An Ode to a Gentleman
There are those that endure. Romanticism of hardship is a rather recent trend. But then again; this is perhaps a reflection of the times we live in. A generation born into low hanging economic fruits; recipients of the rewards garnered by the efforts of those that came before them. Those are they that endured. This is an ode to one such gentleman, for whom self-pity and indulgence was a luxury life would not afford.
This is not an elegy. Elegies glorify; moreover, the above mentioned individual is healthy and kicking. He is my grandfather, and so it becomes impossible for me claim absolute neutrality in this discourse. Make of this what you will.
There is a relationship between the outcome of a life and the location of its origin. In India, this relationship is suffocatingly tight. Kanathur Achanniah Nagaraj, known to me as simply ‘thatha’, was born in a village called Kanathur, part of the Turuvekere taluk of Southern Karnataka. Incidentally, this is also the birthplace of the father of Karnataka theatre legend ‘Master Hirannaiah’. Unfortunately that is the best that can be said of the village alumnus. It was, and is, an unexceptional place with no real room for excellence to emerge; a plot of space forgotten in time.
Nagaraj was born under a star sign called the ‘Moola Nakshatrhra’ which dictates that the child’s mother will suffer an unnatural early death. I suspect the cause of my great grandmother’s passing due to a relatively unimpressive infection, was more a result of the lack of medical facility than alignment of stars. However, there were fingers pointed at 2 year old Nagaraj, which he was at the time, unaware of. Nevertheless, he shared a close bond with his father; a rare phenomenon in that context. You have to stare with adamant resolution to find the silver lining with this one.
Sadly though, even love engendered by a lost mother has limitations. It can’t pay bills. Halfway into his bachelor’s degree, Nagaraj’s father pulled the plug on his college fund. And so, he began to work part time jobs, one of which was tutoring high school children to support his education. This was to have a major impact on his life.
After graduating with a bachelor’s of education degree, life led him into work at the railways in the accounts department; a lucrative and highly sought after government job at the time. Shortly afterwards he was found a suitable bride to be wed, a woman named Girija from the nearby district of Turuvekere. I wonder what his sentiments would be when he thinks back to this fateful moment in his life. I do not believe I could muster the courage to ask.
Cacti aren’t pretty. But yet they grow, even in the harshest of conditions. My grandfather never could adjust to the futility of a life in an accounts department. And so he did the unthinkable. Amidst severe criticism from friends and family he uprooted his life, now complete with a daughter, and moved to the growing city of Bangalore. The move was not a premeditated one; he had no job offer or life savings to turn to.
I started with a promise not to glorify. On this occasion I shall turn a blind eye to my original statement, for the intent demands celebration. Taking even a step towards actualizing the self, rests on a plethora of luxuries, none of which he had. This is a time frame where the notion of individual passion was so subservient to sustenance, that it was laughable. But perhaps there is truth to the idea that struggle is a requisite for growth. Personally, I have never been inclined to such romanticism. Regardless, the cacti grow.
If the thought crossed your mind, yes this is a rags to riches story; but not in the conventional sense. The riches came later and through his second daughter. The second daughter is also my mother, and so in a sense I am one of the recipients of the fruits of his labour. The fact that I write his story whilst on vacation in Norway is perhaps a comical tryst of luxury. But the riches came at a price.
Once Nagaraj moved to Bangalore he sought work doing what he had originally done to make ends meet – teaching. His ultimate test as an educator must have come through his devilishly slow grandson. I returned to India with my family at the age of 12, as a boy who spoke not a word of any Indian language. The ominous task of ensuring my academic prowess in the language department, fell upon him and my mother. My mother was mean. She would tell me I would fail and I would cry. So it’s safe to say the only reason I passed Kannada classes was because of thatha.
I hope to God that at least a few of his students were brighter than me. He joined RV Boys High School as a math and physics teacher, and rose to be principal of the institution. Passion subsumed ambition and he stayed on as head of the school until he retired. To the best of my knowledge he was happy doing what he did, and never sought more. It was fortunate that he had his work to distract him from the other half of his life.
Nagaraj’s wife Girija developed asthma shortly after delivering my mother. Fuelled by Bangalore’s growing pollution, my grandmother’s condition slowly deteriorated. Her weight already an issue, now grew to alarming proportions due to indoor confinement. Tirelessly thatha went from hospital to hospital spending nearly all of his savings on medicine. My mother took over cooking responsibilities and household chores at the age of 13. Perhaps that’s why she makes such a splendid ‘bisibelebath’ which is easily my favourite dish in the world. You see every cloud really does have a silver lining.
