Thatha

Roll in a Retired Superintendent of Customs and Central Excise, a lover of all things mechanical, a technology freak, a hardware student, a card-player who played every Sunday evening, a WILLS patron (as long as it sponsored the Indian Team), a smoker who quit, a man with impeccable English, a person who thought all government jobs could be taken care by flawless correspondence, a stubborn man and a stick-to-basics-rest-will-be-fine personality together, and you may somehow be close to what my maternal grandfather was.

Given the brat that I was in school, and I was away from my parents, my grandfather was the person I was initially afraid of. There have been only two times in the eleven odd years I spent with him, that he admonished me. The first was when I bunked school with 10 other friends, and went to play cricket the whole day (like Swami and his friends in Malgudi Days). He had slapped me right in front of my teacher, and my glasses had gone for a toss. That night he had checked on my glasses when I was pretending to be asleep, and years later, he asked me forgiveness for it. He gave me a golden rule then : "Men forget all the yap you give them, but never an insult". He had made a point by insulting me there, in front of everyone, because I would remember the insult till the last day of my life, and with the insult, I would remember the lesson learnt.

It was fun with Thatha, during school days, he was the one who would sign my report cards, and there was one time, where to control my brat-ness, he had asked my class-teacher to mark "No complaints" and the date on a small notebook, which he would periodically review. This book was maintained for about 2 months, before everyone grew out of it. It was while cleaning my cycle, that Thatha and I would really get into the groove. He was the total D-I-Y guy, there was nothing in the house which could not be ripped apart using the tools in his bag. From snippers to soldering irons, he had them all. He taught me how to clean the cycle, repair its brakes, rechain the pedals to the wheel and fix a dynamo to the whole thing. He would even take a test ride and tell me whats wrong and where.

It was on his old scooter that I graduated to geared vehicles. The scooter would barely give 25 kmpl, but he would diligently write down the reading on the garage wall, and calculate the mileage everytime he filled in gas. He would open the scooter up every Sunday, much to the wrath of my grandmother, who had a hard time calling him in for breakfast and lunch. The best part was he would call for coffee and sit in the garage, while she would look all over the house for him. And when he finally got it, it was cold, and was sent for re-heating. My thatha would often send me on small trips to the local store to get him his quota of Wills cigarettes. There was a time when we were going on a trip, and he had got a 20's pack, because he was not sure whether he would get them on the roadside. He eventually quit smoking, but it was too late by then.

Every family occasion was a time for him to recount his old tale, of when he had a Morris, which was started by spinning a pedal wheel in front of the bonnet. He had gone to KRS along with the family, and while he was going uphill, all the petrol in the car tilted towards the bottom of the angled tank, causing no petrol to flow into the engine. And how they had to walk back and get more gas, till the time the car could start in its inclined position.

Much later we had a Padmini in our garage, which Thatha would polish every Sunday, with a generous amount of WAXPOL. He cleaned it religiously and would never let my uncle drive it, for the reason that it belonged to another uncle of mine, and my Thatha was not the one to be in a position to answer unwanted questions. My uncle had actually sulked for some time, because Thatha had not allowed him to drive on the way to Bangalore. By the time I was in a position to drive those machines, Thatha had become quite frail, though you could never go on his external appearance.

Continued here.