Enigma of Being
“What would’ve been my life like had my dad succumbed to that heart attack when he was barely forty-two,” he resumed his tale. “My third-rate degree was just on hand then and there was nothing else for us to fall back upon in such an eventuality; maybe, it was his will-power to avert our downslide that kept him alive. Or it could be the destiny of my own siblings that intervened with his fate to keep him going as their interests wouldn’t have been as well served by my life, and I too couldn’t have been as carefree as I was in my youth, which had been the crux of my life. But before that when my grandfather passed away, given our attachment, my father was worried to death that it would upset me no end, and so he asked his cousin to break the news only after preparing me for that. Oh, how my poor grandfather used to insist on knowing my exam schedule for him to do the Sundara Kãnda parayanamfor good tidings at my exam time, and it takes some eight hours or more to recite the epic even for a regular that he was; if only I had put in my studies half of his efforts to invoke the divine grace upon me; how some of the experiences of life seem sweeter in recollection!”
“Don’t they say man loves his grandchildren more than he ever loved his own offspring?”
“Surely, you would have a grasp of it when you reach that station of life,” he said as his eyes turned moist. “How I regret that I’d never paid heed to his letters for they were all carbon copies; what was worse, I never wrote home, aware though I was how eagerly my grandfather - not to speak of my father – looked forward to my missives; the errand boy at my father’s office once told me that it was his daily chore to check up for my letters at the head post office. Well that was the eagerness with which my father awaited my letters that shamefully I never wrote; but still, I didn’t mend my ways for I was lost in my own wayward ways. It was another story that my grandmother’s villainy saw my father’s hand behind my indifference to my grandpa’s missives to grind her inheritance axe, whatever, as and when I was short of money, the requisition and the compliance were both telegraphed. I learnt from my mother much later, how anxious my dad was to see that I was not inconvenienced even for a day, and if only I knew what a hassle it was for him to arrange the money for me, I wouldn’t have been the spendthrift I turned out to be. Oh, why didn’t he tell me how hard up he was; would I have been so insensitive as not to have tightened my belt? When my father wrote to me that his errand boy died in a road mishap not on his routine postal trip but on some official duty, as if to spare him the pangs of guilt, I could picture the sentimental side of him that I had never seen till then; but as my eyes welled up withtears, it struck me that I wasn’t in tears when I learnt about my grandfather’s death in spite of our attachment. Maybe it had all to do with the fact that he died at a ripe old age or it could be that I was subconsciously reconciled to his end.”