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Memoirs
The Guardian of
Smile
by
Pramod Khilery
It was the most
unlikeliest piece of news ever broken to me. The moment my mother said,
"don't get sad" with a tinge of choke in her throat before breaking it
out my heart had begun to throb swiftly and my eyes had started rolling
before them a film tracing the life of my maternal grandmother as I had
seen it since my childhood. My grandmother is 75 but any remotest
thought of losing her could have transported me into a world of
unconsciousness. Within that fraction of second my face had moved from
being a hurler of equanimity to a struggler making an attempt at holding
my voice from falling and tears from moist eyes. And then fell that
incisive sentence, "your mausaji…. Krishanji is no more". I felt
as if it were a hammer blow on my head.
Discombobulated and convulsed, I said to myself, Krishanji mausa,
how could he! I forget everything running through my head. I went blank.
Sat in a quite corner in the library trying to remember the face of that
man who was mausaji to me all these years and now I was being
told that he was dead. Poker faced, staring at the magazine I had been
reading, my mind went deep into the days I had spent with mausaji
while bai (mother) kept talking on the other end telling me
details. For next fifteen minutes, lost I was in the images of memories
wearing a brooding look interspersed with moroseness on my face. This
was the piece of news I couldn't have imagined in my faintest
imagination. How could he? He was so young only in his fifties. No
longer was I ensconced in my chair. I leaned forward, rested my right
elbow on the table, put my chin in the cupped palm of my right hand and
began to gaze into vacuum. Everything was before my eyes now. A film
started to run unfolding all the episodes and instances of my life spent
with him. He was there in every frame of film with his smiling visage
mouthing witty rejoinders, telling me working of mechanical parts of his
jeep, toiling hard at his home, driving jeep and tractor, having a cup
of tea, gulping his daily dose of 'post' down his throat and doing
myriad things. Half opened magazine was trying to cast its word in my
eyes but mind was blocked. It was his face, his gait and his whole
demeanor that had enveloped me. He had come alive in the recesses of my
mind.
When I restored myself back to normalcy and came out of reveries the
reality of his being not around anymore was buffeting hard. At a
distance of more than 400km the reconciliation with the bitter truth was
easy, devoid of having to see my cousins and mausiji grieving but
yet hard to digest. But I knew the reality. My endearing mausaji
was no more. This realization blanketed in 'My mausaji' had sent
me far away from even imagining the plight of the family he left behind.
The earliest memories of mausaji goes back to my childhood days
when for him, yet to become father himself, my sister and I were nothing
short of his children. I recall with vagueness the day when he drove my
mausiji, my sister and me on a tractor to a photographer's studio
and made both of us children sit between him and mausiji as if we
were his children. When photographer was about to click he asked me to
put my hand over his lap. I have no idea what this gesture of his was
suggestive of but one thing I can vouch for is that this touch must have
given him the feelings of being a father vicariously. Another incident
that rings in my head belongs to days when I was too small even to
remember anything. So many times have I heard this incidence from almost
every member of my family that it got imprinted on my mind. Once when he
drove down to his in-law’s he parked his jeep outside the home. Around 8
or 9 in the evening when he was busy prattling with my uncle and aunties
he heard the sound of honking. Immediately he came out to inquire who
was fiddling with horn only to find a neighborly woman carrying a child
doing the nagging act. He was just about to come down on the woman for
having done so when he was told that actually the doer was the child. At
this he cooled down and said it didn't matter. That child was me.
Mausaji is no more. Mere thought shudders me. I am yet not used
to seeing my grandmother's home without my grandfather. The desolation
is so scary. A man who was synonymous to activity won't be even seen
anymore. Here was a man for whom procrastination was a non existent
entity and problems just a joke to laugh at. He had this uncanny knack
of extracting a burst of laughter from every situation however much grim
may it be. How often he had me in splits through his sense of humor
which made him come up with jocular remarks that he regaled me with in
his own inimitable style. Mausaji had lost one of his hands to
crop-cutting machine early in his teens. Yet never ever once did he
whine about his having only one hand. On the contrary he would toil so
hard that often people with both hands intact felt shamed. Neither did
he let his handicap come in the way of his driving. He was one of the
smoothest and cleanest drivers of transport vehicles I have ever seen.
None doubted his driving skills, so much so that sometimes when he would
hand over the wheels to someone else most often everyone in the vehicle
would request him to come back at the wheels.
As I write this my eyes see a face. This face is innocent and
smile-inducing but somewhere gives impression of being in some sort of
indescribable conflict. This face endeared itself to children. This face
when mouthed one liners listeners couldn’t help erupting into laughter.
