Father and sons

Father and sons—it has been a tantalizing equation. Father was a widely read man. He had a good knowledge of many domains varying across arts, science, philosophy, politics and sports. As we brothers were growing up, he put up his searching lens to spot any kind of budding talent in his pedigree. During my middle schooling, I copied a few sketches and filled them with cheap wax colors. Father knew about famous painters like Raphael. He got very amused at my works. He bought a nice compilation of classical paintings to boost and nurture the seed of a genius painter in me. I got nice sheets and lots of water colors. But I could never progress beyond putting a faint imitation of a picture put in front of me. I never had a flair for painting something original of my own. I sent my imitations for entries for kids competition appearing in Nandan and Champak magazines. Forget about winning a prize, I never ever came nearest to even being mentioned in the list of dozens of those whose works found appreciation at least. Father was wise enough to know that as a painter I had already hit my peak that wasn’t sufficient to get a name in the list of appreciated artists in children magazines. As a liberal man he didn’t force me to keep copying the easiest drawable lines. That saw my innings as a painter coming to an end.

I was a thin boy and like all skinny ones was quick and energetic. He must have seen me running around while playing. He was at least justified in assuming an athletic talent in me. Father himself was a grade one athlete during youth. He crossed twenty-two feet in long jump and ran impressive timings in many kinds of races. He filled up Mother’s iron trunk with brass trophies that he won at LIC national sports meets. It made him feel that his athletic genes might propel his son to at least a school-level glory. Our target was to hit gold at the school-level meet on children’s day. I prepared well. He would ask about my training after he arrived from office at night. Then the much anticipated day of the race arrived. That fateful race proved to be my first and last attempt at winning a gold in running competition. I was last by a big margin. In fact I was lucky enough to see all the competitors cheering for me to cross the line. ‘I drank water before the race, so got tummy ache,’ I lied. He knew the truth but allowed my lie to stay as the reason for not winning a gold.

Then in the high school I developed a pungent liking for cameras. As a well-read man Father knew about many talented photographers who had made a name for themselves. He got me a beautiful red camera. He then inspired and encouraged me to go clicking the best moments from the village life. Over the weekend, he scanned the pictures. The best was a village lampoon, who pleaded to be clicked, whom we made to wear his mother’s ghagra and stand grinning under a mulberry tree. The second best involved my brother on a eucalypts tree. But it needed special effort to spot the boy in the foliage. The reels were costly. Father thought it better to stop the supply. The camera stayed in the tin trunk for many years.

India won the world cup in cricket and the entire country turned eligible to dream of cricketing talent. We went crazy for the game. He was kind enough to buy us a few bats and dozens of balls. Cricket is a completely technical game but we would realize it during our middle age only. Our cricket was barely above the level of gulli-danda—a kind of hit and run madness on uneven grounds. We spent so many hours on this pleasant madness that even a snail would have rounded the earth in the meantime. Cricket was never going to gift us anything more than bumps and blues by the cheap, hard, heavy cork ball that we used instead of the costly standard leather one. Father realized it very soon and condemned it as the game of the idlest people on earth. He said it was nothing short of career slayer for millions of young people.

Then one fine day, I realized that real cricket was beyond our wildest imagination and self-belief. Moreover, it was a team sport where individual brilliance was always on the anvil of collective fate. Drawing on my sporting wisdom I chose an individual sport. Doordarshan had started to telecast Tennis Grand Slam matches. Steffi Graff, Gabriala Sabatini, Boris Becker, Goran Ivanosevich were its colorful brand ambassadors. I and my friend Pardeep stabbed deep into our little pocket money to pool resources to buy two rackets. Then we cleared a part of the fallow land outside the village to serve as a court. Three keekar sticks served as net poles and a jute rope as the net. Despite the best of our efforts it was a highly uneven open ground. Under a sweltering sun we would reach there with our gear including water bottles like typical tennis players. But our game never progressed beyond one correct serve in half dozen attempts and some lucky return that counted as the biggest rally. Most of our time and energy would be taken by collecting the runaway ball from the surrounding lands bearing scattered acacia and bunchgrass tufts. Tennis thus turned very tedious. After a few months of dehydrating effort we realized that any dream of playing the Grand Slam was equal to landing on the moon in a self-contrived village rocket. Those rackets are still placed in a dusty corner as souvenirs of those serve and volley days.

