“The impulse of love could be the embodiment of nature but its sustenance is conditioned by the ways of life. Maybe as a recompense for that we tend to love our children,”
“So it seems,” he said and continued with his tale. “As I grew up, I turned into a rebel; can you imagine my smoking at home at fifteen? Why, my father too was a smoker, and strangely, it was my grandfather who had sustained his habit; when he got wind of my dad’s smoking ways, he had loosened his purse strings for once, to enable him to smoke Berkeley instead of the cheap Charminar. They say the common refrain in our village then about my grandfather was, ‘the miser is wiser too’. Much later, my dad was forced to give up smoking on doctor’s advice, but before he could get the better of his urge, my mother was wont to confiscate the contraband, which she used to pass on to me in place of pocket money; some repeat of history. But down the times, compared to the Berkley of yore, the India Kings of the day are no more than nothing or is it that my taste buds were blunted by years of smoking, I don’t know.”
“Blame the hybrids of the day, high on yield and low on quality.”
“Maybe hybrids are the necessary evils of our populous times; but for their bounteousness, can our teeming billions ever have a mouthful. That’s the price man pays for the population growth,” he said. “Any way, following in my father’s footsteps, I too gave up the habit not long ago, so to say on doctor’s advice; but when an old flame pleaded with me to stop smoking for her sake, it was the self same me that told her, ‘I’ll give up the world for you, but not my smoking’.”
“The scare of a doctor is more potent than the concern of a loved one and that’s the reality of life.”
“True,” he said and continued from where he had left, “My dad and I had never seen eye to eye, but we came to respect each others’ abilities; he used to take my advice and often acted upon it. Being in a dilemma whether or not to bring upfront a minor health problem of one of my sisters to the prospective groom, he wanted to have my take on that; well, I told him that it would be a fair disclosure only after she had her way with the boy with her persona. As a man he was brash to begin with, but as he mellowed down in time and as I matured at length, we became friends towards the end of his innings that was after being at loggerheads for the best part of our lives. Whatever, how sweet it felt in those last years of his life and how empathic we felt for each other, what an enduring satisfaction we both derived in our closeness! I’ll cherish that till the end, as he did until he died.’