Grandpa was finally conscious after a week of concussion. Distressingly independent at ninety six, he had been ambling gently around the house when he stumbled and fell, hurt his head and lost consciousness. His speech was still a little slurred, but despite occasional bouts of delirium, he was clear-headed most of the time. His body, however, already wracked by old age and Parkinson’s Disease, had succumbed. The presence of male nursing attendants round the clock irked his free spirit, but he no longer had a choice in the matter.
‘How are you, child?’ he asked as soon as I entered his room with Rajesh.
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that Grandpa?’
‘See? I beat you to it!’ His eyes shone with glee.
‘How can he joke like this when he’s in so much pain?’ Rajesh asked dumbfounded, as Grandpa and I exchanged mischievous looks and chuckled.
‘That’s how he is,’ I replied tenderly, ‘And that’s what he’s taught us too: always to come up smiling, with a joke on your lips, no matter what’.
He passed away within three months of this, but I like to think that his dauntless spirit lives on in all his grandchildren.
My first clear memory with Grandpa is at the age of five. My male cousins had ganged up and were teasing me mercilessly, and I had fled to Grandpa. Ensconced in the sanctuary of his arms, I told him, between sobs, what had happened.
‘So … they called you a donkey … hmmm!’
I waited breathlessly for my tormentors to be called to book. But his next words completely threw me: ‘Where are your big, floppy ears? Where’s your tail?’
‘What do you mean Grandpa?’
‘I mean darling, that you haven’t really become a donkey. So why do you cry if some fools don’t know the difference between a beautiful little girl and a donkey? The Almighty has given you plenty of brains. So, think of a reply instead of crying when someone is unkind to you … crying will neither solve anything, nor give you any satisfaction!’
That gave me to think, and that lesson has remained with me to this day. Grandpa’s point of view was peculiarly his own. Left motherless among seven brothers at a tender age, with a father who became a workaholic, Grandpa was a consummate survivor.
He was a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom for all his grandchildren – the best Montessori school a child ever had. Showering us with unconditional love, he gave us a legacy of life-skills and mind-development exercises in the form of stories, idioms, conundrums, games, couplets and conjuring tricks – all done in such a way as to capture our imagination. His reminiscences about the Partition of the country in 1947 and the family’s transition to India, with my three year-old father in tow and an aunt on the way, were verbal manuals in survival skills and attitudes.
‘Whatever losses you sustain in life, always remember, you are not defeated until you choose to be’, he would say. ‘You can always rebuild what you have lost, the way we did after the carnage of the Partition, if you have your family and your health’.
Years later, working for a reputed newspaper, I found myself in hot water when my old boss changed jobs and the new boss, as usually happens, wished to clear away the old team and bring in his ‘own people’. I was an extra-special target since my niche was coveted by his personal protegee. Harassed in numerous intangible, petty ways, I was initially tempted to fling the job in his teeth – I did not really need the money. Besides, with my Master’s degree in Economics I’d been offered a plum job in Equity Research, which I had declined because of my love for writing.
However, Grandpa’s genes inside me would not let me bow to injustice. Being the granddaughter of Grandpa – the one who had left everything behind in Lahore, and starting over in Delhi in the face of prejudice against ‘refugees’ at the age of thirty four, had risen to the post of CEO at Tata Oil Mills – I refused to be hounded out of a job I loved and did well, and held my ground in the teeth of overt hostility for six whole months, at the end of which period the boss simply gave up and let me get on with my work! All through this time Grandpa was a pillar of strength for me, keeping my spirits up whenever the stress of the situation got to me.
We learned Chess from him, as well as Bridge, the ancient Chaupar, and a host of card games and conjuring tricks. To this day, I ascribe my ability to think situations through exhaustively and take sensible action to my grounding in Chess and Bridge under him. All of his grandchildren – my cousins, sisters and I – would clear all aptitude tests that came our way with little or no preparation, thanks to our childhood spent answering his puzzles and conundrums.
His immense love and joy in his family made us all feel cherished and precious, and gave us a core of self-confidence and security. It was never too late for him to accompany us to the market to buy something we had forgotten, and which we dreaded telling our parents about. It never, ever crossed his mind to refuse when his three year-old youngest grand-daughter demanded that he stop watching the Sunday movie on television and play with her in the garden. I am told he once rang up from Bombay (as it was then) when I was four, to ask my parents to switch on the radio, since my favourite song from ‘Bobby’ was playing on AIR!
In his later years he suffered increasing loss of hearing, blurred vision due to a spoiled cataract surgery, and the progressive tremors and phases of forgetfulness of Parkinson’s Disease, but never, till his demise at the age of ninety six, did we ever see him defeated in spirit.
It’s no wonder then, that the least demonstrative of my cousins – a notoriously taciturn person – was moved to write his first ever personal post on Facebook upon Grandpa’s demise: ‘Remembering my Grandfather -- one of the few people who inspired me’!
No comments:
Post a Comment