grandparenting

Grandparenting

It’s a great feeling being a grandfather. Holding the new-born of your progeny in your hands opens the floodgates not only in your tear ducts, but also on the cache of long forgotten memories of the infancy of your own child which submerge you completely. You remember vividly how your own child looked at that age and how the grandchild looks exactly the same but still totally different. You also reminisce how your own child was an angel whereas the latest addition to the clan never seems to stop bawling. Soon enough, however, you realise that it may not really be so. Fact is, on one hand your tolerance for sleep deprivation has waned considerably, in inverse proportion to the spreading midriff and the receding hairline; on the other, your anxiety levels have risen steeply. So initially, every groan and every howl of the tyke may fill you with deep concern bordering on panic.  You, however, slowly adjust to the altered sleep patterns, frequents bouts of the child’s crying and inverted priorities. Going for the morning walk gives way to cuddling and humming to the little devil, who seems to come into her own only at 4 in the morning. The baby’s bath becomes the most important event of the day. Watching a one month old whooping in joy at the sight of the bathtub is the greatest joy in the life of four adults. If the child can go through the entire bathing ritual without crying, we keep talking about it ad nauseum till the child excels herself with a better performance.

You marvel at the steady progress made by the child every day.  Every shake of the clenched fist and every kick of the legs seem like an act of extraordinary intelligence, every look is full of prescience and the child is soon declared extremely precocious. And if she happens to respond to your silly cooing and clucking sounds on more than one out of 10 occasions, she is an absolute genius. Everyone in the family feels that the child smiles only for him/her and all the adults start behaving most childishly to attract the child’s attention.

            Some things have, however, changed beyond recognition. My daughter (the new mom) is always on the prowl with a bottle of hand sanitizer and douses your hands liberally with it before you can lay a finger on her daughter. Extra stretchable diapers, wipes and the baby’s party dress for the naming ceremony (with matching mitts, booties, bib and a rose bedecked head band) and many other interesting things are ordered on line by the mother while she is feeding the girl on a strap-on cushion. The new mom is also surfing the net often to decide on the right time to start her tummy crunches and cardio workouts. Grandma’s remedies and wisdom have been completed supplanted by the internet. So no gripe water for the baby’s colic pains, no mugli-ghutty, no talcum powder and no water for 6 months. I shudder to think what will happen when the child starts crawling about, putting things in her mouth and playing with her toys.

            Gotta go. As usual, the baby has done her thing at the least opportune time; when the grand mother is having her bath, the new mom is having her first meal of the day and this is that rare occasion when the baby is not girdled with a water absorbent nappy. The baby is howling in anger. The cradle is full of crap all over. I don’t see any sign of the ubiquitous baby wipes. I pick up the baby and carry her to the wash basin. Alas! Some things never change.

DADA

DADA

Dada, our father who passed away at the ripe old age of 90 recently, belonged to the old school when PDA was a strict no-no.  So I have to really rack my brains to reminisce about some tender moments spent with him in my childhood days.

I do remember those early winter mornings, when I used to climb into his quilt and listen to the story of “Androcles and the Lion”. While narrating it for the nth time (for some reason, I always found this story fascinating) he used to nuzzle me with his perennial stubble, which was not a very unpleasant sensation. I still remember the coarseness and the tingle on my cheeks which must have been tender those days.

He was a selfless RSS worker (it took me years of adult life to accept this resignedly), hence he was always saddled with the most thankless tasks by the pompous asses who ruled the roost. He used to bicycle to distant “Shakhas”   (branches of RSS which conducted the daily drill and games), trying valiantly to keep them alive. As a child of 5 or 6, I had no option but to accompany him on these expeditions. In cold winter evenings, I used to ride the danda (the top horizontal bar of the frame) of his old bicycle (among other things, one of its pedals used to be always broken), always sleepy on my return journeys and often shivering with cold. Sensing my discomfort, he used to stop midway, take off his pullover, (knitted from cheap wool by my mother during her free periods in the government school where she used to teach) and drape it around my frail shoulders. I can still feel the heat of his body (generated from vigorous cycling) conducted through the pullover, dispelling the chill from my bones like magic.

