My Father, page 16
Regarding my sister, Kamala, as stated, Father had the traditional view that after her bachelor’s degree she should be married. As such, he did not charter any specific career path for her. But Kamala thought differently and went on to become the principal of a senior higher secondary school.
Father was friendly towards us but also commanded our unqualified respect. That was essential if he was going to be able to enforce the discipline that he saw as necessary for our success. By the late 1960s, a new room had been added to the house, which we three brothers shared as our study room. Ravi and Ashok also slept in that room, while I slept in the common family room. Each evening, Father would make at least one random visit to our room to check that we were studying and not goofing off. If he caught us dozing or wasting our time chatting, a scolding would invariably follow. More often than not, one of us would hear his approaching footsteps in the direction of our room and quickly alert the others.
Father also insisted that we went to bed by 10 p.m. He wanted us to rise early in the morning. He was regular with his early morning walks with his friends and would come to our room to wake us up before heading out. Sometimes, his friends would arrive early to fetch him and he would miss the chance to wake us up. On those days, we would manage to steal a few extra minutes of sleep.
We three brothers studied at Shree Mahaveer Digambar Jain High School (later converted into a senior higher secondary school) till tenth grade, except Ashok, who switched to Podar School after his eighth grade. The school charged a minimal fee – just four rupees per month, according to my memory. It was a short walk from our rented house on M.I. Road, where we lived till 1957. Our second rented house in C-Scheme area was just as close to our school. But in 1959, we moved to the house that Father had got built. The distance between this house and the school was a solid 2.5 kilometres. At the time, we brothers were just seven, nine and eleven years old. We all thought this was a punishingly long distance to walk each way.
Given its limited space, Mahaveer School used to run two shifts, a morning shift for grades one to eight, and an afternoon shift for grades nine and ten. This meant that till we got into the ninth grade, we had to be at school by 7.30 a.m. in the winters and by 7.00 a.m. the rest of the year. Getting up early enough to arrive on time, especially during winters, was a real challenge. But Father had no ear for our complaints. Having himself walked between Suwana and Banera many times at our age, and between Jain Hostel and Maharana College in Udaipur later, he thought the walk was good for our health and mental discipline. At times, Mother’s heart would melt and she would spare us some change from the household budget to take a rickshaw for the second half of the way when returning home. But many times, even rickshaws would not be available or would demand half a rupee in fare instead of the quarter rupee we were willing to pay.
During summer breaks, Father would encourage us to join him on his morning walks. Though we joined him sometimes, we were generally reluctant participants, arguing that the summer vacation was our only opportunity to get some leisurely sleep. He also encouraged us to do daily exercise and taught us some yoga asanas. I could never get the hang of shirshasana, though I did manage to learn some of the other important asanas. I found it difficult to maintain regularity in my practice then, but have rediscovered the exercises more recently. For the past decade, I have been spending eight to ten minutes on some simple yoga exercises each morning, which has proved highly beneficial. I have also begun to go for walks, measuring up to five kilometres a day on average.
Our education was supremely important to Father and he closely monitored our progress. At school, I used to have monthly tests, a half-yearly examination and a final examination. I remember that after each examination, even the monthly tests, upon returning from office, Father would ask how I had done in the examination and then go over every single question in the examination paper. He would inspire me to be the best student in the class. He would often say that you should be the best at what you do. If you are going to be Sherpa, be Tenzing. I met his expectations sometimes, but not always. Every now and then a particularly bright student would transfer into my class and edge me out.
He remained focused on education even when it came to the grandchildren. Whenever he would speak to Amita, either during our visits to Jaipur or on the phone to her in the United States, his first question would invariably be about whether the children were doing well in their studies. Ravi was subject to the same enquiries about his daughters, Meghana and Nidhi, when he visited Jaipur, while Ashok’s two daughters, Aditi and Arushi, and son Arihant, who lived in the same family house, were subject to direct scrutiny.
