All of us, every family, every society, every country needs help from unsung heroes to rise above mediocrity. In a world which is full of uncertainty sometimes true heroes end up being the anonymous ones. We tend to look at a person's success, popularity, and even virtues, but how about someone who is just there for you. In life there is always that one moment when you need someone, you need that support which reinforces you & helps you achieve those goals. Most of the time this comes from people that truly go unnoticed. You don’t even realize their importance in your life till they are gone but when you do, it becomes incumbent to acknowledge it with honesty, talk to them, hear their thoughts and when they are no more in this world, to shed some tears for them.
One and half years ago, my youngest cousin, cried that he didn’t get into Harvard and had to choose between Yale and Brown for his undergraduate. On my maternal side, we are twenty of us including the spouses and in one generation from me, the first person to study and graduate from a US university to Anuj, eleven of us have had the privilege and opportunity to attend world’s best teaching institutes, the success is not only the colleges and universities we attended but, also the fact most of us were able to pursue a liberal education which has made us world travelling, free thinking, entrepreneurs & artists. Most of us are able to pursue our dreams rather than worry where our next meal will come from. That is a true measure of success, however, this success is built on one man’s sacrifice more than anyone else.
On my paternal side, we were borderline poor; a family, which had lost all its money hastily and had neither means nor any way to recover it back, apart from a slow gradual, fight back. On my maternal side, my granddad was a simple army man with eight children. As his children started growing up, the need to educate, feed, clothe and give them a decent life became difficult on his meager army salary. The choice was to cut down the quality of a few aspects of these necessities or seek help from outside. Hence, the decision that the elder children will live with their maternal uncle was taken. He not only took them in, but also, gave them opportunities to grow and excel.
It was the early part of the 20th century, he was born on the 9th July 1929 to a clerk in the Indian Army. He was the only brother to his 4 sisters. Parents adored him, but his sisters doted on him more than his parents. He was younger than 3 of them and until the very end, he remained their little brother. He was named ‘Ratan Narayan Shrivastava’, he was my mother’s maternal uncle. Let us call him RN.
The family atmosphere was predominantely religious and full of rituals. Mother was an overtly pious woman and she passed that to all her children. Though the father was a fairly educated person but was quite superstitious, this later came to haunt RN’s life.
As far as we know, his childhood was mostly happy, travelling from cantonments to cantonments across central India. He had anecdote and stories from all those places. Education was important and hence he was pushed to excel in school, however, he was academically average at best. Though later he showed a particular analytical brain, which always held him in good esteem.
He joined ‘Sagar University’ for his college and there he became an avid cricketer. Even at 5’4 was an amazing fast bowler; with a slinging action he was knocking off many a batting line-ups. One of my earliest memories is when me as a 5 or 6 years old & ‘Neta mama’ (my maternal uncle), had gone to see him play in an inter-office match, to our surprise by the time we reached there the match was almost over as RN had knocked the opposition out for 50 odd runs by taking 7 or 8 wickets. He even won the man of the match for his performance.
(Sidenote: For a long time, I had his MoM prize with me. It was a small little plastic tray. However, I lost it, it felt like I had lost a piece of my own history.)
It was not predetermined, but he chose numbers to be his profession, he joined the Accountants General MP office. His lack of ambition combined with resolute ethics were key hindrances in elevating him in the ranks. It was his analytical mindset and unhurried calm, which kept his work professional and ethical.
The unsuccessful personal life and not marrying must have had a big impact on him. Supposedly, he had decided to marry some girl, however, his father rejected that match as the ‘kundlis’ didn’t match. He just gave up on the marriage after that. His younger sister remained a spinster too. They both became each other’s pillars of strength. She encouraged & consoled him and he asked for her guidance and opinion on almost everything. His emotional stability with that single focus on the betterment of others must have come from a disappointment of not marrying. He always thought that he had the additional responsibility to take care of ‘Rajjan mausi’. I don’t think he was an asexual person or ever became one, I think it was just circumstances which kept him away from marriage. He and ‘Rajjan mausi’ became do-gooders and both were eager to help anyone & everyone, all the time. So for the rest of his life, doing good took precedence over just being good.
My dad and my mom's family were acquainted with each other much before they got married. Hence, my eldest metarnal uncle, 'Rai Mama' became friends with my dad in college. One day he decided to visit the room that my dad was renting while studying in Bhopal. Here he found out that it was a squalid one room with no proper ventillation and all his books had to be kept at a height because the rain water was seeping through the cracks and under the door. My dad didn't have a proper place to cook his food either. When he told this to RN; RN didn't hesitate to give this almost a stranger, a place in his home and two square meals so that he could study.
When I was born, my father was posted in Bhopal and my parent's were living with RN. I lived first 6 years of my life in a small rickety 3 room house on the first and the second floor in old Bhopal. Water was scarce and had to be brought up in buckets from the road. Two full flights of floors, twice a day, for a handful of people. It was a chore that the whole family was involved in. Old Bhopal was a charming place, I still remember the five o’clock ‘aazaan’ waking me up, it was a place where we were surrounded by old ‘havelies’ and flower shops (the ‘mohalla’ was called ‘Malipura’ because most of the flower sellers had their shops there). I can’t think of ever being unhappy there.
