Remembering Dad

Tomorrow, 7th Oct 2012, will be 2 years since he went away from us.

I have always been the practical one in the family, almost Vulcan-like in my logical thinking. So I have reasoned with myself and with Mom that whatever happened, was the way of life, and is the natural cycle of life and death. As Mom dealt with her grief, many a times I reasoned with her, that he had after all, lived a long and healthy 72 years.

But all said and done, it would have been great to have him amidst us. One recognizes the impact a person has in ones life only after he or she is gone. For me, Dad embodied a seeker, one who passionately sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone, and no other reason. He was always absorbing even the tiniest of information, just out of curiosity about a subject or broadening his perspective on any subject by just reading about that one more bit of information.

An avid reader, most times he could be found buried in his precious books, or the newspaper. Those were the days of course, when most folks used to rely on the good old newspaper for news of the world around them. Now Mom, who only wanted to scan the newspaper quickly with her morning cuppa before getting on with the morning chores would wait and wait, but Dad's reading was never a quick skim here and there. It was usually a full hour of reading front to back, sitting in the balcony with the sun shining on at him. Soon Mom discovered a way to speed him up. She started requesting a page here and a page there. "Are you done with the middle section?" .. and soon after "Give me the cultural programs/city happenings section". etc. So Dad could read to (well, almost) heart's content, while Mom could read in parallel and then run off to her chores.

Another vivid memory of my time with him was the way he introduced me to working with one's hands. The other V of the house, my brother would always be out, never to be found at home, while Dad and I would sit and experiment with various things. In those days, he built a fold-able study table for my brother. cutting plywood, attaching laminate to it, sanding it, and so on. It was a joy to work alongside him, poke around his toolbox, help him. He never stopped me from doing anything because it was "sharp" or because it was "hot" or I could potentially hurt myself. I remember him teaching me to solder stuff when I was pretty young. Sadly I myself don't have the guts to do it with my kids as of today;  probably concerns about lead poisoning, "its a hot thing, can burn" make me more cautious than I ought to be.

Dad had a love of photography that made him setup his own darkroom when he was doing his PhD in Russia. When he got a chance to explore, he started filigree-woodcarving; a Vishnu Lakshmi figure painstaking cut from a thin sheet of plywood. He tried his hand at paper-mache figures using molds. All this when there were hardly any tools in those days in India for a crafter. All this when handmade was not even remotely fashionable. His out of the box thinking usually involved making a small contraption if possible to solve a certain household problem. As much as he enjoyed applying his mind to problems, concepts, philosophy, theories; he was certainly a work-with-your-hands-to-build-stuff kind of guy, when he chose to be. Yep, chose to be, because theorizing about everything under the sun was a favorite of his; a gene he seems to have passed on to me.

The funny thing about Dad was also the way in which he would lecture us, or teach us values. For every situation we faced, he had a funny anecdote from his childhood or someone's else life, which he used to recount to us in great detail. He would draw a parallel to the other story in such a subtle fashion and tell us how the two were similar and how "they" learnt something, that we would invariably wish we had done the same thing in our situation. It was uncanny how many stories he had for almost any given situation under the sun, all told to us with great hilarity, not sermonized at all. Again drawing a comparison to my own preachy self with my kids, I do wish he was here to fill the gap in teaching them in a better way.

Kudos to you, the ultimate teacher-dad!