Father was a voracious reader. I recall there always being one or two thick books on the central table in his room. These were mostly books on contemporary politics or political history relating to India or the world. He had no interest in fiction and I never saw him read a book that fell in this category. Every couple of months, new books would replace the old ones on his table. A few of the titles that stick in my memory from the 1960s and early 1970s are The Untold Story by B.M. Kaul, The Himalayan Blunder by J.P. Dalvi, Integration of Indian States by V. P. Menon, India: The Critical Years by Kuldip Nayar and The New Industrial Estate by J.K. Galbraith. Since few in the Rajasthan secretariat were in the habit of reading, he had no difficulty checking out the books from its library and keeping them as long as it took him to read them.
Since his school days, Father had developed a deep interest in the lives of eminent leaders. As a result, he had read biographies or autobiographies of such major figures from around the world as Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Lord Mountbatten, Charles Chaplin, John F. Kennedy and many others who had inspired generations of young men and women. In the course of writing his own books on the history of Rajasthan later in his life, he read nearly all the major works available on the subject. And he did much original research when writing his books on the freedom movement and on state politics in Rajasthan.
Besides his love of books, there was his passion for bridge. For four decades preceding the last five years of his life, he had a group of bridge players who would gather to play the game every Sunday. Each would play host by rotation for the game. When our house was the venue, Mother would have to make tea and snacks many times, and one of us brothers would serve them. Frequently, my father would get upset with his bridge partner when he made a mistake that led to their losing a game. We would hear him yell, ‘Partner, what did you do? You just don’t know how to play.’ Or, ‘Partner, when will you learn to play?’ There were one or two players who were not as good as others at the game, and they got called to join only when the group was one or two persons short. Father would send one of us brothers to go and fetch them. One of them would often complain to us on the way that he was treated like a spare tyre, called to join in only when one of the regulars was unavailable. The stakes in the game were small, being no more than five to ten rupees exchanging hands in any one sitting.
The game lasted several hours, but on many occasions it would go on into the early hours of the next morning. If this happened when someone other than Father was hosting the game, Mother would get more and more anxious as the night advanced. By 1 or 2 a.m., she would lose patience and wake up Ravi – that was the curse of being the oldest son – and tell him to find out whether Father might have had an accident while returning home.
Until 1967, when Father became deputy secretary, we had no phone. But even after we got the phone, most other members of Father’s bridge team did not. Therefore, Ravi had no option but to go in person to the house of person hosting the game to verify that Father was well. Since the bicycle was the only vehicle the family had until the late 1960s, the two-way trip often took forty minutes to an hour in the dead of night. But Ravi had the coolest head among all the siblings and he carried the burden with good cheer.
The following morning, when Father returned, Mother would be very upset with him, sometimes declaring herself on fast for an indefinite period. It would take a day or two, sometimes longer, for normal communication between her and Father to resume. But the situation would hardly change, with the cycle repeating itself in another few weeks. We all knew that Father could not live without bridge and Mother could not help getting anxious whenever he stayed out till late playing the game. The two of them and the rest of us had to live with those facts.
Father had abiding faith in God. He passed on the family tradition of faith in the deity Hanuman, especially Balaji of Sindri, to the next generation. I recall that he had memorized the Hanuman aarti and once wrote it for us on a piece of paper. He also led the Lakshmi pooja every Diwali evening. There was a long period of time when the entire family, including he, fasted on Tuesdays, eating only one meal that day. He was not averse to visiting temples, but I saw him do that only rarely. He positively disliked religious dogma. I cannot recall a single instance of a pandit coming to our house to perform any rituals.
Among religious books, Father’s two favourites were the Bhagavad Geeta and Uttaradhyayan Sutra. The former synthesizes the competing strands of Hindu thought while the latter is the most important sacred book of Shvetambar Jains (our family is Shvetambar Jain), believed to contain the actual words of Mahavir, the founder of Jainism. His collection of books included the English translation of the Bhagavad Gita by S. Radhakrishnan, Satyarth Prakash by Swami Dayananda Saraswati and several volumes on Swami Vivekananda.