However, when she turned 18 funds had run out. Just as his father was unable to support his education 32 years ago, my grandfather was unable to support my mother in pursuing her engineering dreams. I must overemphasize the fact that my mother has never held thata accountable in any way. Indeed she remains in awe of how the man held a family together when it was teetering at the edge. Nevertheless, I must remind you of that suffocating connection between the outcome of a life and its origin…
As the entire family was struggling to keep her physical health intact, my grandmother’s mind was slowly falling into decay. Depression is the most abhorrent of all human emotion; but then again it is not an emotion at all, it is the lack of it. She blamed all of her misfortune on thatha, and regularly raged and screamed at him claiming that he never had cared for her. By this point he was now retired and had completely dedicated his life to her service; save for the time he spent holding tuitions at home. He was able to do this for free and support underprivileged children now, for money was no longer an overbearing concern. My parents had seen to that.
I suspect at the heart of my grandmother’s relentless assaults was a deep insecurity that he would leave her to fend for herself, completely alone in her harsh world. Yet she needn’t have worried. Knowing his sense of internal duty, the thought probably never crossed his mind in 43 years of marriage. Nevertheless, she attempted suicide, not once but twice, failing on both occasions.
After returning to India, my mother threw herself into my grandmother’s welfare. As she freely admits, she lacked both my grandfather’s will and his patience. In a fit of rage, she once stormed into Girija’s doctor’s office and demanded to know why she wasn’t showing even marginal improvements. As a response, the wise old doctor produced a bottle of pills from his drawer and told my mother unflinchingly that this was the medication my grandmother swallowed every week. The amount was sufficient to put a regular healthy individual into a coma. ‘You must accept that this is how it always be,’ said the doctor. My mother dissolved into tears, but my grandfather who was listening by the door remained unperturbed. He knew; he had always known. Once my mother had managed to bring herself back to a state of calm, the doctor had one final piece of insight. ‘It is neither I nor the medicine that is keeping your mother alive. The only reason she is breathing right now is because of him.’
Girija finally got her wish in 2003. A quiet death for a quiet life. That was the first body I had seen in my 13 years and the memory stands out in vivid clarity. I can’t say I remember thatha’s immediate reactions to his captor’s passing. But I can reflect on how jarringly peculiar the moment must have been for him. I can’t know if he loved her the day she died; indeed I can’t know if he had loved her at all. All I know was that this man had dedicated 43 years of his life in service to this woman. She was now gone, and he was now free to begin anew.
Thatha moved in with us; but this new found freedom soon became a prison in itself. Over the years thatha had developed an almost military sense of routine. One that he was unable to break. He continued to rise at 5am even though there was no longer a patient to tend to. Instead, the house he now occupied had two teenagers and a dog; a radically different scenery from a depressed sixty year old. The house was occasionally used for parties and we frequently returned late. Yet never once did he complain, he went about his business as he always had and never once got in our way. What I find even more remarkable, is that he never thought less of us for our lifestyles, even though his life had been radically different at our age. He was someone who changed with the times.
Fortunately, boredom wouldn’t plague him for long. He was about to embark on his third career. As thatha was never meant to be retired, my mother was never meant to be a ‘homemaker’, as the pejorative term goes. In 2003, she came out of her stasis and finally embarked on her very own next chapter. In line with the vein that runs through the family, she started a school; a preschool to be precise. Thatha threw himself into the project. He became the first person that greeted the eager children at the doorstep of the school. Now he had many more to call him thatha, and he continues today to be loved by staff, children and parents alike. Every year during Independence Day celebrations, he lights the lamp to a standing ovation. I’d like to believe he found solace here, surrounded by adoring people of all age groups, doing what he loved without a noose hanging around his neck.
In the last few years he’s had bypass surgery and suffered a serious injury to the head, which lead to a brain hematoma. He battled his way through both, like pretty much everything else he’s done with his life. A couple of weeks ago he tripped and fractured his hip. And so he has yet another painful recovery up ahead of him; one that will involve involuntary bedrest. It seems different this time. At the age of 82, his spirit seems to have finally broken. Those who have supported others their whole lives never can bring themselves to lean on anyone else’s shoulders; even if those are the shoulder’s they once carried. He thinks he will become a burden, a liability. If he did become a burden, perhaps then he would understand the number of people whose life he touched as an educator; for all of these people would raise their hands to care for him. But he won’t. He will learn to fight once more. He will endure.
A few days before his hip fracture, I left India to start a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University. The day I left, I saw him shed tears for the first time. Our usual language of conversation is Kannada, but this time he spoke to me in English. ‘Sometimes you just can’t hold the emotions,’ he said. It amazes me that someone who has been through so much can bring himself to shed tears for something so seemingly irrelevant. I could tell my departure mattered deeply to him. Far more than I had imagined it would.
I suppose with this final disclosure I’ve betrayed an emotional intent for writing this piece. On this I confess myself guilty. It is true that this is a grandson’s effort to preserve the remainder of his thatha’s legacy. But I shan’t be apologetic about it. For you have now reached the end, and now within you, a memory shall be retained. No matter how small, no matter how insignificant, it will live on. And through your memory, so will his struggle.
