Uncle Satbir

 

As a boy uncle Satbir had lots of issues against going to school. So much so that Grandfather would hoist him up like a fodder bundle and dumped him in the class. In his childish keenness uncle Satbir would prefer to be out of the school. That was his first choice. Grandfather was once a teacher and his injunctions about life centered around school and mashakkat, hard practice, on mathematics primarily. So, despite uncle Satbir’s protestations, it was foreordained that he had to go to school and love mathematics.

Then some mysterious nerves tweaked in his brain and uncle Satbir grabbed the mathematical sinews in their entire minuteness. The teachers would be found to be inadequate to handle his mathematical wizardry and unrelenting queries. With a jingling enthusiasm uncle Satbir cracked the IIT entrance examination. It was a commendable feat for a village boy who loved wallowing in the pond holding the tails of buffalos. Uncle studied aeronautical engineering at IIT Kanpur. But the fleeting quotients of the mathematics of his life found it a perfidy to be stuck up in an institution. Despite doing really well in studies there, Uncle stood by his unadulterated scruples and ran away from the august institution. Grandfather got a letter from the premier engineering college that his ward had gone missing. With a sly lightness, Uncle simply vanished in thin air. Maybe he found institutions as a kind of ferocious and hideous iron collar around his neck and broke free.

After five years of absconding, my father tracked him in Yamuna Nagar. When Father reached the spot, Uncle was the undisputed king of accounting in the truck union office. Father saw him on a rickety desk, a panama hat on his head, a bottle of local liquor in front, an account book open and the mathematics wizard expertly settling the transporters’ sums. It was very difficult to extricate him from the brotherly grasp of burly Sikh drivers, who thought the truck union would fall to pieces without its young, three-quarter IITian.

Back home, despite the outrageousness of his deed, he was convinced to enroll in B.Sc. degree course at the local college in the town. Uncle resplendently declared that he would top the university. And he did. Meanwhile, he made life impossible for the professors, who would fold hands and ask him to enjoy life outside because he knew all that they had to teach. Uncle walked and talked mathematics. It made Grandfather pardon all his goof-ups and sins against education.

A friend of Uncle was struggling to clear his matriculation exams. There was a chance to join police but the matriculation certificate was the roadblock. Uncle loved the idea of appearing in matriculation exams as proxy for those who won’t pass even fifth class exams of their own. He got a few of them pass with first class degrees. Unfortunately, as he appeared for this friend he was caught. Uncle always thought that he did the job with an incorruptible conscience because he never took monetary remuneration for writing exams for poor students. Anyway, he was caught and a case lodged against him. He had his very own rallying points and said no to hire any lawyer to fight his case. He appeared before the judge and gave his declaration:

‘Your Honor, I know I have broken the law but I have done it for a good cause. This friend of mine is very poor. He has lost his mother also. A matriculation certificate would get him a policeman’s job but he cannot pass it himself. I did it for him. Had I taken money for it, I would have accepted my crime.’

Wonder of wonders, the judge let him go with a warning against repeating the same in future.

A marriage proposal came and Uncle just shook his head that meant neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’. In any case, they got him married without pondering over too much about the purported meaning of the shake of his head. After six months of conjugal experiment, Uncle again heard the lugubrious echo of freedom from all institutions. Amidst the engulfing tumult of protestations by his young wife, Uncle declared he cannot live with her. When Grandfather protested against this declaration, Uncle flatly countered, ‘She can stay in the house but I will leave!’ And he vanished like he had escaped from the clutch hold of the IIT college. He ran away. This time almost forever.

Even while on the move like a nomad, he would have many admirers involving both institutions and individuals. Mathematics wizard as he was. After a lot of escapades for freedom, he opened an IIT coaching institution at Dehradoon and raised a fantastic breed of IITians, many of whom settled abroad. He did all this with a limping leg and continuous, niggling pain. 

Destiny seemed to hunt him with a grievous and fatal precision. At the age of forty, he met an accident while riding a scooter. He was dragged by an unknown vehicle and the scooter’s handle tore through his stomach, exposing the whole mass of intestines. He held his organs tightly in his grasp till help came and only then fainted. At New Delhi AIIMS, critically short of staff under the onslaught of the entire country’s critical cases, he lay waiting for some doctor to be free as life slowly crept out of him. Death peeked over perilous precipices. But Uncle was braced against the final fall. He called a junior doctor and told him, ‘Roberts you have to do this operation. Don’t worry, I am not going to die. You will simply be an instrument of my survival.’ The surgery went for almost twelve hours. And as he had promised, Uncle survived.

He carried a huge line of stitch marks along his abdomen. From the same accident, he carried a leg injury that won’t heal. A kind of gangrene ulcer. It was almost raw flesh around the shin. Look at it and you would shudder with horror and pain. ‘The pain that would make you cry is normal for me now,’ he would say. It would need multiple dressings in a day. He got accidental hernia also along the stitching in his abdomen. It protruded with a big growth but he could not be operated because of the non-healing nature of his leg injury. So Uncle had to tie himself in a belt to hold his hernia growth.

He tried all forms of medications to cure his leg and finally became an expert homeopath in search for the ever-elusive cure for his injury. He muzzled up the classic Homeopathic treatises and in fact became more knowledgeable about Homoeopathy than the professional degree holders. He kept on searching for some miraculous concoction of herbal medicines that would cure him. He always had a firm belief in a solution because mathematically every problem has a solution. This was the toughest problem that kept him busy for the last twenty-two years of his life. And carrying all this burden of physical pain, he raised a very successful IIT coaching academy that produced hundreds of IITians.

But no institution was strong enough to hold his formidable and raw sense of freedom. He made the institution and after a decade broke it himself. One of the teachers was almost like an adopted son to him. He stayed with Uncle with his very courteous and diligent wife. It was a happy family in every sense of the term. They made a huge house in the luxurious foothills of the Doon valley. The academy was doing perfectly well. They had big cars. Then one fine day, Uncle again broke loose from the shackles of normalcy. Like a child suddenly scatters the sand castle it had so laboriously erected on the beach, Uncle suddenly swiped and closed the system. He parted from the son-like teacher. He divided the assets, gave them everything and kept just the residence with him. The academy was given to the teacher who had served him like a son for a decade. When they left the house, the teacher howled with pain and struck his head against the wall. It may seem an ominous fall, egged by the spasmodic blasts of destiny, but I know it was more of Uncle’s own choice well deliberated as a mathematician.

Uncle stayed all alone in his palatial house during the last four years of his life. A housemaid stayed with her family in the servants quarter. There was a pair of Labradors to fill up whatever was left of the home in the brick and cement structure. During these four years, Uncle would go to Mumbai for a week every month to give lectures at prestigious academies and would return with an attaché case full of money. He was after all much in demand. From Delhi airport he would hire a taxi to reach Dehradoon. And during one of such journeys, Uncle reached home finally, due to cardiac arrest, at the age of sixty two.