At a practical level, Father had great respect for all religions. I remember how, after we had moved to our new house in 1959, one by one, he collected nice big posters of the founders of all the major religions, got them framed and hung them in our family room. There were pictures of the Buddha, Mahavir, Christ and Guru Nanak. In 1975, on the occasion of the 2500th anniversary of the nirvana of Lord Mahavir, Father helped found a cultural, philanthropic and social service organization called Mahavir International. Today, this is a vast organization with more than 125 branches around the world.
While framing the constitution of Mahavir International, Father successfully inserted in it the provision that this will be a society meant to serve the destitute, irrespective of their caste, creed or religion, and that any person belonging to any faith would be welcome to become its member and office bearer as long as she subscribed to the broad principles of ‘Live and Let Live’ and ‘Love All Serve All’, as enunciated by Mahavir. I remember assisting Father in the work of the organization when I came for my first visit back home from the United States in the summer of 1976. The earliest activity of the organization had consisted of issuing a small number of scholarships to bright but needy students. I remember reviewing the applications and helping Father with the final selection.
Given that he was an active participant in the freedom movement, it is no surprise that Father was very nationalistic. He also did his best to pass on that sense of nationalism to his children. One of the things he did towards this end was to seek out portraits of all the leaders he admired, frame them and hang them up in his drawing room. Upon entering his room, the first thing anyone noticed were majestic portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, S. Radhakrishnan and Indira Gandhi.
Father also named the children in the family after well-known contemporary and historical figures. His sister’s son was the first child to be born in the extended family following his generation. He named him Mohan, after Mahatma Gandhi. Ravi, whose full formal name is Ravindra, was named after Rabindranath Tagore. Ashok was named after Emperor Ashoka, and I after Aurobindo Ghosh. Then, when my eldest son was born, Father named him Hirsh, after the emperor Harsha Vardhan. In India, the name is spelt Harsh, but we tweaked it a little since in the United States the conventional spelling would have been understood to mean ‘unpleasant’ (harsh), which is almost the opposite of its meaning – happy or joyful – in Hindi. In the hospital, soon after his birth, we had given him the name Ananth. So, his name ended up becoming Ananth Hirsh.
Father was very social and had a large network of friends. He had served in the Government of Rajasthan during a period when institutions and systems were being put in place. As a result, he had had the opportunity to employ many people. In two of his stints, at Malviya Regional Engineering College and at State Insurance, he had directly hired many individuals. As the staff welfare officer in the secretariat, he also solved the pension and seniority issues of numerous employees. Many of those employees remained loyal to him and would occasionally come by to see him even after his retirement. With his network of friends, he also helped friends or friends of friends to clear bureaucratic hurdles in various sections of the state government. This further expanded his network of friends.
An important reason for his large network was his friendly personality. He had an uncanny ability to relate to people of any age. As result, many of my own and my brothers’ friends became his ‘friends’ too. He would often be sitting in the front lawn in the evening, reading the newspaper or a book, and one of our friends would show up. He would ask him to come and sit next to him and immediately draw him into conversation. Over time, many of our friends had also grown very fond of Father. Though I had left India in 1974, some of my friends continued to visit our house to see him. One of them eventually ended up co-authoring a book with him. Ashok also had a large network of friends, and Father indulged them regularly. Later, Ashok inherited Father’s networking skills. I recall even Father being very impressed with the network of friends and acquaintances Ashok had created.