This is not an elegy. Elegies glorify; moreover, the above mentioned individual is healthy and kicking. He is my grandfather, and so it becomes impossible for me claim absolute neutrality in this discourse. Make of this what you will.
There is a relationship between the outcome of a life and the location of its origin. In India, this relationship is suffocatingly tight. Kanathur Achanniah Nagaraj, known to me as simply ‘thatha’, was born in a village called Kanathur, part of the Turuvekere taluk of Southern Karnataka. Incidentally, this is also the birthplace of the father of Karnataka theatre legend ‘Master Hirannaiah’. Unfortunately that is the best that can be said of the village alumnus. It was, and is, an unexceptional place with no real room for excellence to emerge; a plot of space forgotten in time.
Nagaraj was born under a star sign called the ‘Moola Nakshatrhra’ which dictates that the child’s mother will suffer an unnatural early death. I suspect the cause of my great grandmother’s passing due to a relatively unimpressive infection, was more a result of the lack of medical facility than alignment of stars. However, there were fingers pointed at 2 year old Nagaraj, which he was at the time, unaware of. Nevertheless, he shared a close bond with his father; a rare phenomenon in that context. You have to stare with adamant resolution to find the silver lining with this one.
Sadly though, even love engendered by a lost mother has limitations. It can’t pay bills. Halfway into his bachelor’s degree, Nagaraj’s father pulled the plug on his college fund. And so, he began to work part time jobs, one of which was tutoring high school children to support his education. This was to have a major impact on his life.
After graduating with a bachelor’s of education degree, life led him into work at the railways in the accounts department; a lucrative and highly sought after government job at the time. Shortly afterwards he was found a suitable bride to be wed, a woman named Girija from the nearby district of Turuvekere. I wonder what his sentiments would be when he thinks back to this fateful moment in his life. I do not believe I could muster the courage to ask.
Cacti aren’t pretty. But yet they grow, even in the harshest of conditions. My grandfather never could adjust to the futility of a life in an accounts department. And so he did the unthinkable. Amidst severe criticism from friends and family he uprooted his life, now complete with a daughter, and moved to the growing city of Bangalore. The move was not a premeditated one; he had no job offer or life savings to turn to.
I started with a promise not to glorify. On this occasion I shall turn a blind eye to my original statement, for the intent demands celebration. Taking even a step towards actualizing the self, rests on a plethora of luxuries, none of which he had. This is a time frame where the notion of individual passion was so subservient to sustenance, that it was laughable. But perhaps there is truth to the idea that struggle is a requisite for growth. Personally, I have never been inclined to such romanticism. Regardless, the cacti grow.
If the thought crossed your mind, yes this is a rags to riches story; but not in the conventional sense. The riches came later and through his second daughter. The second daughter is also my mother, and so in a sense I am one of the recipients of the fruits of his labour. The fact that I write his story whilst on vacation in Norway is perhaps a comical tryst of luxury. But the riches came at a price.
Once Nagaraj moved to Bangalore he sought work doing what he had originally done to make ends meet – teaching. His ultimate test as an educator must have come through his devilishly slow grandson. I returned to India with my family at the age of 12, as a boy who spoke not a word of any Indian language. The ominous task of ensuring my academic prowess in the language department, fell upon him and my mother. My mother was mean. She would tell me I would fail and I would cry. So it’s safe to say the only reason I passed Kannada classes was because of thatha.
I hope to God that at least a few of his students were brighter than me. He joined RV Boys High School as a math and physics teacher, and rose to be principal of the institution. Passion subsumed ambition and he stayed on as head of the school until he retired. To the best of my knowledge he was happy doing what he did, and never sought more. It was fortunate that he had his work to distract him from the other half of his life.
Nagaraj’s wife Girija developed asthma shortly after delivering my mother. Fuelled by Bangalore’s growing pollution, my grandmother’s condition slowly deteriorated. Her weight already an issue, now grew to alarming proportions due to indoor confinement. Tirelessly thatha went from hospital to hospital spending nearly all of his savings on medicine. My mother took over cooking responsibilities and household chores at the age of 13. Perhaps that’s why she makes such a splendid ‘bisibelebath’ which is easily my favourite dish in the world. You see every cloud really does have a silver lining.
