Life with father

Growing up is fascinating, especially when you have someone to look up to.

July 26, 2014 04:32 pm | Updated 04:32 pm IST

SM_Shiv

SM_Shiv

Sometimes when I watch or hear children calling their parents outdated or different, I think about my own childhood, especially about my father. He was a metallurgist, who loved literature and life. My father was an extraordinary man but his extraordinariness lay in ordinary things. He was the genius of the everyday. He brought to life a physicality that went beyond machismo, to be strong and yet almost be in awe of non-violence.

There was something seamless about the way he lived. Walks, storytelling, his pride in penmanship, his tinkering around the house, his brilliance as a metallurgist all flowed into each other. Everyday brought events to look forward to. Childhood was sheer delight. Anything seemed possible: crossing the Subarnarekha with the tribals, watching cockfights in haats , translating poetry into another language and enjoying the taste of words, building small machines, or planting a tree. They were never-ending chapters of childhood, where even boredom led to new dream worlds. Even bad results in school were liveable as I celebrated each moment. I remember he often dropped us to school. The ritual was sheer pandemonium. The Ambassador contained me, my sisters, and half the neighbourhood, with my little dog incredulous at being left out.

His was a sheer celebration of life, of history, of the sheer music of the sensorium: Sights, sounds, smells. Drives through forests or working on carpentry were life for him. He was a born storyteller and orality was part of the physicality. Memory bridged the two and he would recite Sanskrit and Shakespeare with exuberance while driving through the forests, enjoy the smell of mowed grass, the odour of strong coffee, the comradeship of steaming idlis . He lived his philosophy in an everyday sense. A day’s diary was both an ethical statement and a toast to life. I remember, as a child, I would refuse to eat till he told us stories and the Mahabharata, Einstein, Archimedes, Panchtantra, Karna and Odysseus would role out in a magical interlude. Once we had been tucked in, he would drive to the club to indulge his one passion, bridge. Bridge completed his day.

Sometime, as children, we felt he went “too far”. He would drop in on our class rooms in chappals , shirt half open, look at maths problems scribbled on the board and discuss them enthusiastically with class teachers. They loved his visits and his generosity in showing them alternate ways of solving problems while I cringed in the last row, the perfect dodo at Maths. For him Archimedes and Pythagoros were contemporaries, while they were a barrier to my already-weakening cricket.

He loved sports and sportsmanship. His favourite was the Australian bowler Keith Miller. He preferred Miller to Bradman. Bradman achieved more but Miller, he felt, lived life; a true sportsman. Cricket was a game to him, not a career. He loved Indians beating the odds like Ramanathan Krishnan, Lala Amarnath, Wilson Jones or Milkha Singh. He always felt that if the Anglo-Indians had stayed on, we would have been a great sporting nation. He claimed they had hockey in their blood; their dribbles were perfect.

Yet, there was a wonderful innocence about his world. It was honest, matter-of-fact and people saluted such men. My father’s friend once told me of a meeting in Tata’s. The usually focused JRD Tata was rambling over some case and my father said, “Sit down, you are adding confusion to the issues”. JRD did. Each man respected the other. I remember Tata House in Bombay had a rule that officers must come in suits. My father preferred Fred Perry t-shirts and JRD created an exception. My father was allowed to come in t-shirts while rest wore suits. Somehow the story added to the stature of both the men.

There was a mutual respect that went beyond hierarchy, lifestyle or background and the greatness. I remember once Mysore Iron and Steel limited desperately contacted JRD for a team of consultants to help the sick company. JRD sent my father, messaging them that he was the team. Tata Steel in those years had many such men; extraordinary engineers who saw life as craftsmanship. They exulted in each other’s achievements. When foreign visitors came to see Tata Steel, my father would take them to see tribals polishing steel or some alloy. He was proud they could do this with a precision that matched any machine’s. He was proud of the tribal sense of craft and quietly considered them the first metallurgists. I understood little about his sense of their fate. All I lived for were the bows and arrows I got as we roamed over the Dalma hills, watching Sunday haats and evenings afire with the sheer magic of Jhum cultivation.

I know people talk about justice today in all its abstractions. But he talked about fairness as if it was an everyday measure, a humble kind of justice. Fairness was like craftsmanship; you kept working at it. Once, while walking along Jubilee Park, a man in a bowtie greeted us walking a hysterical-looking poodle. I laughed at the sight. The gentleman, Mr. Naik, explained that he was walking the dog before going to a party. My father reprimanded me, “Don’t get carried away by appearances. That man is a great engineer. He can roll up his sleeves and dismantle and put back a blast furnace. He has earned his right to a suit.” All his examples were anecdotes, parables; one learnt by example. He hardly lectured.

