There was something about the way that the telephone rang that night, exactly seven years back, that told the story. I sat up bolt upright in bed, as my wife answered it. Her face said everything. He had gone, quietly in his sleep, with the rest of the family in the next room. As we sat in the car to the airport, lost in silence and memories, Aditi broke the silence. Raghu, she said, I saw Babu vividly in a dream tonight. He was on the road in front of our house. I had not seen him happier, for a long time. He had come, to say goodbye to her. My father in law, Dr. Devesh Chandra, struck me as a very sweet and friendly man, when I was courting his daughter. I believed I had to tread very carefully; I was not overly concerned that I was from Kerala and my future wife, from UP, that was a blip that I could handle, but the fact that I could not string together three words to form a sentence in Hindi, was worrisome. He was a Hindi scholar, and I would certainly make a poor impression on him, I thought. But then, once, I arranged for his daughter to get a whole set of textbooks, borrowing them from my friends. That probably endeared me to him. He would mention that years later with great fondness. Dr. Devesh Chandra was a revolutionary. He was a brilliant student, though he lived in penury, far from his family. Drawn by the renaissance of the freedom struggle, he dropped his surname, as he did not want attention to be drawn to it. He gave his children the surname, Raja - to him, they were the rulers of his life. He did not bother with rituals and festivals and matched my own father, in his quiet agnosticism. While, sadly, much of his revolutionary fervour was suppressed in the serving of a large, extended family, the fire still smouldered. During the Chinese aggression, he donated the gold medals he won from the Lucknow University to the Prime Ministers relief fund. During the emergency, he wrote to Indira Gandhi - he was personally known to the Nehru family - that he was very disappointed and disillusioned and that he would like to have his medals back. The government acquiesced. When my parents, (jumping the gun and without my knowledge), met my mother-in-law and him to formally propose our marriage, he was struck with consternation. I would hold that against him for some time, mistaking his approach for opposition. It was only later that I realised that revolutionaries are also supremely incompetent (as was the case with my own father) when it comes to arranging mundane events such as marriages. As a family, the rest of us soon learnt how to overcome his indifference to material matters such as investments and buying a house. Over the years, I grew to like him immensely. Mostly unknown to the rest of the family, we had a separate thing going. A voracious reader and writer, he specialised in translating historical books from English to Hindi and many of his works were published. As I spent hours listening to his flawless Hindi, my distaste for the language disappeared; I began to understand its richness and its nuances. It was he, who gave me a copy of Dr. Sanus biography of Narayana Guru and encouraged me to read it. When he passed away, he was reading the complete works of Dr. Ambedkar. Babu was a great raconteur; his stories and reveries were fascinating and he particularly liked to question popular notions,often referring to his large library. Once, he told me that the Pindaris and Thugs, eliminated by Sleeman, were probably much misunderstood people. He wished he could go to the British museum, where, he believed, some of the records taken by the British from the Pindaris were lodged. Yet, below that scholarly visage, there was plenty of mischief as well. He was an ace rose grower, but firmly believed that rose buds for grafting had to be stolen. Walks in Delhis public parks would be expeditions for pinching buds and he would return home with a few under his tongue, where they remained moist and ready for grafting. At my first real UP wedding - the one of my Brother in law, the Sangeet escalated to a kind of friendly rivalry, with the girls family lampooning each one of us in song, some of which bordered on the bawdy. As we sat their laughing at our own discomfiture - in any case, a Hindi challenged Malayali at a UP wedding is as useful as an ice cube in a furnace, when it comes to repartee - my father in law began to sing songs that matched theirs for raunchiness. I will never forget the look of surprised embarrassment on Aditis face; she, like me, had never seen that facet of her father ever. My father-in-law belonged to a generation that is now fast disappearing from public memory; a generation that saw momentous events such as the freedom struggle, independence and its aftermath, and were touched irreversibly by its revolutionary zeal. Today, as I cleaned his cache of books, including a Quran that he gave Aditi, I realised how much he meant to the two of us and Ishaan.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:38:02 +0000
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