Even in those good old days, it was not safe to leave the bicycles outside overnight. The locks could be picked in no time. So dada had to carry the bicycle up the stairs every night to park it in the balcony of our first floor flat. I remember one little game we often played to my great delight. While sleepily riding the danda of his bicycle on my return rides, when we used to reach home, I used to pretend to be sleepier than I actually was and refused to get off the bicycle when he had to carry it upstairs. The strong man that he was, from years of “Surya Namaskaras” (a yoga exercise), he could easily carry the bicycle upstairs with yours truely precariously perched atop, to my great delight and excitement.

I remember with love, a word he never actually uttered with us, the tingle of his stubble on my cheeks, the warmth of his pullover around my shoulders and the wild excitement of getting carried atop his bicycle over the staircase. 

RITUALS

RITUALS

We continued our morning walks after moving to the central Mumbai suburb of Sion. But somehow it was not the same. Instead of the picturesque environs of “Sagar Upvan”, we had to do with the bye lanes of Sion East, which were full of second grade schools and colleges of various hues. The children were always milling around on the roads. One school had their students dressed in whites for the sports day and they were pretending to play various games ranging from cricket to football, on the narrow sidewalk, already crowded with morning walkers, maids, milkmen and the newspaper delivery boys. I thought it was pathetic. The girls studying in the junior college nearby were clad in the cheaper versions of the dresses worn by bollywood starlets in their latest movies. (The maids wore the cheaper replicas of the dresses made popular by the actresses on popular soaps). The boys were always rushing sleepily to their classes while chattering excitedly all along. The stray dogs always thought that they owned the place and fought and shat all over indiscriminately. All things considered, morning walk ceased to be the pleasure of yore and became more of a chore.

          Then somebody introduced me to the dilapidated apology of a garden on the Sion fort, not far away from our apartment complex. We had to climb 85 stairs to reach the garden. There were another 70 odd stairs if one wanted to reach the top of the keep. Otherwise, people walked on the walkway which went around the castle. It was far from clean and quite slushy in the rains. But slightly better than the roads and devoid of the obnoxious morning traffic dominated by empty cabs, speeding needlessly. The garden had a laughter club, a clapping club, a karate club and the ubiquitous gully cricketers. Some middle-aged women were busy doing grotesque contortions which they must be thinking as exercise. One dapper looking old man played ‘ring’, (a rubber tube in round form, an ancient version of the Frisbee without the excitement, played in the style of badminton), with two ladies. I wonder wherever they still find the ring.

          We soon got into the groove and sort of adjusted to the poor man’s jogger’s park. I soon became very good at breath control. Every corner, every secluded spot, which was not occupied by the ubiquitous lovers, reeked of urine. So you either had to hold your breath or exhale while passing these places.

          When I was diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and advised to get some sunshine whenever possible, I started climbing to the top of the castle and sat in the sun for a while doing my breathing exercises and believe me I was the most normal human being in that keep of broken walls. I found a good unbroken spot on the parapet wall where I could sit cross legged, do Pranayama and soak in the sun. But to my utter dismay, somebody had spilled some lentils (Daal) there. So it was totally uninhabitable. I had to settle for the second best spot where I had to sit with feet dangling over the parapet wall. Whenever the lentils started to dry, somebody would renew the deposit without fail. I had a good mind to tick off the guy who was doing this to me. Finally I did see him once. He caught my attention because he was being followed by a cackle of crows cawing excitedly. He opened the polythene bag he was carrying and deposited the remnants of his yesterday’s dinner on the same spot. The crows swooped in cawing hungrily. To my horror, the guy kept sitting cross legged among all the noisy crows, looking at them with glazed eyes. Then I knew that this was a hopeless case and if I so much as whimpered in protest against his rape of a perfectly sittable parapet wall, he would kill me.  Reason? His eyes were full of religious fervour and his look betrayed that he was making an offering to his ancestors via these crows (in Hindu religion, the offerings to the crows are expected to be directly transferred to the ancestors). 

          I felt he must have treated his progenitors real bad to be required to do this every day without fail. I remembered some of the prayers I had memorised in my childhood. One prayer ends like this:” If you recite this once, your greatest sins will be washed away; if you recite this twice, all the riches of the world will be yours and if you recite this thrice, your greatest enemy will be destroyed”. Another prayer ends thus: “If you recite this prayer in the morning, the sins of the previous evening will be washed away; if you recite it in the evening, the sins committed during the day will be washed away and if you recite it morning and evening, all your sins will be washed away”. These prayers definitely do not advocate that you commit sins so that you get the opportunity to say the prayer and absolve yourself from their after effects. But we tend to interpret these things to our own advantage. Religion does not teach us to sin but we find it convenient to assuage our conscience with prayers and rituals and use this as a licence to do anything during the day. Recite a powerful prayer in the evening and hey presto, you are as pure as morning dew again. The more you sin during the day, the more bizarre the rituals in the evening. I could go on and on, but this is the time when I feed grass to the white cow every evening, so ciao for now.

