Skip to main content

Ba(Grandpa)

It's been long since I wrote anything, between days and months what losses I incurred last year are hard to summarise. I lost my grandfathers, yes both of them. You know the feeling when your favourite story book gets stolen and you have no way to buy another copy since you are a kid with no money and the book had been brought risking a fortune. You sulk, you wail, you cry but deep down you already know whatever you have lost can never be brought back. I went through such feeling, I feel I lost a huge part of myself with these two people. I can't bring them back to fill the dust filled corners of my life where they had their presence nor can I be that butterfly chasing girl anyday, she too has left with them.

My grandfather from my maternal side was a man of few words. I remember my early school vacations when the favourite place on Earth for me used to be my maternal home. I remember those five rupees wale bus rides that took me to mama's ghor. The place would be filled with warmth of baa (grandpa) and amoi (grandma). Baa was a teacher. He would ride his bicycle wearing a white dhoti and kurta to school and be back almost at the same time everyday. I don't remember hearing him complain about any food he was served with. He was a peace loving man and liked to be around his people. My grandparents had the sweetest married life. Baa was still at school when he married amoi, a girl half his age. They were happily married for around seventy years until he left this year. He could share his childhood, his youth and his mellowing years with amoi. What can be more rewarding than that. He left  last March after amoi had fed him his regular breakfast. A peaceful death he had. Amoi lights a diya every morning for him and talks to his photograph like he were around. They have taught me the true meaning of love which  thrives even in absence of one's loved one.

My grandfather from my paternal side left last November at the age of ninety two. Ba for me was the most important person on Earth. I can go on writing about him and yet I wouldn't be able to justify what he was to me. He was a walking library. His room smelled of books: radical dog eared paper backs to yellowing hardcovers. I have grown listening to the stories he had in store for bed time. Right from feeding me the best of everything to taking care of silliest of things like trimming my nails, he happily played my guardian angel. I remember him underlining newspaper articles each morning so that I could read once I reached home from school. He would read out poems to me and talk about his university days at Allahabad. He was a strict disciplinarian but he mended all rules for me. Without him life would never be the same but I would carry him forever in my heart.
Without my grandparents I would never have been the person I am today and they would always be fondly remembered.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading between the lines

"Read between the lines",  I heard our professor say. We were in midst of a Victorian text. I looked at her point blank. She had spoken about something which I had no clue about. "Ma'am,  would you please elaborate? ",  I tried framing this sentence in my mind but my introverted  self overpowered my inquisitive soul like everytime. I hopelessly waited for an explanation. Ma'am started explaining about how beyond the surface meaning of any written text, there lay a wide plethora of meaning which wasn't explicitly stated. She talked about finding a void between the written words and our imagination, that void which shapes our interpretation. That explanation opened doors to my perception of reading a text. It wasn't that I had never considered about the possibilities of meanings that lay coated in words until then, but, what perhaps I lacked was to look for that void where I questioned the layers of meaning, where I put myself in those layers of wo...

What do you want to be?

While I was in my 10th standard, almost everyone I met wanted to know what I wanted to be. This question always perplexed me. From the lens of a fifteen year kid who was not yet sure of the changes which awaited in the near future, this question gave me nightmares. I would constantly sit by the mirror and ask myself, what actually would be my answer. My friends always had fancy answers at their disposal. They would confidently chirp whenever any one asked about it. What amused me most was, my friend who had no inkling to study Biology wanted to be a doctor and another friend who detested the idea of even cooking noodles, wanted to be a chef! But whenever they spoke about their wishes, they would always sound confident. And there I was, fumbling for words which refused to escape my lips. It was not until I entered Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya to do my plus two, I found my voice. The teachers there have a different way of viewing life. For the first time, I no longer felt the classroom...

"My love is enough for both of us"

"My love is enough for both of us", she often felt those words ring in her heart. She finally had understood that life wouldn't always follow her designs. That people are meant to leave but their memories won't. She often had wondered how someone could love her to such an extent when that person had always known that she wouldn't reciprocate those feelings. How could a person stand by her when she always acted as a fleeting shadow. She never had given hope for she knew the pain of dejection but he kept hoping like a hopeless vagabond. How she wished that he would some day hate her enough to let go. She devised ways to free him from this web, she acted cold, turned indifferent, did everything he detested and she finally saw some changes. It was a relief, he finally seemed to take hold of his life. She could see him grow responsible. He finally it seemed was learning to love himself. Phone calls died, meetings subsided, they become known strangers. All this while ...