My grandfather, known to everyone as simply Papa ji (‘Father’ with the suffix of respect), eats an orange almost every day. Though he has trouble opening it with his uncoordinated, slightly pudgy hands, he digs into the orange peel until his fingers meet pulpy flesh.

He knows that a knife would be more effective, but fetching one from the utensil drawer would entail getting up, setting his cane down, and exhausting energy that he may not be able to spare.

Instead, just as I bring him the proper knife, Papa ji bites through the orange peel, grips his fingers into the opening, and strips the fruit to expose pith that covers the fruit like moss.

“Aja. Lelo.” Come. Take. He offers it to me in his palm.

Once I take it in my mouth, he eats a slice as well.

“Jaldi mat kaa”. Don’t eat too fast, he orders.

My grandfather massages the orange slice in his mouth, allowing some of the juice to trickle down his chin. With the wrinkles around his mouth and the two flaps of fat hanging off his face, it’s difficult to tell if he has swallowed the seeds or if he has chosen to store them away for some unexpected hibernation.

“Papa ji, seeds mat kaiye.” Don’t eat the seeds, I insist. Though I can address him in the respectful tense of Hindi, the word for ‘seeds’ eludes me.

He leans across the table, clinches a napkin, and spits out two orange seeds. He must have been saving them in some slippery groove in the back of his mouth.

“Dekho! Tere seeds,” Look! Your seeds, he says with a note of victory.

Papa ji holds one in between his index finger and thumb like a precious stone, then pops it in the back of his mouth and swallows it like a prescribed pill.

“You’ll be sick,” I warn him.

He picks up the other seed. This time, with the knife, he carefully peels away a layer of skin from the seed. This throwaway piece of the fruit is a transparent sheet, a ghost of the seed, a past life that the seed has suddenly shed. Papa ji brings it close to my sight and highlights the thin, miniscule veins with the tip of the knife.

He takes this thin sliver of skin and places it on his tongue, then nibbles on it with the shining front teeth of his dentures.

“Aap kya kar rahe hain?” What are you doing? I ask, perplexed by his demonstration.

He chooses not to respond. Instead, he grips the knife again and peels back more skins of the seed as if trying to reach the core. The seed becomes much smaller, smoother like a rock, elegant as if buried in the earth. And again he chews the skin, grinding it down to bits of pulp.

Another time with the knife, and another sliver of skin comes off. The seed, even smaller now, has eroded into a pebble of sand. He presents the last layer he manages to carve off the seed on the tip of the knife.

“Eat it. Now.” Papa ji instructs me in English. He resorts to his adopted language whenever he needs to pull rank. I would think it would be the other way around–resorting to his mother tongue of Hindi to drive home a certain point–but his short sentences of English allow him to convey the barest bones of any argument.

I follow his lead and chew it with my front teeth. He sucks on the last of the seed like candy.

“Oranges will grow in your belly tonight,” I admonish.

He pauses and then starts chuckling. “I will have fields of oranges, beta.” He still calls me ‘son’ as if I were a child, even though I am nearly the same age as my father was when he first left India. I gather I will be addressed like this until there is no one left to call me by this name.

“Mujhko patha hai.” I understand, I tell him.

“Nahin. You have not understood. I have eaten the heart.”

He removes the naked seed from his mouth. All that is left of it.

“The fruit is now just this. This is where it comes from. This is…” he searches for a specific word. A moment passes between us. He has trailed off somewhere, wandering through the pathways of his memory. His drifting has occurred more often these days, but I can’t tell if this is because he has a sudden desire for exploration or if the memories have all started to blur together.

“Essence,” my grandfather says, definitively. “This is the essence. We come from here only.”

Papa ji reaches a full-stop, encouraging the sentiments of his words to reach me and finally sink in. So that they can become memories in my own mind. That his memories can be joined to mine, and we become extensions of one another.

“Samaj? Understood?” He asks, first in Hindi, then in English.

Yes, I nod to him. Understood. At least I hope so.