember!’ she said, surprised. ‘I used to ask the ayah [nanny] to take you and your sister down to the beach, but she would have to bring you back by noon, because it got too hot.’
I quickly realised she was confusing me with my mum, but said nothing.
Another time, before she became bed bound, Nana had to be taken to the toilet at the care home using a hoist. Afterwards, she said, ‘All this fuss just to spend a penny!’ Then she winked at me and said, ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
I couldn’t tell her that there was no ‘home’ anymore, because her flat had been sold.
When I was training to be a nail technician last year, I went to the care home and painted Nana’s nails pillar box red for her, but she couldn’t hold her hands still or move them. She still loved bright colours though, and would always point at the brightest colour when I offered her a selection of shades.
Nana and body image
I remember once, about twenty years ago, complimenting Nana on having perky breasts despite being in her seventies. ‘I have always had a very high bosom!’ she said proudly.
Unfortunately, when she developed breast cancer, her pride in her breasts meant she refused to have surgery. But luckily, because she was in her nineties, the cancer was so slow-growing that it was kept in check with a tablet a day.
When she was 94, I took a picture of her and showed it to her. ‘Is that me?’ she asked, horrified. ‘I look horrible!’
Age comes to us all, but in Nana’s mind, she was still the Nairobi beauty queen she’d been when young. I’m glad she still saw herself like that.
Ray, Nana’s right hand man
Nana had a protector in the care home: Ray, an adorable elderly man four years older than her. He took a shine to her, and the pair would always take their meals together.
Ray had the most amazing story. He was born in Poland in 1921, was a paratrooper and fought the Nazis in WWII, but was captured and became a prisoner of war in Germany. He escaped, fled to France and was going to be parachuted in again, but luckily fell ill and missed the mission he was meant to be on: the pilot turned out to be a double agent, and everyone perished.
‘I shouldn’t really be alive,’ he would say. ‘I’m so lucky.’
One day in early 2020, when Nana was 94, Ray, Nana, Lily and I were sitting round the table in the care home dining room. I remarked, ‘Isn’t it amazing that Ray was born on 25th November, Nana was born on 25th June and Lily was born on 25th April?’
Nana eyed me with a baleful glare. ‘I do not care for talk about birthdays!’ she announced crossly.
I think she’d just had enough of them by then.
Ray just made it to 100. We were going to visit him that week to wish him a happy birthday, but Lily caught Covid, and by the time she’d recovered, sadly Ray had passed away.
The last days
Nana declined quite rapidly during the last few years. She had gone from being able to walk when she entered the care home, to needing a wheelchair; from being able to feed herself, to needing to be fed; from being able to talk, to becoming mute; from being able to move, to lying in bed, completely immobile. I know she would have hated the indignity of having to soil herself in bed and be cleaned up by the nurses.
It was all incredibly sad. At the very end, on the final few days, she was barely able to smile - only to open and close her eyes. I was there for her last ten minutes, joining my mum at her bedside.
I sang her, ‘You are my sunshine’, and she passed away at the end of the song.
She was all goodness, all kindness: aptly, a bright spot of sunshine in what was a very bleak childhood. I loved her so very much.
Shirin Cooper, 25th June 1925 - 12th June 2024. Rest in peace.
Your mother's cultural snobbery is saddening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaii2uvHkpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaii2uvHkpI and to dismiss something as lowbrow just because it's popular is a profoundly unintellectual position.
In 1997/98, when I became famous throughout my school for always getting in trouble, my parents forbade me from watching 'The Simpsons'. Vintage-era Simpsons is one of the cleverest works of art of our lifetime. Your nan seems to have had an unpretentious intelligence that educated people have beaten out of them.
A very beautiful and vivid piece, Ariane. X