This face was also the harbinger of what the body carrying this face had
been enduring for so long, trying hard in vain against the brutal
desires of addiction. This face as it segued from sporting black
whiskers to grey had made room for some wrinkles but not for moroseness
as it faced so may hardships. This face had an ingenuous appeal to it.
Behind the weight of grey was a face young and fresh.
During my Navodaya days he came to see me more than once on 'parent’s
days'. Every time he came he did not forget to bring along fruits and
home made food. Not only during my school days even when I was in
Polytechnic College he came cropping up twice out of blue. I had been
rambling about in the college campus when someone diverted my attention
to a man near a jeep pulled up across the road trying to beckon me. When
I turned around much to my pleasure it was mausaji. He picked me
up, drove straight to woman's Polytechnic where Pooja, my sister, was
studying, picked her up and drove straight to a restaurant. He and
mausiji made sure that both of us had good time and dropped us back
at college. He did this whirlwind twice. In both instances he came like
a gust of wind, buffeted us with his balminess and took leave. Today I
remember and say those were the days.
How often do we get to see a relative like mausa doling such
affection on his nephew? My respect for him comes partly from his being
an innocent person and partly his being so nice to me. How many times
would he start telling me serious things he was engaged in endowing my
childhood with respect? His talk interspersed with a very affectionate
and fawning 'beta' telling me about intricacies of sundry things would
make me nod my head often. I would feign comprehension of his mechanical
terms laden jargon. Showering encomiums on me seemed to have become his
second habit. More the number of people greater the degree of praise.
During my salad days when I was groping in the dark to seize a job and
traveled to Chandigarh he extolled my virtues before the bodyguards and
police personnel of a certain minister to such an extent that for most
of them I was a paragon of virtues. Though I did not succeed in landing
a job but I got dollops of love and affection from police personnel who
otherwise are so infamous for being uncouth and boorish.
Ever since I gained my consciousness I always saw him driving one
vehicle or another. In my childhood every ford tractor was an instant
reminder of him. In later years when he bought another tractor, for some
inexplicable reasons I could never associate that tractor to him. Such
was his fondness for vehicles that almost all my memories of him have
one vehicle featuring in it alongside him. In some way he was incomplete
without a vehicle. He would often travel to my nanihaal and our
home on his jeep and sometimes on even tractor if the nature of work
required him to do so. Though he must have traveled on buses and driven
other vehicles as well but it is so difficult for me to imagine him
without his jeep. As my mother told me when once his jeep met an
accident on their way to Haridwar, once he was sure that everybody was
safe he turned his attention to his jeep and he had his heart out of him
at seeing the mangled state of jeep. He was almost inconsolable. To me
his entire persona was tied with first ford tractor and then jeep.
Up until a certain time rattle of his jeep followed by honking was such
a part of our life that it became synonymous with him. Towards the later
years of his life this rattle and honking became very infrequent. No
matter what we were busy with we would hear the rattle of vehicle and we
knew it was him. Most often even before he honked. The sentence "Krishan
ji aa gaye (Krishan ji has come)" would float in the air. He
would halt the vehicle, wait for someone to open the gate, if opened,
O.K. otherwise he would get down and open it himself and bring in the
vehicle. Often I would find him busy with his jeep, setting something
right, fixing some snag even before having had a glass of water. His
jeep was his greatest friend. During our run-ins with our virago
neighbor he and his jeep were only one call away.
To his children he was an indulgent father. On most occasions he would
pander to their choices. So far as I know he could never bring himself
to hit children physically. If he ended up scolding his children out of
a fit of anger a minute expression of dimmed and pale visage of his
children was enough for him to give in. Then he would start trying to
please them. I never saw him making children the target of his ire.
Besides these whenever I came home I would get to hear innumerable
stories of his hardships every year. On meeting I would try to read his
face expecting some, even faint bearing of those bitter episodes but he
would defy my expectations. I would find him enjoying his life in the
same vein with the same jest as if nothing had happened. He was made to
go through the most trying times by the quirks of fate yet he remained
same as he always had been; spirited and vibrant. Instead of marks of
his fights with fate all that I could glean from his face was an
infectious smile.
I had last seen him a year and half ago. Our full family sans my Daddy
had gone to Katehra, the village he lived in. As we all were sitting in
the room he sauntered in holding something in his hand, exhausted,
making clear he had been toiling hard, passed that very old smile and
blurted out, "you have become an officer". I couldn’t say anything other
than throwing a meek smile. That was the last time I would see him. He
seemed in hurry and walked out of the room, never to be seen again, now
ever.
July 26, 2009
The author is a senior lecturer in
Computers Science Department of an Engineering College in New Delhi.
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