Badminton never progressed beyond breaking racket netting and shuttles with wild weird swings and strikes. Hockey was played with raw wood sticks cut from the trees. These were roughly shaped like standard hockey sticks with a curved lower end meant to strike and stop the ball. In the stampede after the ball cascading over irregular ground these sticks hit more feet, legs and shins than the ball itself. Football turned out to be lunatic running after the ball when someone would hit the hardest kick to send it to the clouds instead of the rival goalpost. So by the time I passed senior secondary school, all the sporting dreams had been summarily quashed. We had no talent for any of the sports or games.

Among all this passion for creating a niche in the sports I remember a school trip to Tara Devi near Shimla. After the eight class annuals, in March, we went on a trip to Tara Devi. It was a Red Cross sponsored camp. There were students from different districts in Haryana. Those fifteen days were so eventful that they need a little booklet to cover all the incidents.

One of the events was diary writing competition about our time at the secluded hill-top camp. I had filled up a notebook bearing a chronological account of our schedule and little innocent observations about nature around because I had seen the hills for the first time in my life. Ours was Hindi medium and our English teacher had to promote and vociferously recommend my Hindi scribbling to get me announced as a winner to salvage some honor for the district. That was the sole prize we won out of at least a dozen categories. So I returned with the diary writing title in my name. Father was ecstatic. To him it was almost like I had won the Booker prize. He saw writing talent in me and brought very attractive looking diaries to encourage me in the art of writing. The diaries remained unused and were later used as exercise books for algebra. So here was one more talent squashed to pulp.

Nobody cared to pick-up books in our class at the village school. Our family had, what can be called, a sort of elementary love for academics. Just because I cared to touch books made me the class topper by default. This made Father, and the entire village to go along, think that I was a very talented student. Our history teacher even thought that I had what it takes to be an IAS officer. So I was promoted as a talented academician. In the absence of any competition I had been the class topper throughout the tenure of high schooling. But I turned out to be an average science student in senior secondary schooling at the town. Father had cleared the written examination and the interview for the Officers Training Academy (OTA) but couldn’t join on medical grounds being under-weight by a good margin. He thought that maybe I had enough capability to reach at least his level in the selection process. So there I was appearing for the prestigious National Defense Academy (NDA). I passed the written examination but performed miserably in the grueling four-day interview. ‘Army needs average students, so maybe you are fit for civil services,’ Father reasoned. Many people agreed with him that I had the talent to be an IAS officer.

Till matriculation, I was decently comfortable with mathematics but after that the chambers of logic and straightforward reasoning seemed to have stopped in my brain. Quite mysteriously I suddenly lost footings in science subjects. It was a kind of emotional whirlwind where two plus two could be anything but not four. I took humanities for graduation and enrolled at the local college notorious for mischief amply carried by errant farmer boys. I rarely joined the classes. I graduated with a mediocre score in the vicinity of 58 percentage points. Then straightaway I started preparations for the civil service examination and scored 54.3 percent, a score deserving top merits. But in the most crucial personality test they gave me a measly 37 percent. Father was happy that I had reasonable talent to be an IAS officer. However some things are sometimes never destined to be. I was at last selected to the Haryana PCS. But then the politicians ensured that my selection doesn’t translate into appointment.

It was chronic boredom with life and I allowed myself to be pulled into export-import business when an opportunity presented. It was a venture with some friends. No wonder it was like a flute player going to the battlefield with his flute. It was a summary failure. I finally realized that it was time to grab any job that came my way. So I settled to be an editor with an academic publisher. Father was miserably unhappy to leave behind an editor son struggling among tomes of manuscripts in the editorial department of academic publishers.