(Sidenote: Every time I watch Merchant-Ivory’s ‘In custody’, I feel like I am in Bhopal of my times, I remember most of those roads, I feel that I could have visited those courtyards or seen all those ‘havelies’.
One of my early memories, when I felt the feeling of embarrassment for the first time was when my dad took me to participate in a live Sunday morning radio show for kids on 'All India Radio'. There to a question, I told the RJ that I had eaten a white ‘gulab-jamun’, the hosts of the show tried to tell me that it is called a ‘rasagulla’, but I was adamant about my white ‘gulab-jamun’. When we came back home, RN and my mom, who were listening to me on the live radio laughed at me. Now it struck me that I had said something funny and I was red-faced.
Though he was a magnanimous person, he did have an autocratic streak in him. He disliked when anyone went to the cinema. My mom loves movies and she still enjoys them more than anyone I know. Every time my dad, mom or uncles would dress up for the movies he would throw tantrums and not let them go. I think it was more of a control issue than his dislike for movies. I remember going to some movie with my mom and dad and I was specifically told not to tell RN about it. His sisters, nephews, and nieces were kind of scared of him, they never confronted him and he remained like that for many more years to come.
RN was always a quirky fellow. One of his major quirkiness was to collect everything from magazines, empty matchboxes, to expired lottery tickets. Yes, you read it right, he had an obsession for buying lottery tickets and though most of us would throw away the old ones, he used to collect them. I still remember in an old cupboard where he had stacks of them along with all kinds of other stuff. His favorite magazine to buy used to be an Urdu film magazine, called ‘Shama’. By the looks of it, it was quite pedestrian, however, because it was in ‘Nastaliq’ no one else could read it. Much later he started to subscribe to Reader’s Digest and a random magazine, which was all about various kinds of puzzles and riddles and in-mail competitions. He was Dilip Kumar fan in a house full of Devanand fans and he did look like him in his younger days.
One morning RN took me along with papa and 'neta mama' to see the ‘Muharram’ procession, as a five-year-old it had left an undeniable impact. I still remember this one guy's face as he hit himself with barbed wire and blood was oozing out. Yet in the evening he had taken me to the ‘mela’, there for the first time, I had seen and eaten a ‘roomali roti’ at a kiosk. I don’t remember what had he bought me from there, but it was something that I cherished and was overjoyed to get it. Maybe it was just a balloon, but it really doesn’t matter when you are a kid.
As time went by, my dad got posted to Chhindwara and we moved out of his home. A year later I moved to MHOW to live with my grandparents. By now, I was in the 2nd grade and now Bhopal home just became a stopover during our travels. But my brother and I always looked forward to stopping there. We loved the double fried, ‘aaloo bada’, he used to get for us in the morning, or looking out towards old Bhopal from our terrace, and even walking along those narrow lanes which were bustling with activity. This made us happy. I am not sure why, but it felt more like a home than anywhere else. Every time he visited MHOW, he gave me more pocket money than anyone else, I was left a bit richer and that felt good.
Fortunately, for him that during the Union Carbide tragedy of 1984, he wasn’t in Bhopal. When the time to claim the compensation came, most of his friends took it. They insisted that he should also register. He flatly refused on the grounds that it would be unethical for someone who wasn’t affected to claim it.
My next real chance to live with him happened when he moved back to MHOW after his retirement. It was 1987 or 88. He still kept the Bhopal house, but he was living in MHOW with my grandparents. I will never forget when he got his retirement gratuity, he made me carry a huge amount of cash. Do not remember the exact amount, but, I had never seen such a large amount and walking with him to deposit it in a bank made me feel proud and responsible.
He was always known as a man with bulging briefcases. His stuff in MHOW had all kinds of things in it. If you ever went through his stuff you would find things which you never expected, old newspapers, in which you couldn’t find anything special. Random clothing items which were not his, magazines, books, lots of diaries written in Urdu and filled with numbers. One weird habit that he had was that he used to steal photographs from people’s albums. I could never psychoanalyze this behaviour. It could be some kind of voyeurism but I attribute this to his compulsive habit of keeping mementos and memories. It annoyed people when their best photographs went missing from albums and I confess that I was livid when that happened to me. He had come to stay with me in Gurgaon and when he left I found out that he had taken some of mine. They were of me and my 'then' girl friend’s photographs (out of which some were not so children friendly) for his collection. I lost my cool and one day when he wasn’t around, me and cousin went through his stuff in MHOW, lo and behold, there they were. All of them, more things that I had realised I was missing. I so wanted to confront him, but like always the elders in the family didn’t let me confront him.