However, when she turned 18 funds had run out. Just as his father was unable to support his education 32 years ago, my grandfather was unable to support my mother in pursuing her engineering dreams. I must overemphasize the fact that my mother has never held thata accountable in any way. Indeed she remains in awe of how the man held a family together when it was teetering at the edge. Nevertheless, I must remind you of that suffocating connection between the outcome of a life and its origin…
As the entire family was struggling to keep her physical health intact, my grandmother’s mind was slowly falling into decay. Depression is the most abhorrent of all human emotion; but then again it is not an emotion at all, it is the lack of it. She blamed all of her misfortune on thatha, and regularly raged and screamed at him claiming that he never had cared for her. By this point he was now retired and had completely dedicated his life to her service; save for the time he spent holding tuitions at home. He was able to do this for free and support underprivileged children now, for money was no longer an overbearing concern. My parents had seen to that.
I suspect at the heart of my grandmother’s relentless assaults was a deep insecurity that he would leave her to fend for herself, completely alone in her harsh world. Yet she needn’t have worried. Knowing his sense of internal duty, the thought probably never crossed his mind in 43 years of marriage. Nevertheless, she attempted suicide, not once but twice, failing on both occasions.
After returning to India, my mother threw herself into my grandmother’s welfare. As she freely admits, she lacked both my grandfather’s will and his patience. In a fit of rage, she once stormed into Girija’s doctor’s office and demanded to know why she wasn’t showing even marginal improvements. As a response, the wise old doctor produced a bottle of pills from his drawer and told my mother unflinchingly that this was the medication my grandmother swallowed every week. The amount was sufficient to put a regular healthy individual into a coma. ‘You must accept that this is how it always be,’ said the doctor. My mother dissolved into tears, but my grandfather who was listening by the door remained unperturbed. He knew; he had always known. Once my mother had managed to bring herself back to a state of calm, the doctor had one final piece of insight. ‘It is neither I nor the medicine that is keeping your mother alive. The only reason she is breathing right now is because of him.’
Girija finally got her wish in 2003. A quiet death for a quiet life. That was the first body I had seen in my 13 years and the memory stands out in vivid clarity. I can’t say I remember thatha’s immediate reactions to his captor’s passing. But I can reflect on how jarringly peculiar the moment must have been for him. I can’t know if he loved her the day she died; indeed I can’t know if he had loved her at all. All I know was that this man had dedicated 43 years of his life in service to this woman. She was now gone, and he was now free to begin anew.
Thatha moved in with us; but this new found freedom soon became a prison in itself. Over the years thatha had developed an almost military sense of routine. One that he was unable to break. He continued to rise at 5am even though there was no longer a patient to tend to. Instead, the house he now occupied had two teenagers and a dog; a radically different scenery from a depressed sixty year old. The house was occasionally used for parties and we frequently returned late. Yet never once did he complain, he went about his business as he always had and never once got in our way. What I find even more remarkable, is that he never thought less of us for our lifestyles, even though his life had been radically different at our age. He was someone who changed with the times.
Fortunately, boredom wouldn’t plague him for long. He was about to embark on his third career. As thatha was never meant to be retired, my mother was never meant to be a ‘homemaker’, as the pejorative term goes. In 2003, she came out of her stasis and finally embarked on her very own next chapter. In line with the vein that runs through the family, she started a school; a preschool to be precise. Thatha threw himself into the project. He became the first person that greeted the eager children at the doorstep of the school. Now he had many more to call him thatha, and he continues today to be loved by staff, children and parents alike. Every year during Independence Day celebrations, he lights the lamp to a standing ovation. I’d like to believe he found solace here, surrounded by adoring people of all age groups, doing what he loved without a noose hanging around his neck.
In the last few years he’s had bypass surgery and suffered a serious injury to the head, which lead to a brain hematoma. He battled his way through both, like pretty much everything else he’s done with his life. A couple of weeks ago he tripped and fractured his hip. And so he has yet another painful recovery up ahead of him; one that will involve involuntary bedrest. It seems different this time. At the age of 82, his spirit seems to have finally broken. Those who have supported others their whole lives never can bring themselves to lean on anyone else’s shoulders; even if those are the shoulder’s they once carried. He thinks he will become a burden, a liability. If he did become a burden, perhaps then he would understand the number of people whose life he touched as an educator; for all of these people would raise their hands to care for him. But he won’t. He will learn to fight once more. He will endure.
A few days before his hip fracture, I left India to start a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University. The day I left, I saw him shed tears for the first time. Our usual language of conversation is Kannada, but this time he spoke to me in English. ‘Sometimes you just can’t hold the emotions,’ he said. It amazes me that someone who has been through so much can bring himself to shed tears for something so seemingly irrelevant. I could tell my departure mattered deeply to him. Far more than I had imagined it would.
I suppose with this final disclosure I’ve betrayed an emotional intent for writing this piece. On this I confess myself guilty. It is true that this is a grandson’s effort to preserve the remainder of his thatha’s legacy. But I shan’t be apologetic about it. For you have now reached the end, and now within you, a memory shall be retained. No matter how small, no matter how insignificant, it will live on. And through your memory, so will his struggle.