I remember coming back one evening after watching a movie on Winston Churchill. My father smiled and said “He was not fit to touch Gandhi’s shoes. Churchill was a roadside bully made heroic by imperialism. He was a show-off who could never match Gandhiji.” Gandhi was my father’s genius. He felt Gandhi understood the genius of the body and the importance of courage. Guts, he would exclaim, was the nobility of courage.

Another favourite was Emile Zatopek. As a child I would hear him talk of how Zatopek raced against trains, bare body ranged against the enormity of machine, racing against himself. Zatopek was a special hero because he defied the Stalinist regime to stand by Dubček. His stand was non-violent, one body defying an army. My father had a fondness for Czechs. He felt it was a country embedded in tragedy. I remember holding forth after the history class on Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. He quietly told me something that surprised me: “I was there working at Skoda munitions. Masaryk was a good man. The Czech army was strong. It could have held the Nazis. I think that is why Gandhi said, ‘If the Czech army had fought the Nazis, it would have been an act of non-violence’.” And history would have been different. For him, non-violence was not a pinched act of asceticism.

He loved and cared for people through simple acts and they adored him in turn. The local fruit man, the vegetable vendor, the taxiwala, the chowkidar , tribals collecting firewood, the barber, the next-door neighbour… all were his friends. They felt more themselves when he was around. He had a tremendous sense of equality. I remember one rainy day in Calcutta when a scrawny labourer was pulling a huge handcart, helpless against the slope. My father got down and pushed along with him oblivious of the watching crowd. The cart puller and he were two workers in perfect synchrony. Nothing was said except a murmur of thanks but one sensed a silent comradeship.

His car driver stayed far away from our house. When his wife had just had a baby, my father would arrive late driving home alone. He explained, “If he drops me, then goes home by bus, he will be late. His family waits up for him. It is easier if I drop him.” He loved workers and was fascinated by the tribals going home from work singing carrying bits of firewood. He noted that no babu goes home singing after work. The workers are tired but they did not let their tiredness overwhelm them.

As one grew up, one realised the power of memory and its poetics in his life. History, genealogy, myth was important and one recited it; so it lived inside one. It was an affirmation of continuity, of identity. But memory was something of a life-world without which analysis and intelligence were never complete. Life was incomplete without memory, orality and storytelling. I think it came from his sense of civilisation and more particularly his sense of childhood. Childhood had to be magical, full of mystery, of expectation. It was a gift; a gift of memory, stones, experiments, where each child found his own Gods and worshipped them. I think it was the years of childhood in Jamshedpur, in a city among hills that made me. It gave me memories that guided me later invisibly. Childhood was a little utopia that came alive in you even as a generation disappeared and I felt myself greying.

My father did not know much about feminism or other isms. But I knew he treated my sisters as equals yet understood the difference of gender. As a child I was known as the dreamy boy with three brilliant sisters. The beauty was that it did not bother any one of us, each was happy in their domain. I survived school because my sisters generously did a lot of my homework. I was too busy collecting crabs and snake skins, chasing butterflies, sitting on trees dreaming about my heroes. It was that availability of innocence that I am grateful for.

I must confess there was an innocence in the world of my parents, the decades after independence, where Gandhi and Nehru made Indians feel special. They believed in their ideals. I remember a story my father told about early management classes. The lecturer would give them a puzzle made of wood. Once completed, there was a picture of the U.S. The class would then be asked to invert the puzzle. On the other side was a picture of Lincoln. The moral was clear. Take care of the man and the nation would take care of itself. For that generation, character building and nation building went together. Heroes were real and God was generous with heroes in that period.

Yet, I felt a sense of change, a sense that battles and life were becoming more complex. During one of our last conversations, my father felt things were changing and to live according to ideals would be more difficult. He hinted that rules were changing. He gave me an anecdote from sports, from hockey, the game played by Dhyan Chand, another of his favourites. He told me of the 1936 Olympics played before Hitler. India played the U.S. and the first 20 minutes produced little. The team was playing with new shoes. Then they took them off and played barefoot, winning 21-0. And then things changed. The west realised that one needed a different hockey; not one played bare feet in maidans , in little railway towns. They brought in Astroturf, which was expensive; one could not play on it in bare feet. The Astroturf in our lives is the new obstacle. We have to outthink the west, he said.

I still remember these stories, the strange lovely moments of growing up when my mother cooked wonders and my father created more. One is grateful for such lives. I wish children today could live in such worlds.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.

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