In this ongoing collaborative series, young writers around the world revisit stories important to their childhoods. Like many of the tales that shape our lives, these pieces flow into each other, creating a narrative that links contributors across continents and cultures. Read the previous stories (The Sweetest Thing in the World, The Day the Princess Didn’t Want Her Crown, An Unimaginable Adventure, Margaret, Grandma’s Secret Moves, and The Fisherman’s Daughter) and don’t miss the accompanying videos that bring these young voices to life.

“She never forgot where she came from,” my mom finishes.

She has just told me a story about my grandma and milk. It goes like this:

When my grandma, who I call Ammamma, was young in South India, a man with a buffalo would come every morning to her door. He would call out “Amma!” — the English equivalent would be “Lady!” — and she would come out with a jug into which he would milk the buffalo. I still find it hard to imagine, coming out of my house to see a giant buffalo and to get the day’s milk that way. That was how it was, every day for a long time.

Around 30 years later, when my mom was a baby, she moved with my grandparents to London and they lived in a tiny apartment, which they shared with another family. Every morning the milkman would come with whatever dairy each family wanted and leave it on the doorstep. For my mom and grandparents, it was bottles of milk and eggs.

Later, my grandparents moved out of the apartment and into a small house. The milkman still came every day, until the day when that custom was changed. From that day, every time my grandparents needed milk, they just went to the store to get it, like I do.

My grandparents lived in that very house for a long time. Finally my parents convinced them to move to our home in Brooklyn. Now they go out once or twice a week to get milk from the corner. Each week my Ammamma comes up the stairs to look at our fridge and go to the store for milk. She sometimes seems far away.

“She never forgot where she came from,” my mom repeats, looking at her mum.

I drink the cold glass of milk in front of me.