Last year I made a photo album by hand for my grandmother's eightieth birthday. I'm a nineteen-year-old student in Chennai, and I'm not especially artistic, so it was quite a challenge for me.
My grandmother lives with us and she basically raised me while both my parents worked. She loves telling stories about the old days, but most of her photos were in a cardboard box, curling and fading, and some were stuck together because of the humidity.
It took me about two months, mostly late at night after my college work. First, I secretly took the box from her cupboard and sorted the photos by decade. I had the most damaged ones scanned and printed again at a photo shop. Then I bought thick handmade paper and made a cover from an old silk sari of hers, which my mother helped me find. I stuck the photos in and, under each one, I wrote a few lines in Tamil about who was in it and what was happening. For that part I had to ask my aunts lots of questions without letting her know why.
When we gave it to her at her birthday lunch, she went completely silent. She turned the pages very slowly, and when she got to a picture of my grandfather on their wedding day, she started crying, then laughing, then crying again. She kept saying she'd thought those photos were lost. Now it lives on the table beside her chair, and she shows it to every visitor who comes to the house. Honestly, nothing I could have bought would have meant as much to her.