Family history questions · An NRI’s guide

51 Questions to Ask Your Grandparents (An NRI’s Guide)

Published September 1, 2026 · About a 10-minute read · Fifty-one questions in seven sets

It is Saturday night in San Jose, which makes it Sunday morning in Thrissur. Your grandmother has already been to the temple and back. You ask if she has eaten. She asks if you are wearing a sweater.

This is the call. You have made it a few hundred times. It covers the knee, the rain, the neighbour’s son who is also in America, and whether you have found someone yet. It rarely goes deeper — not because either of you is hiding anything, but because the shape of the call was set years ago and neither of you has moved it.

Somewhere in those hundreds of calls a strange fact has settled in. You know the name of her blood-pressure tablet. You do not know the name of the street she grew up on. You can picture her kitchen down to the position of the pressure cooker, and you have never once asked what her own mother’s kitchen looked like.

This guide is the list of questions to fix that — written for the grandchild holding the phone abroad, not for a school project. Fifty-one of them, in seven sets, in the words you would actually say on a call.

Why ask now

We are not going to give you a statistic about how many visits you have left. Do your own arithmetic instead; it lands harder. Count the trips home you have made since you moved. If you left in 2016 and go back once a year, that is about ten. Each trip is two or three weeks, and most of those days belong to weddings, relatives, jet lag and errands. The unhurried afternoons where somebody actually tells a story — there have been perhaps a dozen.

Now count forward. Hold the same rate, and be honest about her age and yours.

There is a second, gentler reason. The stories are thinning out before she is. Ask a seventy-eight-year-old about 1962 and she will reach for a neighbour’s name and not find it. The details go from the edges inward — first the names, then the street, then which year it was. Every call on which you ask one real question is a detail caught before it drifts.

So this is not a list to use one day. It is a list to use this Sunday, one question at a time.

The 51 questions

Seven sets, numbered straight through so you can say “ask her number 33” to your sister in Toronto. Each set opens with the kind of detail that makes a grandparent lean in — and each question is short enough to ask across a bad line.

Childhood & the village

Start with the house, not the era. Every old house in India had a water source and a smell — the well in a Palakkad courtyard, the common tap in a Girgaon chawl, the hand-pump behind a farmhouse in Bihar — and that is where the morning started. Ask about the well and the whole household walks out of it: who drew the water, who bathed first, who got scolded.

  1. What was the name of the street you grew up on?
  2. What did the house you grew up in smell like in the morning?

    This one is a Katha prompt, word for word

    “Tell us about the house you grew up in. What did it smell and sound like?”

    From the Childhood & Growing Up prompts in the app.

  3. Who woke you up?
  4. What did you get in trouble for most?
  5. Which game did you play more than any other?
  6. Who was your best friend when you were ten?
  7. Did you like school?
  8. What did you want to become?

Partition, migration & the move abroad

For many Punjabi and Sindhi families the story has a train in it — one that left Lahore in 1947 — or a ship out of Karachi. For Bengali families it may be a river crossing from Sylhet or Barisal. For most families the move is smaller and just as large: a village in Ratnagiri to a single room in Bombay, an agraharam in Kumbakonam to a government quarter in Delhi. And then there is the move that made you an NRI — which they also remember, from the other side of the departure gate.

  1. Which town do we actually come from?
  2. Did our family ever have to leave a home behind?
  3. What did they carry with them?
  4. When did you first see a big city?
  5. What is the first big piece of news you remember hearing?
  6. Did you ever think of leaving India yourself?
  7. Who in our family went abroad first?
  8. What did you think the day I told you I was moving abroad?

Food & festivals

Every family has one sweet that was made once a year and never bought. In one house it is the besan ladoo your nani rolled only at Diwali; in a Marathi house the karanji; in a Tamil one the adhirasam that either puffs or fails. Ask for the recipe if you like, but ask more about the kitchen: who was allowed to stir, who stole the first one, which steel dabba it lived in.

  1. What did your mother cook that nobody makes anymore?
  2. Which sweet was made in your house only once a year?
  3. Who did the cooking at a wedding — the family, or a hired cook?
  4. What did you refuse to eat as a child?
  5. What did a festival morning look like in your house?
  6. Which fasts did your mother keep?
  7. What did you eat on long train journeys?
  8. Which meal do you remember the whole family eating together?

    This one is a Katha prompt, word for word

    “Describe a favorite family meal and the stories told around that table.”

    From the Food & Recipes prompts in the app.

Marriage & how they met

The grandparents of an NRI were married anywhere from the 1940s to the 1970s, and the range of how it happened is wider than you think. An arranged match in 1968 where the two of them saw each other once, across a drawing room, with a roomful of relatives present. A love marriage across caste that the family did not mention for a year. A photograph posted to a cousin in Nairobi. Each is a story, and almost none has been told to the grandchildren.

  1. How did you first hear the name of the person you would marry?
  2. What was your first impression?
  3. What did you wear at the wedding?
  4. Who cried the most at the wedding?
  5. Where was the first place the two of you lived?
  6. What did you argue about in the first year?
  7. What is one thing your partner taught you that you still use?