SNAILS

SNAILS

We stayed in the posh southernmost  locality of Mumbai called ‘Colaba’ for two years. The view of the sea from my 13^th floor flat was absolutely breathtaking. We took great pride in telling all visitors that we had Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani for neighbours. Although I never saw either of them, I did, however, sometimes get a glimpse of some of Ratan Tata’s 26 dogs when they were being taken by the staff for a drive; and occasionally saw from afar the parties hosted by Mukesh Ambani in his terrace garden.

            The best part of the stay was the morning walks we took in the BPT (Bombay Port Trust) garden behind our building. Named “Sagar Upvan”, it was a paradise for walkers/joggers on the seashore. Well maintained walkway, with lots of neatly tagged shady trees, with detours going up and down, it also had two grassy knolls in the middle for yoga enthusiasts. There were some covered areas with benches for taking shelter if it rained and some benches on the seafront where you could sit and enjoy the view if there was no low tide and there were no crappings/crappers nearby. The park was devoid of the ubiquitous obnoxious bunch of noisy urchins who are usually found at such places making a total nuisance of themselves.

            The walkers were a curious bunch. Most of them were nattily clad in the latest sports attire and expensive sneakers. One gentleman had a funny way of swinging his arms as if he was trying to elbow his way through a milling crowd at VT station. One chap greeted everybody coming from the other side with a loud Hari Om! And one lady scurried about like a frightened mouse. There was a group of three desperate housewives who insisted on walking together side by side on the narrow walkway and walked so furiously with elbows flying around and gossiped so loudly that everyone got out of their way when they approached. That was their “power walk”. I found it mildly irritating and soon learned the trick of getting the better of them by looking sideways at a distant object when they approached, which forced them to check the offending elbow from swinging out when I crossed them. Some workaholics kept vigorously yelling away in their hands free cell phone devices all along. There was an occasional young mother with baby and Ayah in tow. There also were the love birds without whom no Mumbai public space is complete. I used to marvel at their devotion. You have to be really in love to get up in the wee hours of the morning, put on your Sunday best, slap on some make up and head for the nearest park for a lover’s tryst. Not to forget the occasional Adonis with a perfectly toned body, armed with the latest ipod, clad in the trendiest running gear and trainers and loping effortlessly through the melee of the morning walkers with a bottle of energy drink in hand, smelling of sweat mixed with expensive perfume.

            In rainy season, many trees were in bloom, the grassy knolls became wet, and the sea became much more majestic. Some walkers gave up, other diehard ones persisted. With the help of an umbrella, one could negotiate the stray showers, till Mumbai settled into serious rain. We normally continued our walks, with some other faithfuls, till the walkways became too slippery/ water logged.

The snails and leeches came out in large numbers and were at times found crawling around on the walkway also. The most heart rending sound I ever heard was the loud crunching sound of a careless walker stepping on a snail. I always flinched on hearing it but the careless share broker/businessman went on babbling on his cell phone as if nothing happened. Whenever I saw a snail crawling across the path, I wanted to pick it up and keep it in a safer place, but was too busy/lazy to do it. Then, inevitably, would come the next crunching sound and I would feel terrible again.

One day I saw an old gentleman carefully picking up fallen leaves, fruits and flowers from the track. I could easily understand the feeling behind it. He was trying to avoid these beautiful specimens of nature getting crushed on the walkway (which would have made it all squishy and slippery). I felt like kissing this guy who was quietly practising what I was not even thinking. Then I realised, it is not enough to have good, pious and noble thoughts unless/until you decide to do something about it. Grieving for crushed snails does not absolve me from the guilt of tacit complicity in their demise

           

TOP

TOP

In my childhood, the rainy season brought many Hindu festivals esp. in the month of Saawan in the Hindu calendar.  I always enjoyed the outings with the family, many of them on the bicycles, to various places of worship, best of all to the river Narmada for a holy bath. Sometimes the ladies sat in a cycle rickshaw and I had the choice of riding the bicycle with my dad or sitting in the cycle rickshaw with mom and granny. Due to the Spartan seating arrangements on offer on the bike (with possibility of serious damage to one’s posterior), as compared to the soft lap of granny, I normally opted for the three wheeler ride. My dad’s vigorous peddling however posed a serious threat of facing the ignominy of being overtaken by him and my other equally enthusiastic uncles on their bikes. It was a tricky choice which one should not be required to make at such a tender age.

