The legend in our living room

His voice was like the sound of shoes dragged on cobblestones. It doesn’t sound pretty, but it is. I can’t remember if I like the sound of cobblestones because of him or vice versa. He used that warm raspy voice to call my name. Anoopa Rani. That was his special name for me. It is the clarity of detail with which I recall this name and that voice that surprises me.

Of course, there are hundreds of other things that I remember. But I can tell that with each passing year these memories are a little more faded. Perhaps a little more romanticized and hero-worshipped, but blurred; as if I’ve taken off my glasses and I have to squint just a little more.

The circumstances under which my sister and I got so close to my maternal grandfather, are a little off the beaten track. When a woman in my mother’s time got married, it was fairly common, unquestioned and a conclusion of the foregone variety, for the bride to move into the home of her husband’s family. My father, having been orphaned at a very young age and thenceforth having been raised by various older siblings, presented a new situation. And the two of them together were nudged by this history, to explore fairly uncharted territory in this tried-and-tested Indian topography of family life.

Amma and Appa lived alone in an ‘independent house’, and had two children zipping about on the well-worn red oxide floor, before circumstances forced another change. Amma’s parents were advancing in years, and my grandmother’s health was failing. It was a suggestion by my grandfather that led to our family moving in with my mother’s parents. I sometimes think it was a large-hearted gesture and sacrifice Appa made, to relinquish his place at the head of the table, however nominal it might have been. Nevertheless, ‘Anand Babu’ came to live with his wife’s family. And Thatha became the biggest part of all our lives.

My earliest memories of Thatha are the gravelly voice of shoes and cobblestones, and the softness of his khadi clothes: the proud heritage of his freedom fighter days. Of the strong whiff of Brylcreem when we sat in the living room, my father and he in solemn conversation about cricket. They always called each other ‘Sir’, except occasionally, when Thatha switched to ‘Anand Babu’. The only overt sign of affection between two gruff men in a household draped, tucked and perfumed with women. There was my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, my sister and me. The council in the living room with their coffee and cricket, knew they were fighting a losing battle, and clung to their well-formed habits, idiosyncrasies and most of all, each other.

I don’t think I ever thought of Thatha as proud- he was too down-to-earth for that- but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else with such a distinct air of sophistication and self-assurance. Thatha had fought for his country, been imprisoned with the Mahatma, married the woman he loved, raised three children, survived the loss of a son too young, started an educational institution, learnt and mastered many languages, traveled widely, built a house on land that was his...
He’d basically managed to pack in an astonishing number of achievements in his lifetime, and bore the everyday awe of people around him with grace and humour.

In the twilight of his life, he surrounded himself with the things and people he loved. His house with his wife, children, grandchildren, dogs, cats and oft-visiting friends, held together with his personal holy trinity of coffee, cricket and khadi.

I can’t clearly remember when exactly he changed, because I was too young when my grandmother passed away. But I know that he was weakened by her passing. I know that he often cried, and had lost some of his will to live. An atheist all his life, Thatha turned to religion with the kind of fervour I had only seen in his late wife. Within a year of her passing, we moved into the beautiful house that he built and named for her. Lalitha.

In spite of the changes that I was then almost oblivious to, Thatha managed to pick up the pieces of his life. He turned all his attention to his granddaughters, who were growing fast and proving to have alarmingly poor grasp of Hindi. The language he helped bring to the South, the now-failing metaphor of unity, when India was beginning to show the British what was what.

I remember the patience with which he took me through the same rules of Hindi grammar that sidestepped me time and again. A battle that I gave up fighting altogether when he died. He wrote all my essays for me. I especially remember how, in moments of deep concentration, he seemed to go through some mental tunnel, and suddenly start writing in Urdu. One line in Hindi, left to right, and the next line in his small clear Urdu script, right to left. I was fascinated even then, notwithstanding my run-of-the-mill teenage air-headedness.

It is important to mention that at an extremely rebellious time in our lives, my sister and I never sensed a generation gap in our separate relationships with Thatha. He bought us all our stationery. Rather, he bought her all the stationery that I ‘stole’ and ‘lost’. He bought us our first saris, and also all the pairs of jeans we owned, although he disliked the garment. His special name for denim was ‘Katthey Battey’: cloth of the donkey, for some reason. He admonished us the most for poor marks, but still drove us out of the house in the evenings, on cycles he bought us. I also get the sneaky feeling he gleefully encouraged our childhood crush on Boris Becker. (I had to like everything my sister liked.)

I remember the exact moment I realized Thatha was dying. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer and owing to his age and various other health issues, things didn’t look too good. While the rest of the family was trying to deal with it, I was busy avoiding it. I was sitting at the dining table watching television, as any good hard working 18-year-old should, and he walked from the living room to his room. As I watched him, I realized I’d never seen him walk so deliberately and with so much pain. It took him a couple of minutes. I think I cried. As Thatha got worse, he started drifting further and further away from us and, apparently, closer to his dead wife. He would talk to her often and tell her he was on his way. I was terrified.

I don’t want to talk about his death very much. I think the God he had implicitly put all his faith in, screwed up. And I’ve never seen so many people so lost. Gradually, we put away the everyday things that reminded us of him, in an attempt to regain a semblance of life as we knew it.

It didn’t work; we never forgot. I can still smell the Brylcreem. I remember the sandpaper-coloured ‘medicine tray’ peppered with Glyciphage and Sorbitrate. On his mirror, right by the hair cream, was a neatly written list of his daily medication. Every night, at 11.30 pm, his clothes for the next day, on a hanger, everyday, the same as the last one: khadi pajamas, khadi vest, khadi kurta and detachable brass buttons. The beautifully carved walking stick. The rocking chair- his chair- in the living room, in front of the television. Rows and rows of VHS tapes, of Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, which we had watched Sunday after Sunday for years. In the corner, a neat wooden roll-top desk. Pens. Paper. Books. Below the glass surface of the table, a neat hand-written document of the most recent cricket match schedule. Each day marked off with the team that won.

Thatha should be so proud. What a legacy he left behind! A school full of thousands of children. A family capable of unconditional love and unremitting sacrifice. A house filled with such magnificent echoes of cricket-match-screaming.

I moved out of my grandfather’s house a year and a half back. But not without taking a part of him with me. His rocking chair is in my living room, facing the television. On my bookshelf is a picture of him, sitting on this chair, a dog on each lap. This is my favourite picture because right there in the left bottom corner, is a bit of my leg and the shadow of my arm. It reminds me of where I come from. And that there was once a legend in our living room.