Work & money

Ask for the number. The first salary in rupees is the one figure most grandparents can still say to the rupee — and it opens everything else: what it bought (an HMT watch, a Murphy radio, the Godrej almirah that is still in the bedroom), what was sent home, what was saved for. The number is the door; the story is behind it.

  1. What was your first job?
  2. What was your first salary, in rupees?

    This one is a Katha prompt, word for word

    “What was your first job, and what did you buy with your first paycheck?”

    From the Career & Life’s Work prompts in the app.

  3. What did you buy with it?
  4. Which boss do you still think about?
  5. Was there a year when money was really tight?
  6. What did you save for the longest?
  7. What from your working life are you proudest of?

Faith & language

She says the Hanuman Chalisa under her breath during take-off. He still does his sandhya at dusk, or reads the Japji Sahib at dawn, or has kept the Friday prayer through every city he ever lived in. And then the language: the one she uses only for prayer and for scolding, the one you understand perfectly and answer in English. Ask about both. They are the parts of her that will be hardest to find later.

  1. Which prayer did your mother teach you first?
  2. Where did your family go to pray?
  3. Was there a song everyone in the house sang together?
  4. Was there a time your faith was tested?
  5. What language did your parents speak to each other?
  6. Which words do you only know in your mother tongue?
  7. Does it bother you that I answer in English?

Advice to you

She ends every call with the same line — dhyaan rakhna, take care, wear the sweater. Ask where the line came from. Somebody said something to her at eight years old that she has repeated for seventy years, and nobody has ever asked what it was.

  1. What advice did you get as a child that you still follow?

    This one is a Katha prompt, word for word

    “What is one piece of advice you received as a child that you still follow today?”

    From the Life Lessons & Wisdom prompts in the app.

  2. Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
  3. What am I worrying about that I should not?
  4. What do you want my children to know about you?
  5. What would you tell yourself at my age?
  6. What has nobody in the family ever asked you?

How to actually capture the answers

Here is the honest problem with this list. You will ask two questions on Sunday, get a good answer, and by Wednesday you will remember the feeling but not the name of the street. And you cannot be there every Sunday to ask the next one.

You can give her one button, though. This is what Katha is for, and this is how it works.

You buy Katha Gift into your own family album and personalise it — a written note, a voice message of up to thirty seconds in your own voice if you like, and a starting chapter of questions. Choose Where It All Began, the childhood chapter, and the prompt under number 2 on this list is in it. When you are ready — Diwali morning, or the next Sunday you are both free — you send her the invite link the way your family already sends everything, on WhatsApp. She taps it, joins the album, hears your voice in the welcome, presses one button and talks. Katha transcribes the story in the language she spoke it in — English, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Odia or Punjabi — and it lands in the album where you, your sister in Toronto and your children can listen, comment and react.

Stories can be translated into English so your children can read along.

Katha is an Android app. She keeps the recordings; you keep the questions coming.

Give them Katha this Diwali

The Diwali edition

Five questions about their Diwali as a child

Diwali falls on Sunday, November 8 this year, with Dhanteras on Friday the 6th and Bhai Dooj closing the week on Tuesday the 10th — Wednesday the 11th by a panchang set to India. If you are calling home that week, ask about the Diwalis before you existed — the ones with clay diyas bought from the potter, not fairy lights; a paper kandeel hung from a Marathi balcony; kheel and sugar khilone in a Punjabi drawing room; an oil bath before dawn in a Tamil house, with the lehiyam after. Five questions, one for each call that week.

  • Who drew the rangoli at your door?
  • Who lit the first diya?
  • What went into the Diwali dabba that was sent to the neighbours?
  • Which firecracker were you not allowed to hold?
  • Who stitched your Diwali clothes?

This one is a Katha prompt, word for word

“What was your favorite festival growing up, and how did your family celebrate it?”

From the Traditions & Celebrations journey in the app.

Choosing what to send home that week as well? We have written a separate guide to Diwali gifts for parents in India, with the catch on each.

Before you make the call

How do I ask without it feeling like an interview?
Do not announce it. Ask one question per call, in the slot where you would normally ask about the rain. Ask about a thing rather than a feeling — the well, the ladoo, the first salary — because things are easy to answer and the feelings arrive on their own behind them. Then stay quiet. On a phone the silence feels long; count to five before you speak.
What if they say “nothing interesting happened to me”?
Almost every grandparent says this, and it is almost never true. It usually means “I don’t know which part you want.” Make the question smaller, not bigger: not “tell me about your childhood” but “what did you eat before school?” The small question has an answer; the big one has a shrug.
Should I record it?
Yes — and tell them you are. Say why, plainly: so the children can hear it in her own voice later. Most grandparents say yes at once; a few want to think about it, and that is their right. If you use Katha, this is built in: before the very first recording the app shows a one-time “Before you record” screen where the person recording confirms they have permission from everyone in the recording. Consent is part of the flow, not an afterthought.
Which language should I ask in?
Theirs — the one the story happened in. If you understand it but answer in English, that is fine; she will probably switch to English to be kind to you, and you can gently ask her not to. A story told in the language it happened in has more in it.

One button, before this Sunday’s call

Give your parents Katha — $49, once.

Every story they tell is saved, transcribed, and theirs to keep forever. Start with your parents, or one generation up — the album is the same, and the house she grew up in is as good a first story as any.

Give Katha this Diwali