Appa

This is the email I wrote on Feb 18, 2004 – the day after my father passed away. The email was addressed to our family email group – and tried to capture the jumble of thoughts that passed through my head on the day after...

As we live through this – and try to let what has happened sink in, I was thinking about all the different ways in which we remember Appa. As we talked on the phone, each of us had a different facet of Appa to think about and cherish. Sudha called earlier today, and talked about what she remembered of him when we were in Goodwill. Shobha was talking about her memories of Appa at a different time – during the seventies, when we lived in Jeevan Shanti.

When I think back, there is this big division – Appa before the stroke in 1984, and after that, in the last 20 years. And for me, that is an almost perfect division – because those times are almost exactly equal. In 1984, I think of Appa as one who was at his peak – the long career in LIC had produced its rewards for him, and he exuded the confidence and assurance that came from that success. Untimely as the stroke was, it was just a year before his scheduled retirement – and even that happened according to some internal logic that was correct. I was just completing my studies and was getting ready to start working. The years afterwards are the ones that are sharpest in memory – and the way that Appa lived through them said as much about his character as anything he did before.

Remember Appa’s constant admonition to always sit up? When we were kids, the one cardinal sin that we could commit around the house was read while lying down. I remember, and sometimes repeat for Avyay, his way of straightening our backs – running a gentle finger down the spine to make us sit up! After Appa had that debilitating stroke, and came home, the one thing was sure – if he was awake, he would be sitting up and not lying down. That was just a symbol of how the concept of laziness was anathema to him. It must have been the hardest work ever, in those days, for him to force his unwilling body to again learn to become mobile – but even within the first few weeks in Bhatia hospital, he was ready – almost never was he too tired or unwilling to do what the physiotherapists asked him to do, forcing his hands and legs to again learn the skills that the stroke took away. Why, even this year, in the week that I was in Coimbatore, after all that this stroke had taken away, there was no easy throwing in of the towel. On the morning of Feb.3, I took him through exercises to move his arms, and start again to make minimal sounds with his mouth, and you could see that he was still willing to make the try – in fact, that is the last very clear memory I will keep of Appa’s face – not the unresponsive expression as I left the hospital room,  but the time earlier in the morning – when I am absolutely sure that he understood and was aware of what was happening, and was ready to do whatever it took to regain his strength and talk back to me.

That analytical ability, that powerful reasoning faculty is the one blessing that we should all be thankful for inheriting from Appa. With him, it was always about thinking things through, going to the sources and starting from first principles for any problem. There is one thing that I have remembered often – something that happened when we were in Borivli, just after we moved there – I would have been 10 years old at that time. I had just got exposed to cricket, through things that friends in school talked about, but knew nothing about. I was curious and went to Appa, of course, the source of all knowledge. Appa himself had only a passing interest in sports, and told me that he knew little about cricket – but – he said it did not matter, because he knew where to get the information. The next day, he brought home the ‘C’ volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica – and that is where I learnt the laws of cricket from, how it is played, who its heroes were (I still remember the line drawing of Ranji that was part of that article, and the little excerpt from Neville Cardus’ writing about cricket). There couldn’t have been a finer introduction to the game that I am still fascinated by – and I still thank Appa for the great way that he introduced me to it.

Talking about reasoning, and analysis – I easily slip into thinking of Appa’s rationalism, amazing though the concept is, for somebody for whom religiosity was so central. I thought it amazing that he was ready, well into my teens, to engage in a discussion about atheism or agnosticism with perfect equanimity? I distinctly remember that discussion with him – and his saying that faith was something very personal, and that everyone would come to it, eventually and naturally. It probably happens to everybody, and I had moments of uncertain faith too – and somewhat contrary to my expectations, Appa was perfectly ok with that. He had a great love of intellectual exploration – and never dogmatic about the sources that one should go to. Through my college days, I would bring home a large variety of all sorts of literature – he would look at them with interest, but rarely comment on them, but I could clearly see that he was willing to let me explore things for myself and come to my own conclusions. I can hardly ever remember him cutting off debate about a subject – and from my earliest days, remember him encouraging the attitude of questioning, and going to the sources. (Remember ‘Diksh…’ – when I asked him for the meaning of a word, he wouldn’t tell me – but ask me to go to the dictionary and find out for myself).

I would have liked to see Appa at work – the brief glimpses we saw were never really complete, and at that time, I didn’t know enough about the working life to interpret it. I would have liked to have seen him in meetings and how he talked to others. I know that he had a reputation as somebody who didn’t easily give in to superior authority by rank alone, and like to think that I am like him – ready to stand and stick to principle, and keep debating things till he was convinced. I know that he greatly liked the art of debate – even at home, I never got the feeling that there was any subject that I shouldn’t express my opinion on. One early incident comes to mind – the mid-70’s – and the big debate in our house about Shridhar’s marriage – the question was really about how the marriage would be conducted and how important it was to do it with all the attendant rituals. In those pre-email days, we would actually write long letters by hand, and with all my teenaged certainty of knowledge, I had written a long, reasoned letter to Shridhar, full of probably pompous prose (that was a period of Somerset Maugham influence for me!). I don’t know whether I ever mailed the letter – but I remember that I showed it to Appa. In one of the few open compliments that I remember, I recall him actually patting my back, with that twinkle that would come into his eyes when he was really pleased – he was just pleased at how I had written out my opinions, irrespective of how relevant my opinions were.