Father worked at the LIC’s Delhi office situated at posh Connaught Palace. I had once gone with him. Walking through Sadar Bazar I got attracted to a little colorful dholak. We arrived at night with the dholak’s cord nicely slung around my neck. My younger brother took a fancy to the instrument. A dholak is nearest to the temperament of rough and rowdy farmers. The raginis, the local folk songs, are basically ear-piercing shouts and yells. Just because Amit would prefer to pound the little dholak with full force using his tiny fists, Father thought his younger son possessed talent for music. We would study at night and before going to sleep, Grandfather and Father would request him for a bedtime musical performance. Amit pounded the dholak quite well and shouted even better over the crude beats. These are primary requisites for Haryanvi raginis. I think Father was correct in spotting this talent in his younger son. In the village the people went to bed very early but Amit’s rehearsals at nine on cold winter nights shook many people out of sleep in their warm quilts.

We had annual function at our village school. Father thought it a suitable occasion to launch his son’s prodigious talent. Rehearsals were taking place for various events. Amit, dholak, Father and many of us reached the rehearsal venue and Father promised the teacher in-charge that he should be prepared for the performance of his life. It was early winter time and a soft sun beat on the grass of the lawn. Amit sat with his dholak in the middle and dozens of us formed a circle around him. The teachers were all attention with their arms crossed over chests. Amit took a long pause like a great artist. After all it was an all-important audition. But no beat would emerge. He got stage fright. Father nudged him many times but the little performer had surrendered. He won’t beat the drum and won’t shout. At least the teachers’ eardrums were spared of an assault. It was highly embarrassing for Father. He smiled apologetically. All of us walked very dejectedly to our house. Father continued with his lecture about talents and guts to show them. Amit felt very low for a day or two and kept a very low profile. He even abdicated the leadership position among the neighborhood urchins. Then Grandfather, much in good faith, requested him to sign off the day at night with a ragini. Amit seemed to pound his embarrassment upon the dholak. He shouted well and gave quite forceful strikes. The dholak burst. That was the end of musical talent in Father’s gang.  

In surprising disproportion to his medium height and slight built, Father possessed an amazing athletic talent during youth. When Amit grew to be a nicely built lanky lad by the time he finished his school, Father’s talent-seeking streak smelt an amazing athletic talent in his younger son. One fine day Father took him to the uneven ground outside the village and asked him to run at his full speed and then take a long jump in the sand pit. He appeared sure that his son will show enough athletic potential to at least cross the family mark in running and jumping. Amit looked a strong lad with long limbs, large feet, nicely jutting out knees—all the hallmarks of famed African distance runners. However, God has been very kind in gracing him with a restful demeanor. To be at peace is a precious gift. But in competitive sports you have to be a restless beast. So despite Father’s shrillest call to prompt his son for a lightening start like a deck-based fighter jet taking off from an aircraft carrier, Amit gently lumbered like an over-loaded cargo train. The historical jump broke the entire range of athletic dreams nurtured by Father. Father was considerably frail by this time—thanks to his philosophical resignation with life, the vacuum being filled with incessant smoking and serial slaying of teacups after teacups through the day. He looked sure that even he—at his physical worst—would have run faster and jumped better than his finely growing son. He was wise enough to accept the reality. That was the end of athletic strains still held up in his consciousness. He never ever asked any of us to run or jump again.

He was but bound by patriarchy and didn’t try enough to spot any talent in our sisters. Had he tried, at least our younger sister would have been a good weightlifter, boxer or wrestler, given her great strength and stamina. Sadly her potential remained untried and untested. All disappointed with life, and broken by the absence of any talent in his sons, Father would at least accept the latent (unharnessed) talent in our younger sister. ‘I would have died far happier if Binny was a boy and all you three just comely girls!’ he would say. That was his acceptance that he had failed to seek talent where it really existed among his children. By the time he realized it, it was too late. I also feel that maybe Father was bound by the thick chains of patriarchy in the rural farming society where seeking talent among girls was totally absent during those times. Thank God things have changed now and many girls from the villages are making a good name for their talent.