Appa

📷

A few years ago on one of our annual trips to Cochin, my grandfather drove us to their church and showed us the space of land in the adjoining cemetery that was going to be the family grave. He turned to me laughing and said “We’ll be lying here, will you come visit us?” Being the cry-baby that I am, I told him it wasn’t funny and stomped away to hide the tears pricking my eyes.

Both his granddaughters accepted the challenge of lighting candles around the wreaths but regretted it instantly. We were using a tiny, pointless lighter and trying to block a steady breeze. We only succeeded in clumsily burning our fingers, much to everyone’s amusement. My mother was entertaining people with the story of how she picked out her wardrobe for the day by looking through her cupboards over Skype with my father, because she and I were flying into Cochin from Chicago, and she didn’t have any saris in her luggage. There was gentle humour in the ambience outside the church after his funeral this Sunday, and he would have appreciated it. The sun was setting, bathing everything in a soft hue of orange, a cool wind was blowing - a huge respite after a very hot, humid day. As I sat staring at the white flowers we’d arranged around his grave and the candles we had failed to light, I wondered if I could make peace with this unexpected, new situation. After the ceremony in the church when I thought I had regained my composure, a friend of my grandparents’ spotted me and said “He was not just your grandfather ille mole, I know he was also your friend” and the tears came rolling down again.

He was my friend and my pen-pal for as long as I can remember. Blue inland letters arriving at our home in Ahmedabad in his unmistakable, terrible scrawl were a cause for celebration for me. Sometimes if it was my lucky day, I got a fat envelope, which meant it was a really long letter - often with attachments like an old entry from his diary, an anecdote from his college days or a long analysis of something that I had written. Over these letters I proudly shared all my stupid ideas, grades from all my semester exams and my embarrassingly bad and numerous poems (Bricks make a house, bricks make a home, bricks make us feel, we are never alone). He taught me how to write my name in Malayalam - the only thing I know how to write in my maternal language. When I complained a lot about his poor handwriting, he unearthed an old typewriter and printed out his letters instead. He insisted, many times, that I must one day publish a book titled Letters from my Grandfather.

I’ve always called him Appa, even though that’s what people usually call their fathers. When I came back from the United States in 1993 as a 6-year old, he came to receive me in Bombay and took me to Cochin where he stood in for my father for a few months while my parents worked in The Netherlands. He tied my shoelaces when I went to school, and would lie next to me every night till I fell asleep.

He had a unique way of keeping children entertained. I’m sure every child he has known has a special story to tell about him. If he was waiting with my younger cousins at the Cochin airport for my parents and me, then he’d engage them in made-up games about guessing the number of white cars passing by or the colour of the dress Angu chechiwould be wearing when she arrived. He always had a bunch of riddles and jokes handy that he’d prepared for some party or another. I insisted that they come to Ahmedabad for my 13th birthday because it had to be huge event and he had to plan it with me. And so it happened. I stood up and proudly asked his riddles to my friends. What part of your body sounds like something you give away? Arms. What is light as a feather and has nothing in it? The answer was airbut one of my friends loudly shouted Angika’s brain and I think my grandfather wanted to give him points for it. One of my distant cousins calls him Tiger and there were other little ones who always greeted him by yelling “THHO!” in the hope of scaring him out of his skin. He and I used “dum dum” to indicate “just joking” at the end of a sentence. This came out of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things which he and my grandmother were reading on one of their trips to Ahmedabad (when he could often be seen with an unflattering blue muffler wrapped around his head because the temperatures probably dropped to a chilly 25ºC).

Appa was always impeccably dressed in a crisp shirt and trousers. At home he wore colourful lungis. He could carry off a bright pink T-shirt better than anyone I know and he looked absolutely adorable in the cute, tiny shorts that he wore when he did his morning exercises and went for his swift evening walks, all the way into his early 80s. He was unbelievably active, alive and interested in everything under the sun. When I began my PhD research he made me hold the line over the phone so he could get a pen and paper and then he made me spell out ‘cytokinesis’. He has dabbled in short story writing - he read out a published one from a Malayalam magazine for me - and he got someone to teach him how to do glass painting when he was in his 70s. He proudly displayed all of his paintings in the living room along with the umpteen family pictures that he liked to arrange and rearrange routinely. I think people often asked him if one of his grandchildren had done the glass paintings because it looked like a little child made them. That didn’t bother him one bit. He was rather fearless, now that I come to think of it. When they visited us in the United States in 1992, he had no worries about driving around by himself in a new country and he pored over maps so we could drive up and down the East Coast and explore. When he was 84, I left India for my PhD, and he became concerned that keeping in touch with me was going to become difficult. We got him a laptop with an internet connection and before we knew it he was sending me emails (sometimes in all capital letters) and commenting on people’s Facebook pictures.

