Remembering Bapu

Yesterday we said goodbye and celebrated the long and exceptionally full life of Shripad Keshav Vidwans, my grandfather who was affectionately known as Bapu. He passed away at age 98 last week.

In the summer he came to stay with us, a few years after his wife had passed away, he drove me crazy but in the best way. Always racing me to see who would finish their cereal first at the breakfast table, he would ask me to bring him orange juice mid-meal so he could get ahead. He made the daily routine far from ordinary. It was a memorable summer, with bike rides and road trips. Before he flew back to India, he recorded his voice on our new computer, reminding myself and my younger brother that he loved us and to keep writing to him always. We replayed it often after he left.

For most of my life, he was my pen pal, writing letters on blue aero-gram paper that would take 10–14 days to post from India to the United States and vice versa. I loved reading his handwriting, with its cursive and block lettering mixed with soft and sharp angles. He would tell me about life and ask me questions about mine. And usually there would be some profound and philosophical tidbit that felt so worldly and inspirational. It made us feel like friends sharing secrets about what we had learned about our different cross-generational lives. Eventually his hands were too shaky to write clearly with age and the lettering began to change. My uncle who lived with him, ultimately began writing to me on his behalf.

Bapu always reminded me that girls were special. He always felt excited to hear about my academics and activities and was eager to see what I would do next. He loved seeing his daughters and me, his only granddaughter, donning long hair, saris, and jewelry, always reminding me to never cut my hair. Given the generation he was a member of, he could have easily have been less progressive and liberal while having it be socially acceptable. But he was ahead of his time, even supporting his sister and her friend when they were widowed, encouraging them to become nurses and be independent so they could take care of their children.

His mental sharpness was one you could be envious of at any age. He always read the newspaper and watched the news, keeping up with both foreign and domestic affairs, he always knew what was going on with everything. When my brother and I visited him in 2012 at a time he was appearing to be in very poor health, he began rattling off laundry lists of things he knew he had in his head. One list was of American politicians and cultural icons: Bob Hope, Bill Clinton, Tom Brokaw, Monica Lewinsky. No matter how old he got, he never stopped keeping his mind sharp. I always wondered if he knowingly did these mental exercises to retain them, or if it was just his way of holding on to every memory he could out of fear of losing them. And of course, the jokes were always there. When he was 93 he told us, “I am 39, not 93!” and laughed. My brother who has been employed with a pharmaceutical firm for many years, eventually was nicknamed “Johnson & Johnson” for fun. And because a fictional dog in a set of children’s books his children read was called “Tommy” he dubbed all four legged friends to have the same name for the rest of time, again, for comedic effect. He was literally the grandfather of all “dad jokes.”

I’ll never forget my trip to India from 2005 when I was upset about something that had me in tears and I went to see him. He sat in his chair and said to me, “you have to keep the good, then, you take the bad and you throw it away, you throw it away!” He gestured with both hands to throw something aside, as if he had my pain in his hands and he was discarding it for me. When I heard of his passing last week, this line came to mind, replaying for me in his voice. Even in the face of adversity, something he faced several times over, decade after decade, he was a cheerful and stoic man, always trying to be strong for others.

I was in India almost five years ago before my wedding. The last day of our trip, I ran over to his flat to say goodbye and receive his blessings before we drove to the airport. I ran up the seven flights of stairs since the elevator was unreliable. When I got to his door I ran inside and said, “Bapu get up! I’m getting married!” I went to his cot and bent down to touch his feet, knowing this might be one of the last times I saw him, given his age. He had a soft giggle that I will never forget that he let out as he smiled and put his hands on my head. He looked so happy. I stood up and hugged him and kissed his hairless head and shook his wrinkled hands, glancing down at his tattoo on his forearm which was inked in dark green — a parrot and his name. I was always so fascinated by this marking and always asked him about it just to see his reaction, which was usually one of “eh, forget about this” that he expressed simply from giving his classic hand gesture where he shook his head and touched his forehead with his hand a few times. It was also the gesture he gave when he’d say, “Gandhi and Nehru, were useless fellows.” I ran out and waved to him as I was leaving and that was that. I did see him again after this trip a couple of years ago, when he met my son and my husband for the first and last time, but he wasn’t the same. So for me, this was the memory of my goodbye that I choose to put in my pocket.

Though we may have lived oceans apart, he found a way, even without the internet at his disposal, to make his American-born and only granddaughter feel special and loved. Certainly, I’ll never know him in the same way that perhaps other family members who lived locally to him did. But, each of us had our own unique experience with Bapu as our father and grandfather and each individual experience is special in its own way, they simply cannot be compared. I’m sure there are characteristics of his personality I will never know and like any long-distance relationship, I’m sure there are characteristics that I believed in regardless of whether or not they were true. He was in no way perfect, but he was a loving and supportive man who cared for his family and even as he got older he told quite a few of us to celebrate his life when his “number was called by a higher power” and insisted that we do not cry. It would be at that point in time, when we would shout to him, since he was hard of hearing (but often too vain to wear his hearing aid), that no one was interested “up there” in having this cranky old man join them in the heavens.

After his passing, my family and I performed a puja (prayer) at our local temple. That morning I found myself carrying a copper bowl to my backyard and gently cutting just the right mix of marigolds, lilac, and bright pink roses to take with us for the ceremony that was to bless his soul on his next journey. While doing so, I kept picturing a photo I took of Bapu when I was visiting India for a month after high school had ended. I was up on my aunt’s terrace watching him below on the street. He was picking flowers for morning puja, bright pink ones. Bapu loved gardening; he loved nature. I always thought it was endearing and a little funny to have such a tall, no-nonsense military man be so into flowers.

My grandfather was a great big man who lived through a kind of history we cannot even comprehend. He saw intense colonial times under British rule especially during his formative years including a lack of jobs and opportunities, he saw the War, he worked for the railways which contributed to teaching his children to love travel and seeing new places, he saw Indian independence, he saw post-Independence. He saw prosperity, he saw loss, he held guns, and he held an iPod. The range of experiences is one that made his life have a richness that I can’t imagine any generation will ever have again. Right before his wife passed away almost 30 years before his recent death, she asked him to live long enough to care for their son who was sick. He kept his promise to the love of his life (he died four years and four months to the day after his son passed away).

He will be most certainly be missed, but his memory and influence will continue to impact his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren for years to come. And that is something that makes me smile, especially when I look into my little boy’s extra-large eyes, which remind me of Bapu’s (and my mother’s and my own). Today, I live near a commuter rail station. Whenever I go running along the tracks and hear the train go by or even hear it faintly in the distance from my house, I picture this very tall, gray eyed, bushy eyebrowed, bald man with a hawk-like nose, donned with patches of soft white hair peeking out of his Gap brand white baseball cap, wearing a bright blue crisp polo tucked into his high-waisted belted pants with military precision, and white Dr. Scholls shoes with enormous Velcro straps. I picture him walking around with a twinkle in his eye and a big denture filled smile.

Bapu, I will forever be mindful to throw away the bad stuff and to try and avoid useless fellows. May you find peace before your next adventure begins.

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