          Of course, apart from the swim in the river, I was more interested in the various goodies available at these festive gatherings. My favourite item was a pair of goggles made from coloured cellophane papers fitted into the rings of hard paper with a rubber band for tying it around the head. Obviously, due to the fragility of the material used and the rough treatment it got from me and my cousin Parag, the goggles never came back intact. Then there were cheap plastic mouth organs which were normally vetoed by the senior members of the family, due to the serious threat posed to the noise level of the universe.  

          During one of these outings, I was introduced to the magical world of the ‘top’, a simple wooden item, conical in shape, with an iron nail at the bottom and a rounded head. The colour of the top was a bright red or green which became indistinguishable after weathering some usage.  There were ribs on the slanting middle of the top where one had to wind a thread, first around the nail and then around the rest of the body. The whole routine was quite complicated.  Then the thread had to be pulled up with a jerk while flinging the top down, to give a spin to the top.

          The thread had to be of a special quality. It resembled the wick used in oil lamps, hence, was quite expensive. Dad gamely offered to make a homemade substitute which he expertly made by rolling old rags across his thigh. But somehow it was not the same. I had to challenge him to make the top spin with his homemade thread, to force him to buy me the real thing.

Initially, the entire rigmarole appeared too tough to master. I kept staring wistfully at the big boys who could not only spin the top effortlessly but also, make it do many tricks like picking it up while still spinning, on their palms, throwing it up and down etc. Sometimes, if they were in a good mood, they would put the spinning top on my tiny palm. The tickling sensation of a whirling top on the palm and the thrill of holding it made me ecstatic. Later, after hours and hours of frustrating attempts, the top suddenly started responding to my command and actually spun majestically before slowing down and eventually rolling away on its side. When spinning the top became easy, I moved towards more esoteric tricks and the culmination of the entire experience was throwing the top down and flicking the thread expertly before it lands on the ground and voila you have a spinning top on your palm.

          Boys played many games with the tops, but once the thrill of making it spin in various expert ways was over, I soon lost interest in it. Then on, it was a forgotten art practised only occasionally to train the younger boys or impress the girls who always swooned when I demonstrated my special tricks.

          Then I discovered marbles. But that is another story.   

Unkempt

UNKEMPT

Unkempt was the word to describe him. He was all of 5 feet tall, was built like a wrestler i. e. muscular, stocky and thick necked; wore dirty, smelly clothes and had a thick mop of unruly hair, resembling an inverted wicker basket matted with grime and dirt. He had a thick moustache which completely covered his upper lip and often carried a giveaway evidence of his last meal. He had a loud, booming voice which was put to good use in the late night shouting matches we occasionally had with the hall next door, Lala Lajpatrai hall (Lallu in IIT Kharagpur parlance, no disrespect to the great man). He could yell the choicest Punjabi curse words with great gusto. He walked with a peculiar shuffle dragging his feet on the ground.

          Folklore has it that he was a really wild kid in his childhood. After his day’s romp with the other brats in the village, he used to often return home with so much dust and dirt in his hair that finally his parents decided to chop off his locks and make him mona i.e. a sikh who has decided to sport a shorter hair style. He was named Amrik Singh, as his parents like many others in rural Punjab those days, wanted their son to grow up and go to Amreeka, the Promised Land.

          He was a man of few words but he could shout “Shanta!” at the top of his voice every time he saw the buxom lass, who was the secret fantasy of all male iitkgpians,  passing by. (The word stalking had not entered the social parlance in that era and it was considered perfectly all right for hot blooded jocks to shout their appreciation of a girl’s beauty and the girls took it in good spirit). He was, however, a staunch supporter of the hall and always cheered the hall team lustily in whichever activity we participated including chess and bridge tournaments. When I won the chess tournament, in spite of being a foot shorter and at least 10 kgs lighter, he easily lifted me up and shouted “Oye Pande! You did it.”

