Day 20 - The Man With The Golden Heart - A Tribute To My Thatha

I shudder to think how close I came to never knowing my grandfather.

The first time I remember seeing him he was flat on his back - I was five years old and had rushed back with my family from the UK where we were living because he had just had a massive heart attack and for a while hadn't been expected to survive. I thank my stars everyday that he did - for twenty five years.

Thatha was a sweet soft-spoken man, whose actions spoke much louder than his words. The kind of man who told you stories and took you along on walks and let you comb and tie up his smartly cowlicked hair (when you were five!). The kind of man who you just knew would quietly but relentlessly move heaven and earth for you.

He was a careful prudent man, having struggled hard his entire life to make a good living for his family. The first windfall he ever saw was his superannuation. It turned out that he was a financial wizard, he just never had the money before to know it. But a lifetime of frugality cannot be undone by a few years of relative prosperity. He still wouldn't dream of taking an auto when he could take a bus and wouldn't take a bus if he could walk. And yet, on his way back from wherever he went, he would buy his granddaughters 'goodies' from the neighbourhood bakery, samosas or puffs in brown paper bags, the sinful goodness leaking out in delightful moist patches, the sight of which still makes us nostalgic.

He repaired everything till there wasn't any more room on it to patch or darn or glue. Nothing could be thrown away, an old envelope became practice sheets to work out sums on and old calendars became book covers. Tiny old pencils would have pen caps stuck on them to make them easier to hold. Pieces of cardboard, the brush from an old pot of glue, bits of brightly coloured rope, everything had the potential to be turned into Something Useful.

He once created a weighing balance with a long pencil for the stick, light plastic plates for the scales and tiny ten paise coins, which according to his research weighed exactly a gram each, for the weights. With this contraption he weighed newly bought gold jewellery, so he could be sure the jeweller hadn't cheated us, and mail to be posted so that he did not have to stick on a single extra stamp.

If you had a refill pen whose spring was broken, Thatha could be counted on to have a tiny spring handy in his trusty box. Was your text book coming apart at the seams? Out came the large needle and the thick twine and Thatha got to work. School bags, shoes, umbrellas, dreams, hopes, there was nothing that Thatha couldn't put right.

Thatha once fixed me up with an ugly old umbrella  (after I had lost many beautiful new ones) that had lines of white stitches crissing and crossing its decrepit grey expanse, keeping it from disintegrating. My initials were darned into it indelibly in bold orange thread. This umbrella quickly became excruciatingly loss- and theft-proof. No matter where I left it or what I did with it, it always found its way back like an ugly puppy. I left it behind on the bus, at school, in people's houses. Not deliberately, at least not consciously so. But the next morning, on the bus or at school, there it would be. It lasted me all the way through school, through thunderstorms and scorching noon walks. How I wish I had that ugly old umbrella now with the lovingly embroidered veins of stitches running through it and the big bold initials!

My grandfather didn't believe in band-aids or band-aid solutions. When we needed some quick help in solving a Math problem that just wouldn't get solved (with the school bus due in half an hour), he insisted on starting from the beginning, from grilling us on our tables, to making us hold our pencils straight, to lecturing us on our handwriting. (His own handwriting was tiny and print-perfect.) We shuffled our feet impatiently, we whined and we protested. Buses have come and gone a thousand times since then, but every once in a while, when we pencil something on a piece a paper, it could be a list to the kirana store, or an address on a card, but inevitably an old memory kicks in and we feel an invisible hand holding our hand reminding us of the importance of holding our pencils upright.

This month Thatha would have entered his ninetieth year. He died eight years ago - his good old heart just literally gave out. This is a poem i had penned for Thatha on behalf of all four of his granddaughters for his 80th birthday a couple of years before he died.

To Our Dear Thatha

THATHA
You didn’t just tell us bedtime         
Stories, true and imagined,
You opened up discussions about      
Life and living.  

You didn’t just take us along
On your long daily walks,
You showed us the world
Beyond our front door.

You didn’t just teach us to
Hold our pencils upright,
You taught us to live
Our lives that way.

You didn’t just fix our broken
Umbrellas and shoes,
You taught us never to give up
On anything—or anyone.

You didn't just teach us algebra
And physics and geography,
You taught us to count
Our every blessing.

If we haven’t told you recently, thatha,
How very much you mean to us,
And thanked you for all you’ve done,
We’d like to tell you now, that we
Count you among our greatest blessings,
And thank God you’re in our lives.
And if you don’t remember so well
Any more, each little instance
Where you made a world of difference,
It’s all right…

Because we do!
Happy 80th Birthday Thatha!