Papaji: A Man of Letters

 "The drawing you made of your new drumset, mentioning all its different parts, was just fantastic. I had no idea that a drumset could be so complex. In your next letter, if you could elaborate on the function of each of these parts, that would be really nice..."

The above excerpt from my father's letter dating back to 2008, written to Dhani, his ten-year-old grandson, just serves to illustrate how his curious mind thrilled to everything and wanted to wrap itself around whatever it could.

Papaji, as he was called by his children and all those who knew him, along with being a father, a husband, and a grandfather to eight adorable kids,  was above all a towering figure whose very presence commanded respect. His unflinching idealism and his faith in humanity were  contagious to all those who came in contact with him. A scientist by profession and a poet at heart, Papaji was truly a renaissance man. 

By the virtue of being away, initially to a boarding school, and later abroad, a steady stream of letters remained the main channel of communication between us, interspersed with occasional phone calls. It helped that both of us, Papaji and I were  conscentious in our correspondence. Not only his letters provided me with a sense of continuity and belonging while living in far-flung places, away from home, but  my very lifeline came to depend on our invigorating epistolary exchanges. 

During our sojourn in Alaska, in a cabin without television and internet, Papaji made sure we kept ourselves abreast with things back home, especially those that interested us. So, his letters overflowing with love and much-needed warmth, also kept us informed on the political front. Details of elections and by-elections were quietly slipped into the letters, as were various clippings from different publications to further authenticate his assessment of the situation. Knowing my love for Shayari, (Urdu poetry usually in a couplet form) sometimes he would include a few at the bottom of the letter, asterisking difficult words he thought I might not know and penning down their meanings in English. 

For Amando, my husband, a wildlife lover and a train buff, he collected any article, ad, tender related  to these two topics. It could have been the announcement of a new line or closing down of an old one, or a conversion from meter gauge to broad gauge, or an effort by the ministry to re-introduce the good old steam on some touristic lines, he made sure that Amando stayed updated. He also sent neatly clipped news items related to tiger census and fresh sightings of the animal where it was thought to have disappeared. However, it was for Dhani, our son, and his seventh grandchild that he reserved the most tender words. He also made sure to share with him poems he had learnt in his childhood: an inadvertent effort to pass on his own passion for poetry...a legacy which we all inherited in varied degrees.  If it was not poetry he was culling out from his memory, he was busy tickling a child's imagination with riddles, or uplifting it with inspiring quotes from the great saints of India, such as Vivekananda, Sri Ramkrishna and Sri Aurobindo.  Every now and then, he would also enclose the 'Youth' section either from 'The Indian Express', or from 'The Hindu', sometimes sending both. For our homeschooling son, those naturally calligraphed letters filled with tidbits, along with a tightly-packed bundle of newspaper supplements  came to represent something exotic, traveling across thousands of miles, over land and sea, being sent by his most adorable and loving nanaji (grandpa in Hindi). 

Recently, while going through my neatly wrapped collection of his letters, I came across one which had a recipe of laddoos made with whole wheat flour, ghee, nuts, sugar and roasted gum arabic, eaten traditionally in North India by the lactating mother to enhance the quality of milk. The measurement of each ingredient was precisely jotted down, and the method was expounded in detail. It read more like the directions for a scientific experiment than a gourmet booster shot.

 

Below the recipe was a quote from the epic poem called, 'Savitri', reading and grasping the essence of which had become the very raison d'être of his later years:

"Let us give joy to all for joy is ours".

That was Papaji.