          His sense of hygiene was wackier than that of Lalit Bhanot (of CWG fame). His room was full of dust and you could clearly see the foot marks made in the dust where he found his way to the bed from the door. There was a permanent pile of dirty shirts lying in one corner. Whenever I went to his room calling him to come to the mess, he would pick up shirts from that pile one by one, sniff them and chose the one that smelled the least. He had put up a poster of Katy Mirza on the roof just above his bed so that he could look at her as soon as he woke up. Despite his outward appearance of being an uncouth yokel, he happened to top his class in aeronautical engineering. When and how he studied remained a mystery to all of us.

          I met him 15 years later in a venture capitalists’ conference at ISB Hyderabad. Had it not been for his trademark shuffle, I could have easily missed him. He had lost some weight and gained some sophistication. He wore a black Armani suit and his hair was short and well groomed. He had got rid of the bush over his upper lip. He reeked of expensive French perfume. He looked the quintessential investment banker. I tapped him on the back; he turned back, politely extended his hand and said Hi! I am Mikey from JJM Capital. I said, “Oye Amreek, don’t you recognise me? I am Pande, your hallmate from VS?”

          He picked me up easily, although I had become 10 kgs heavier since we met last, and said “Oye Pande, b*&%$#d! How are you?

Virtuous Cycle

VIRTUOUS CYCLE

We go through life with a complex relationship with our parents, which is always evolving and changing, comprising different shades varying from wide eyed adulation to resigned acceptance to embarrassed dismay.

When we enter the world, we are totally dependent on them for feeding us, changing our nappies, putting us to sleep and for making our existence as comfortable as it can be, while lying helplessly on our backs in control of neither ourselves nor our environment. Whenever we get hungry/wet/crappy we holler for help and keep howling till we get it. Most of us get over this simple symbiotic relationship as we grow older. But some of us get stuck in this habit of shouting mummy/daddy whenever in trouble, may it be career planning, relationship snarls, marital discord or parental responsibilities.

The next phase is “My daddy the strongest man / My mommy the most beautiful woman (the best cook) on the planet“. This phase lasts till the teen years (maybe only tween years now) when it becomes “My dad the most rigid and stuck up miser / My mom the stupidest dinosaur with no inkling of the current fashion trends“. They embarrass us. Again, some people go through their entire lives thinking their dad the smartest / mom the best cook syndrome whereas some others continue to think that their dad is too stuck up and mum is too uncouth. The vilest vituperation of the genx ‘uncool’ is permanently branded on their nonexistent facebook profiles.

When travails of parenthood assail us in the early middle age, we suddenly wake up with a jolt and it dawns on us that mom and dad couldn’t have been so bad after all if they successfully coped with our teething phase, dysentery, measles, several bouts of flu, numerous exams, tests, quizzes, interviews, school projects, stalkers and horror of horrors “pimples“. They also managed to play Frisbee/cricket with us occasionally, take us on picnics/camping, prepare us for the fancy dress parade/school play and ferry us to painting classes. And here I am stuck with this tyke who starts howling the moment I want to sleep and doesn’t shut up even when I am being so calm and reasonable.

This renewed respect and appreciation for the progenitors sometimes remains till they depart for their heavenly abode. But it can also evaporate quickly when as doting grandparents they start spoiling the children rotten. -“Dad! Put him down. Or he will expect to be picked up every time he cries.” “Ma! no chocolates, I told you.” “Mom! don’t interrupt when I am scolding her.”

Finally, when the parents grow real old and feeble; and become clumsy, sloppy, forgetful, garrulous and repetitive, we tend to get impatient and dismissive. -“Mom! You already told him that joke 17 times.” ‘Dad! don’t spill your soup again.”

To our utter and complete bewilderment, while our own parents are slipping into senility and being generally a pain in the neck, we are already graduating from “My daddy strongest” to the “My daddy dumbest” stage. “What me uncool??” “ Hello! You must be mad.” What does this chit of a girl think of herself? Doesn’t she know I was the princess of the year in Saint Joans Convent, Ludhiana? And the boys used to make a beeline at the gate to have a glimpse of me? Wake up princess. Smell the roses. This is life.

And the cycle goes on.