He was the epitome of organization. Every last piece of paper was carefully saved and every tiny pencil was patiently sharpened with a blade and arranged on his office table. He designed handy little cards and placed them around their apartment with emergency telephone numbers, and others near the TV with a list of channels. He woke up every morning and changed the date and day on little blocks of a wooden calendar they had acquired and then proceeded to tend to his endless number of plants. You couldn’t walk across the living room without a giant leaf poking your legs or your fingers accidentally brushing an exotic cactus. In the balcony outside the living room, it was nothing short of a miniature forest.

He was a leader and a peacemaker. The Cochin chapter of the Elders’ Forum was kick-started by him. He was undeniably its lifeline for the longest time. And in the family and outside it, he was the perpetual neutral party that warring factions could comfortably approach and be sure to be welcomed and heard. As a result, when we visited Kerala every year, we went to see everyone my grandparents knew, which is about half the population of Cochin and some of our family who live in other towns.

But as his first-born grandchild and the one who got to see him only sparingly, I think what affected me most was his incredible interest in everything I did and his endless encouragement. Once he was relating a story to me and somewhere he had to describe how the man in the story had to do something that was emotionally difficult for him, but Appa couldn’t find the right words for this. I remember this clearly, we were standing in the kitchen of our Ahmedabad home, and I suggested using ‘with a heavy heart’. Appa stared at me and told me not for the last time, that I should write a book. He would tell people about the blogposts I wrote and would read out my letters to anyone willing to listen, just as he would proudly pull out a copy of one of my mother’s books from display to show people who came home. The same was true with anything else that I did, such as singing. Ever so often when we had a gathering, there would be the sharp, familiar rapping of his fingers on my knee to get my attention and he would say molu uru paate paade. It didn’t matter whether I sang a ghazal in Urdu that he didn’t understand a word of. He’d clap along happily, completely out of beat but yet so thrilled. (Apart from not having any sense of rhythm, he had no tastebuds, as I liked to repeatedly tell him. He would eat bananas with anything. I think I once saw him mix rice, curd, pickle, bananas, rum cake and papadum in his plate). In the recent years I think he considered not becoming ‘American’ as my greatest achievement. Whenever he saw me he would breathe a sigh of relief that I haven’t put on weight, haven’t acquired a different accent or become aloof to my family.

My last conversation with Appa was on March 7th, on his 87th birthday. When we talk on the phone, he takes one phone and my grandmother talks from another phone connected to the same line. She said she’d heard from my mother about my crazy plan to fly to India in the end of April to cast my vote in the upcoming general elections. “Why would you do such a thing?” she demanded. I said because I thought it was important. She was not in the least impressed and was pretty mad at me for wasting my money. But Appa laughed. I knew he understood my insanity even if he did think I was totally nuts.

According to Appa, children, especially girls, should be free-thinking, independent and passionate about anything they do. A friend of mine once came to my grandparents’ house to visit me. She had recently started up a graphic design company with her husband and she was very excitedly and animatedly explaining her work. Appa was beaming, and looking at her with so much affection even though he was meeting her for the first time. When she left, he remarked that she was so lively and smart and was able to explain the scope of her work to all of us. He was so impressed. When my mother was young, he insisted that she must know how to drive, type, and swim. He didn’t care that she couldn’t cook. He always told her, as she tells me - whatever you do, be a professional at it, the best you can possibly be. I remember he was anxious when I was finishing high school and not doing well in any of the standard entrance tests for engineering and I had flatly refused to apply for medicine. What was I going to do? The only thing I showed interest in was a pure science course at St. Stephen’s College. The morning the College admissions list was out he made my sister Riya open the website so he could check whether my name was on there. He was very relieved when it was. The only time I’ve noticed him mildly disappointed with me was if I couldn’t add a string of our Scrabble scores really quickly. I would tell him I had no desire to be a chartered accountant like him.

I had always assumed he would live comfortably into his 90s. He would be there to celebrate when I complete my PhD. He would be thrilled when I finally get married and he would adore my husband. Today, it is a week since he died. I have written this post in my mind over the past seven days, but I have in no way done justice to all my memories or to his lifetime. These memories that we will cherish, the hundreds of folks from all over the country who came to pay homage, his nieces who sang at his mourning, his nephews who could be seen assiduously taping down stray wires or distributing bottles of water at his funeral, his children and grandchildren who wept uncontrollably as the casket was closed, are only parts of his unique, eternal and heart-warming legacy.