The good is oft interred with their bones

This blog is not meant to be a personal journal. However, as many would argue, segregation of personal and professional lives is a theoretical construct. In any case, as we often joke in our profession, you can link any cause to any effect with angrezi. So this post is going to be rather personal, though I shall make some lame attempts to link it with my professional life.

 

I am reaching a stage in life where a full generation of relatives, whom the English language describes with the prefix “grand,” is fast dwindling. To put a number to it, only 25% remains in my case. Also, those who remain appear to be spending a lot of their time waiting for something. Another generation, which we have never treated any better than our “source of resources”, is also growing old. Their resources do not seem as unlimited as they used to be in those growing up years. The conscience, which happily ignored the unreasonable demands we made on those resources earlier, is increasingly asking pestilential questions at the prospect of ever having to depend on the same resources.

 

Rationally speaking, there is nothing dramatic about mortality (and taxes.) It is the “awareness of mortality” that seems dramatic. Not only do we go through life oblivious about our own mortality, we also ignore the mortality of those around us. It is only an occasional death in the family (or the departure of an aged relative that makes you question – Will I see her again?) that makes us stop and contemplate this commonplace phenomenon called mortality. This inevitably leads to thoughts of legacy, or rather the question – How will I be remembered?

 

I am increasingly realizing that we have little control over our legacies. We will be remembered the way those after us choose to remember us, and we can do very little to control that. Typically, in the long run, we give those near to us an almost equal number of pleasant and not so pleasant memories to remember us by. So it is up to the survivors to choose the memories which will define us after we are gone.

 

Take my paternal grandfather for example. He was loud, some may say he was insensitive, ate rather messily and had an uncanny ability to destroy any gadget beyond repair within three days of purchase. He was also a doctor, but that rarely seemed to intrude into my relationship with him. My relationship with him was often characterized by profound embarrassment. Take for example the time I was twelve and we were on a crowded train, about to enter the New Delhi station. I wanted to go to the toilet, but all of them were being used, so I came back to my seat (presumably with dejection written all over my face.) It was at that moment that my grandfather chose to offer a judicious solution to my predicament, in his habitual loud voice that reverberated through the coach – “All the toilets closed eh? Just open the coach door and do it, will you?” True incident, not kidding! I almost invariably recall this incidence when I talk about him.

 

But there are two other incidents which are etched in my mind. One was when I was even younger. I was tying my keds (there were no “sneakers” in India then,) and he was sitting on a chair in front of me, clad in his usual dhoti and sweating profusely in the Calcutta summer. Suddenly he asked me – “Are you all right?” I looked up and saw him slightly different from his usual self. His head was slightly craned forward, his jaws were tighter than usual and he was looking closely at me (with eyes which had begun losing their vision by then.) “Of course I am, don’t bug me,” I said and ran out. I came back a couple of hours later, feeling uneasy and soon I was in bed, with pus filled boils all over (just chicken pox, nothing more dramatic.) I remember my grandfather checking the boils and nodding, a hint of a smile on his face.

 

I still don’t remember my grandfather as a doctor. But many years later, I was told that the mark of a good professional is what is called “incisiveness” – an ability to spot a problem before it surfaces.

 

The other incident that I remember happened three days before my grandfather died. He died of a wound he received in a freak accident. My grandmother pulled him by his arm to protect him from being run over by a truck. His brittle skin broke where my grandmother had pulled him. I remember him the next day, touching his wound gingerly (almost lovingly) and muttering to himself – “Looks like this is developing into cellulitis, hm, not good.” He then went back to the newspaper he was reading. Three days later he was dead, his right arm having practically rotted.

 

I still don’t remember my grandfather as a doctor. But I hear that objective analysis is the mark of a true professional.

 

Let’s move to my maternal grandfather now. The list of the evils that he has done can be very long. He inherited a thriving business from his father which he ruined, too arrogant and pleasure seeking to survive the competition. He left my grandmother with practically nothing. He spent the last three years of his life on bed. I don’t think he suffered as much as he made my grandmother suffer in this period.

 

But there is a memory I have of him that sets him apart. It involves him cooking. It was two fifteen in the afternoon in a household that typically ate lunch at one. Tempers were running high (as they tend to do when stomachs are empty) but my grandfather labored on, ignoring all our protests. The water had to be perfectly heated, the spices had to be mixed in perfect proportion, each side of each piece of meat had to be perfectly cooked and you don’t do that on high flame. Time was not important.

 

We finally ate at three. No one actually complimented him, but the hushed silence over platefuls of rice and mutton curry was loud enough. They say taking pride in one’s work is the mark of a true professional.

Finally, a memory that I have recently acquired, which sparked this post. It is about a recently acquired relative – my wife’s grandmother. We don’t speak the same language and communicate mostly through elaborate gestures. A conservative Tamil Brahmin, I don’t think she ever thought she will have me as a maplai. But over the one week she is staying with us, she is up at five to bathe and cook me breakfast and brew me filter coffee.

Last night I saw her sitting on the sofa, hunched over herself, with the newspaper held close to her eyes. She was doing the Sudoku. I checked today – it was of the hard variety and she had almost finished it. There is something sublime about an old woman who has spent most of her life cooking and rearing her children, speaking nothing but her own language, confined to the region of the world she was born to and her family, doing a mathematical puzzle devised by a Japanese published in an English newspaper in the house of her Bengali grandson-in-law, in a city she has never stayed in before. I know this is the memory I will remember her by.

 

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. But I guess it is a choice we all owe to those before us.