It’s uncanny how grandparents always look like film stars when they were young.

If I squint my inner eye long and hard enough, I can just see them – they’re sitting down, as cosy as an old wireless set, warming up the leftovers of a conversation. Then they see me and wave. It’s my favourite version of an afterlife, and they are living it.

I hardly remember my grandparents – both pairs died when I was still wearing shorts to school, sporting bruised knees and white socks. The memories I have are fragmented, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, or a narrative with blank lines which I have to complete with nostalgia-infused imagination.

And I only have two photos. They both picture formal occasions – actually, posing for the photo itself could have been the formal occasion. There they are, all serious in their Sunday best. It’s uncanny how grandparents always look like film stars when they were young. Must be the retouching. Or the light.

Of my paternal grandparents, I can remember a few stolen seconds. With difficulty, I can recall a smell of simmering soup and a pair of arms, lifting me up to gargle me. And I remember my grandfather, perched on a slab of stone, watching my father build his own house.

“It can’t be,” my father tells me when I bring it up. “He was already dead by then.”

They both died in the span of a few months, like people in love do.

The house was sold to a family of six and we would visit almost every day. “He was a good man,” they used to say of my grandfather. My grandmother would be praised as a saintly woman. Then I would rush off with the other children to play. The play menu consisted mostly of hide and seek. When it was my turn to hide, I would seek out the darkest corners, hoping to find something my grandparents left behind – an orphan button, a silent slipper, an echo of a voice caught behind the sofa.

Memories of my material grandparents are painted in slightly stronger brushstrokes. I remember my grandfather would sit in the garage all day long. They had recently moved to a new house, and it was like he couldn’t get used to the clean limestone. The garage was his space, with a small fridge and a bread bin for company. During Sunday visits, he would gather us cousins around (confusing the names), open the bread bin, and give us a biscuit each. Maybe because it was the chocolate-hungry 1980s, maybe it was the sugar content, but those biscuits were more delicious than Proust’s madeleine.

In the evening, he would go up to his room, change his shirt and sharpen up his side parting. Then he would sit down in front of the television set and wait for the eight o’clock news. “Good evening,” the newscaster would say. “And good evening to you,” my grandfather would smile back. There was no hint of irony – he really thought the newscaster could see him.

When he died, I remember sneaking into the garage, opening his bread bin and finding it empty.

I remember my grandmother’s swollen legs. Her chair. Her hair, tightly pulled back in a storm-defying bun. Then my mother crying at her funeral and me, thinking how strange it was that even grown-ups cry. And that even grown-ups could be orphans. Will be orphans.

I would seek out the darkest corners, hoping to find something my grandparents left behind – an orphan button, a silent slipper, an echo of a voice caught behind the sofa

I would like to think these are precious memories. But they’re not. They are scarce, poor, half a tot spiked with tricks of the imagination. I didn’t inherit any rich trinket or words of wisdom. But occasionally, some old relative tells me how I have my grandmother’s hair, or how I unconsciously mimic my grandfather’s manner of eating a piece of bread after dinner, to cool down my mouth. And I add another piece to the puzzle.