Now, in the last few days, I have been thinking of how unfortunate the stroke in ’84 was and what it deprived Amma and Appa of. It robbed them of a normal retirement – he talked of taking up consulting assignments after retirement from LIC, he would have retained some of the directorships he had. It would have been lovely for him to have been able to do for his grandchildren what he did for us – teach – but in a more relaxed way when he didn’t have the pressures of work and career. And enjoy a little more, the pleasures of a retired life – reading and listening to his beloved music. I am sure that he had a real, undiscovered musical talent – do you all remember how, in Warden Road, every day, he would recite the Lalitha Sahasranamam and some other shlokas, singing each verse in different ragams? It was one of the few things I remember him being vain about – his ability to recognize ragams. He would go to concerts in Shanmukhananda with Sesha Ayyar, and they would each write down, on a piece of paper the names of the songs they heard and the ragams that they were set to, and he would take childish pride in the fact that he was always able to identify them faster than others. In fact, he said that he was even better at it than Amma, but said that Amma wouldn’t admit it! I would have liked to have kept even one of those scraps of paper – a numbered list of song names, written in Tamil and English. I think now, we had a tape recorder then, why didn’t we ever think of recording Appa during his daily poojas, when he would full throatedly sing in those varieties of ragams?

The other great love for Appa was of course, mathematics. I know that he loved the idea that I studied Statistics and Mathematics in college – although I wandered into it accidentally, and not very consciously, it probably was due to the respect with which he held those subjects. It was his natural inclination – he was always ready, when we were in school, to help with math, more than any other subject. For long years in college and after, a habit that I have lost only in the last 10 or so years, was to while away time by writing out and solving a long multiplication problem – multiplying two multi-digit numbers and writing out the answer in one line – using the cross-multiplication technique that Appa would take such delight in teaching. In the early days, in elementary school – there was the one question I would dread – if I scored 98 marks out of 100 in arithmetic, the gentle “so where did the other two marks go?” He would gladly admit that he didn’t really bother about marks in any other subject – he was really interested only in the satisfaction of seeing me score 100 in math.

And of course, religion, and prayer. When I think of myself in relation to all the rest of us, I feel a tinge of pride in one fact – that Appa and I shared one set of things that he could never have done with anybody else. The memories themselves are indistinct, and blurred by time now – but it is of the Sabarimalai trip when I was 8. I only vaguely remember the details, but I know that it was a very spiritual experience. Wasn’t it astonishing that Appa was even willing to take me along? But I remember segments of the long walk – probably not very long by today’s standards – holding on to Appa’s hand and plodding along, chanting ‘Swamiye Ayyappa’. How important was faith, and prayer, to him – I can’t say it simply – but it was everything. There was something quixotic about how, later in life, he would spend more and more time at his pooja every morning – with Amma waiting anxiously for him to get ready to go to office. I can’t think of anything that I do that resembles, in care and commitment, what he would do every day – carefully wipe and clean each of the little idols in the pooja shelf, apply kungumam to each of the pictures – things that Amma still does. In the last few years in Warden Road, he took up the practice of reciting the Vishnu Sahasranamam every evening. I was in college at that time, and on some days, it did seem like a chore to me and would do it only reluctantly – but now, I am sure that Appa knew that, but still insisted on me joining him very deliberately. I still recite it, and, with unfailing regularity, remember how he would sometimes stop and translate some of the sanskrit words – it is one of the things that I can distinctly remember his voice saying.

Later, I have sometimes thought about why the stroke did happen – why, in spite of all his prayers, his clean and regular habits, yoga asanas, prayers, living the ‘good’ life – he would be punished with the disability that handicapped him. I am sure that Appa thought of it too – and probably didn’t come up with any good answers. But, whatever destiny that determined that he should have that kind of thing happen to him – it was his earlier goodness that determined that he was able to live through it with such dignity. Of the last 20 years too, my memories are about as evenly split – the first 8-9 years when he lived in Bombay, and the latter period when I only saw Appa during brief visits. After the stroke, of course, Appa exhibited feelings of despair and unhappiness – railing against the cruelty of fate that had struck him in the prime of life. But, what was astonishing was how brief those periods were – comparatively, they were almost fleeting – before he cheerfully got back to the task of working away at the physiotherapy or speech therapy. In those pre-Google days, I tried to read all that I could about stroke and its after effects – and I am sure that Appa’s progress was spectacular – the reason it wasn’t even better was only because I did not have enough time to devote to working with him on even more intensive therapy. Of course, he would get angry during those days – most often because we were not able to comprehend what he was trying to communicate through gestures – but did he ever give up trying to communicate? One amazing incident sticks in my mind – on one of Shobha/Shridhar’s trips to India – Shobha had bought some jewelry and was showing it around. At the same time, somebody else made some remark about how the Customs may take notice of that, but Shridhar said that the value of the jewelry was not really significant. For the next hour and more, Appa kept trying to say something – and we didn’t understand at all – till we finally figured out that he was saying – ‘make sure you have the bill’! That incident keeps reminding me again and again – how difficult it must have been for him to have been trapped in the state of aphasia – what peculiar tortures he endured because with his extraordinary reasoning and thinking ability intact, he was deprived of the ability to communicate.

In the last couple of years, for both Amma and Appa, I think there was a measure of peace and tranquility in Vanaprastha that was really great, that they enjoyed thoroughly. Isn’t it strange that Appa came the full circle in this way – born in Coimbatore, then moving to Tirupparankunram, Madurai, Madras, Simla, Delhi, Bombay, Thanjavur, then Bombay again, then back to Madras before returning to spend his final days in Coimbatore?