Grandpa's story

 It was a tough life for Grandfather. His father was bitten to death by bumble bees when he was only twelve. Grandfather had three siblings, all younger to him, two brothers and a sister. Those were the days of family feuds over land. The extended family had lots of domineering males and fearing for her life Grandfather’s widowed mother left the scene. At such a young age Grandfather became the family head. A mother abandoning her children left a deep scar on his heart for which he perhaps carried a heavy grudge against the entire women race. They were so young and had been left to fend for themselves, so maybe he was slightly justified in his discomfort about trusting women in general.

Well, they had to literally survive at the mercy of the clan members who tilled Grandfather’s land. The children toiled in the fields and got survival crumbs. Grandfather was very fond of studies but his life situation never allowed him to go beyond class eight.

When the boys came of age, taking possession of their land was a big milestone to be crossed. A kindly but burly farmer stood by them as they, armed with hayforks and sticks, tilled their first furrows as independent tillers of their share of land.

From the standards of the rustic society, Grandfather was almost a mathematics wizard. The village patwari had to depend on him to calculate and measure land. Grandfather loved playing with numbers. It seemed to be his Ikigai.

He once enrolled himself in the army. A very athletic and agile man he was making a good mark in running and kabbadi as a trainee recruit. His younger brother was also in the army and in the absence of senior menfolk the wives and children faced a lot of problems back home. Seeing their plight, one of his nephews, a zamadar in the British army, got his name struck off from the roll, on the plea that his uncle had run away from home, leaving behind his wife and children at the mercy of fate. In this way, Grandfather’s army career was nipped in the bud.

He was the only educated person in the surrounding area so he was then appointed as a primary school teacher. He held his tiny school in chaupals, where he taught all the primary students gathered in one group at a single place. These never exceeded a dozen or two constituting a single class for all the students at various rungs of academics from class one to five.

My granduncle was serving as a jailor of Multan prison and my father in fact did his schooling from the first to third standard from Multan. Later, Father would boast of his Multan schooling and fondly reminisced that the prisoners treated him like a prince.  

In 1947 the partition-time tragedy broke millions of dreams including Grandfather’s teaching career. There was an influx of refugees. Grandfather was relieved of his teaching duties and his position was given to some poor refugee trying to begin a new chapter here in India after the carnage.

A tragedy then struck the family. Granduncle died of tuberculosis followed by his wife shortly later. My own grandmother also died. So here was Grandfather all alone with his own son (my father) aged around ten and two little sons of the deceased granduncle, one aged five and the other just two. My second granduncle set up his separate family. So Grandfather had the task of rearing three sons singlehandedly. He stood up in his role as a crude version of father and mother both embaled in one unit. He didn’t remarry, fearing the stepmother would turn the life of the three boys very difficult. As I have said he had his own reasons to look at women with apprehension.

He then worked as a farmer and made several entrepreneurial attempts apart from his farming tasks. One of these was brick-making. Those were rudimentary brick-kilns where the bricks were baked in a heap under fuel wood, coal and dung cakes. Being a mathematician he was more into numbers and calculations, taking it as a big mathematical puzzle. His clever partners, who ran field operations, easily duped him while Grandfather was busy with his calculation books.

Grandfather appeared to be farsighted for those times. He found that Bengal had hardly any milk because their cattle were so small and famished. He mustered a band of like-minded farmers. They chose buxom-most buffaloes and these were boarded on a cargo train. The entourage chugged ahead on a long journey to Calcutta. Little did they realize that the Bengali babus hardly had a stomach for Punjabi lactose. They were, and still are, happy with their fish and scores of cuisines coming out of their cultural box. As can be expected the venture failed miserably.

Once, a farmer owed some money to Grandfather. The said farmer and his clan migrated to Pilibheet in Nepal terai and started farming there on leased lands. Grandfather knew how to keep his debtor still in sight. He followed them there with some calves. He thought that grazing on their land would fatten the calves and this would at least cover the interest on the money. The calves grew really well among the lush Himalayan foothill greenery. But there were leopards and tigers ready to pounce and take away their share from Grandfather’s debt recovery scheme. They smartly chucked away Grandfather’s interest earnings that manifested in the form of oodles of muscles on the growing cattle. Grandfather was left with one sturdy bull to show some proof of his venture to the villagers back home. He thought if he could transport that impressive bull to the village, it would help him save his name as an entrepreneur. The journey was stretched over many parts including walking and motor transport. During one leg of the journey the bull jumped from the wagon and broke its leg. Grandfather arrived at the village with a famished, limping bull.

Irrespective of all his setbacks he maintained his passion for mathematics. Its ripples would touch us till matriculation when he tried to solve algebra through his arithmetic techniques because algebra was outside his domain.