I had differences with my father but he remains my role model

By P. Ramesh Kumar

I was like a character in a play who was not given his lines. Can there be a rehearsal when the event in question is the death of a parent? It was out of the blue one day when I had just arrived at my workplace that I got a telephone call informing me of my father’s death in Delhi.

My first reaction was, ‘not again!’ I had just lost my mother two and a half years ago, 11 days before the tsunami hit South Asia. My heart felt like a temporary tsunami shelter that was hit by another tsunami.

My second reaction was ‘it can’t be true’, especially when I heard from my sister that a doctor’s confirmation was still needed that Appa, as we called him, was indeed dead. He had gone to Delhi from Chennai, where he was staying at my sister’s place ever since mummy died, for some pension-related work and to submit a translation of a Tamil novel into English to the Sahitya Akademi.

Death in the family is stressful and it makes communication so difficult when it is most needed. A lump creeps into the throat and makes silence the obvious choice. The mind goes into flashback mode when it ought to be very much in the present for the spot decisions to be made. Appa, who moved to Delhi first when he got a teaching job in Delhi University, would come for every vacation to Chennai to be with my mother, sister and me. He used to talk to me on everything under the sun. I used to pester him with my questions till he told me to shut up.

Laugh at yourself is what he would say

Those conversations and the ones I had with him throughout my life, I guess, laid the foundation for my intellectual orientation. “Laugh at yourself,” he would say when I was in my early teens. I didn’t have a clue to what that meant but it made sense when he said, “whatever field you specialise in you should contribute something to society”.

As a father he was remarkable because he gave a lot of freedom to me and my sister in spite of his having had strict parents.

He walked tall in any group because of his proactive nature and clarity of thought, speech and writing. Sometimes Appa wanted everyone to turn broad-minded like him. He wanted all universities to make a crash course in linguistics and anthropology compulsory for students of all disciplines.

His drive to do something constructive was laced with his fight for justice in any context regardless of what people thought of it. Sometimes, his colleagues in the Department of Modern Indian Languages, Delhi University, where he taught Tamil and comparative literature for 32 years, found fault with his perception of what comprised justice. It did not matter to him.

Public opinion did not bother him even during his youth. Instead of taking a bride within his (Andhra Reddy) community and averting a boycott by his widowed mother, he did what not many young men of his community in his time did. He married for love a dark-complexioned Christian girl who brought no dowry, placing principles before convenience.

When I had asked him as a child why he converted to Christianity at the time of his marriage, his reply stunned me: “Simple. From being a Hindu atheist, I became a Christian atheist”! Although I was not sure of the wisdom or propriety of saying that there is no God, his position as juxtaposed to my mother’s Christianity was responsible in keeping me liberal, receptive and broad-minded as far as religion and culture were concerned.

Also, what I got to see in him was a drive to be fair to people and to speak the truth (often when there was no need to) that was compatible with that of a genuinely God-fearing person. God alone knows what kept him an atheist in his self-description but an essentially good human being in his words and deeds.

Although I hadn’t known of his having had any political affiliation most of his life, in his student days he was active in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a political party that had just about come into being. He was a second-rung speaker in public meetings for DMK leaders at a very young age. Fortunately for him and his family, he stayed out of active politics on the advice of one of his college teachers, K. Anbazhagan (now General Secretary of DMK and former minister).

His date of death was special: 07-07-07

In keeping with his character, which always emphasised originality, his date of death was special: 07-07-07. The suddenness of his death was also a relatively rare phenomenon. I am not suggesting he must have timed it or planned it. Who can ever do that in the case of birth and death?

He certainly must have had a premonition. He was reported to have told the few people he met in Delhi before his death that it was his last trip to the capital. He had turned very lonely after my mother’s demise in December 2004. He was an attendant to her as she lay in bed with two of her toes amputated. That proximity made the separation worse when she passed away. My sister and I couldn’t really talk him out of his depression.

Appa was fair-complexioned but had a flat nose. Nevertheless, he used to look handsome and had a presence. Sometimes out of envy, brown-complexioned as I was, I used to think he might be a racist with a deep-rooted superiority complex and compare his nose with mine. He would brush it aside, saying the tongue (speech) was more important than the nose.

We were the best of enemies and worst of friends. I never made any bones about my dislike for his public activities. I believed they were at the cost of my mother and me. He often did not have enough time or money for us. Having said that, his public image of being a transparent man of action, who mostly fought for others, used to make me secretly admire my dearest enemy.

Fondly called ‘Pappa’ (short for Pamala Balasubramanian, with ‘pa’ and ‘ba’ being represented by the same letter in the Tamil alphabet), which also meant a little child, my papa remained exactly that all his life in more ways than one.

He lived his life largely on his terms without really hurting people much. I helped him in perishing from this world on his terms by keeping my word to him and having his remains cremated in the electric crematorium (now run on CNG in Delhi). His demise in Delhi enabled me to fulfil his wish. He would have had a Christian burial if my mother were alive or if he had breathed his last in Chennai.

If I even try to laugh at myself, be sympathetic to the underdog and take my existence seriously, I may effectively be corroborating what my late progenitor used to say philosophically, “I shall never die”.

Read: If there is an afterlife, I want to meet my mother