Father had a great connect with children also. On one of our visits in the late 1980s, Amita had taken the children on a visit to the local zoo in Jaipur. Ajay must have been less than five years old then. Father was sitting in the lawn when they returned from the zoo. So he immediately called them over to sit with him and started chatting with young Ajay. He asked him, ‘Did you see the “beer” (bear) at the zoo?’ Ajay replied, ‘You mean bear?’ Father said, ‘Yes, beer, did you see it?’ Ajay said, ‘You are saying “beer”, which is a drink that makes you dizzy. “Bear” is an animal.’ Like many Indians, Father was pronouncing ‘bear’ as ‘beer’, and Ajay was quick to point out the flaw in his pronunciation. This was a bit of turning of tables, since during our days as children, Father would never miss the opportunity to correct our English pronunciation, learned from teachers in our Hindi-medium school. But at that point, Father quickly turned to an interrogation of Amita, asking her, ‘How come Ajay knows about beer at such a young age?’ So Amita had to explain why Ajay knew about this drink!
So far, the gene for sports has been missing in our family. Other than Ajay, who has done some serious trekking, mountain climbing and rowing, none of us has been a serious participant in any outdoor activity, let alone competitive sports. Father played some recreational cricket while at Maharana College in Udaipur, as did we during our school days. We also played the game at home, either in the driveway or on the road outside, which was almost free of traffic during the 1960s. Both the field and equipment were improvised. The field was narrow, allowing the batsman to hit the ball only straight ahead. The equipment consisted of a tennis ball, a used bat and the ‘mudda’ (a traditional relaxation seat made of straw for use in the garden) with its backrest as the wicket. On rare occasions, Father would join us.
Though not a sportsperson, Father did have a passion for watching cricket, especially Test matches. Till 1974, when I left India, there was no television in Jaipur. The principal medium for following the matches closely was the running commentary broadcast on All India Radio. Those were the days of commentators such as Vijay Merchant, Devraj Puri, Anand Setalvad, Vizzy (Maharajkumar Vizianagram), Berry Sarbadhikari and Dicky Rutnagur. After we got a telephone in the house, if a test match was being played, Father would call a few times during the day from his office to find out the score. Sometimes he would want to listen to the running commentary for a few minutes to an hour. At those times, I would hold the phone receiver close to the radio while the commentary played. If the game was lacking action or if a particularly bad commentator came to replace a better one, he would hang up. But if the game was going well, he would stay on the line for almost an hour. By the time he retired, television had arrived and he could watch the games live. That greatly added to the value of his leisure time during retirement.
Father maintained a very simple life. After his retirement, with all the children becoming independent and even able to contribute to family expenses, the financial condition of the family considerably improved. But it was impossible to persuade him to treat himself to any comforts, let alone luxuries. An air cooler had been installed in his room by the late 1970s, but he would hardly use it because it made too much noise. On my visits to India, I would ask him if he would like me to bring him anything from the United States. But his only demand was shaving blades. After I took him a shaving kit, including a razor, from the United States in 1981, he discovered how bad the locally manufactured blades were. After that, till India’s liberalization finally brought the same razor and blades to retail shops in Jaipur, his standard question upon my arrival in Jaipur would be, ‘Did you bring the blades?’ The only other product I remember taking for him from the United States was playing cards. Once again, the quality of even the relatively inexpensive cards I would bring was far superior to what he could get locally. The cards I would bring also lasted long, so that I did not have to bring them at the same frequency as the shaving blades.
Outwardly, Father maintained his composure, and for the most part his outer appearance did not give away his emotions. But during the times he had to part from any of the family members, you could see him choke. The first time I noticed it was when Ravi left home to take up a job in Jodhpur. When I left home for the United States in 1974, he came up to Delhi along with Ashok to see me off. That parting was evidently tough on him. Then, when Ashok left to study for his DM degree at the Post Graduate Institute in Chandigarh in 1981, Father had a serious anxiety attack since he had always stayed at home until then. That was the time Amita and I had just got married and we happened to be home. I recall that we had to call a doctor, deputed by Ashok, that evening. The doctor gave Father a tranquilizer and tried to calm us down with the assurance that once he’d had a good sleep overnight, he would be fine. We found out the following morning that the doctor was right.