Another extraordinary piece was his life was his interest in the stock market. His political views were mostly Leftist, he had an apprehension of Congress especially Indira Gandhi, he preferred to be in Jai Prakash Narayan’s camp. However, after the 1992 riots, he reserved his deep loathing for BJP. The 1992 riots had left him wondering where has his India gone. He had lived in Old Bhopal almost all his life in an area where at least 50% population was Muslim and he could never comprehend what would make people kill another human being in the name of religion. He disliked that religion had become something that people wore on heir sleeves, rather than something that was a part of your deep-rooted personal faith. Coming back to the stock market, I think again it was the attraction to numbers and his analytical mind which made him lean towards stock market because his political philosophy was the right opposite of the free market & profit-making enterprises. As early as 1964 he had started to invest in it. In our family, he was the most successful at it, he especially invested in the new IPOs. He even got my dad & others to invest in the stock market but with much lesser success.
He had a wicked sense of humour, he used to catch hold of all the children and loved to rub his stubble on their cheeks. When the kids tried to squirm and wanted to run away, he used to hold them tighter and laugh uncontrollably. He has done that to almost every kid in the family. Every summer there used to fights between him and all of us cousins. In the afternoon he wanted to see his TV shows and we wanted to watch movies on an old VCR. This was a big irritant for him and always led to the confrontation. It used to end when he used to walk out in frustration by saying, ‘zara se yeh nahin ki thoda sa woh ho’, we just laughed like crazy. None of us were ever able to decipher what that sentence meant, he never explained, we never asked, just laughed. We still use it to explain unexplainable situations. Another of his mysterious quotes was ‘badi waisi hain’, he used to use it for almost anything, ‘yahan ki sadak badi waise hain’ or ‘yahan ka khana bada waisa hai’, he never explained what does that ‘waisa’ meant, we didn’t even know if it represented good or bad, I guess it was a bit of both.
Around a decade ago, his lifelong support and confidant ‘Rajjan mausi’ passed away due to cancer. He truly never recovered from it. He became a bit of a recluse and bitter with a lot of our extended family. Sometimes it got to a point where he would say things to people which he shouldn’t have. I don’t think he ever meant to say those nasty things but old age was catching up with him.
In his old age, some of his eccentricities increased. He started going on fasting for a large number of days and on these days he needed a specific diet. No one else other than my mom could deliver that. Most people couldn’t take his constant demands and hence he didn't want to live with them. As he started to realize that more and more people didn’t conform to his logic, he became disappointed and a bit resentful. He had to throw tantrums at every wedding. Sometimes the reason could be, why wasn’t a particular guest invited or sometimes it could just be because he didn’t think that the day was auspicious. We all expected it and he never disappointed us by throwing his usual paroxysm. One thing which perplexed all of us was his refusal to wear all his clothes. He would roam around in a vest, underwear with a towel wrapped around. He would walk out on the balcony or get out of the house to talk to people with consummate ease. My mom used to get irritated by it. But it was banter, she never forced him and he never cared about her shouting.
What remained from his childhood was the plethora of religious rituals. He was a stickler for them. He needed to do his morning ‘puja’, evening lighting of those ‘agarbattis’ and walking up to the local temple. In the last few months, he started to make up stories about these visits to the temple. He told everyone that one day he had gotten lost and a random man helped him, he was convinced that man was ‘Hanuman’. I am not sure this was just to get some attention or he genuinely believed his own versions of the truth.
Disappointment, more than bitterness ruled last years of his life, he went into a shell and slept most of the time. All that he had stood for was crumbling all around him. The families were more and more nuclear, people sent emails which he wasn’t familiar with and he persistently cribbed about no one sending him letters anymore. His Urdu had died, but he did appreciate that I had still kept an interest in it. In these times he couldn’t live with anyone else but my mom. Though they had their arguments and my dad used to get annoyed with his idiosyncrasies. However, there was still an ability to accommodate each other, he had lost that with everyone else. Sonu, my brother, was probably the only one who had the patience to listen to him, talked to him and take him for his usual passbook updates which he was so keen on even in the times of internet banking. His constant worry was when was Sonu going to call, where was he going and when would he come back. My relationship with him had turned into a silent one, he never bothered me but was constantly concerned about me. Towards all other fellow humans, he went from benevolent to a bit intolerant, but yet he always remained a source of monetary support for everyone.
On 8th February, he had a massive coronary thrombosis and he left all of us.
His ideas and morality were rooted in a different time and space. He was born in the era of 'The Raj' and India's independence was still a couple of decades away. Peace & prosperity were not things that you could take for granted, prayer & religion for him was an expression of his personal faith. Where he came from communication was slow but writing letters (in his case they were always postcards, never envelops or inland letters) on every possible occasion and sometimes without occasion was a duty rather than obligation. I think he missed Urdu the most, he was the last of our family who knew Urdu better than Hindi, though he could read and write Devanagari for communication but he preferred to speak Urdu and of course write in Nastaliq. Sometimes we joked that he wrote it so no one could read his thoughts. He was a product of old decaying and yet seemingly romantic old values, the importance of family and trying to hold it together seemed important to him. He judged relationships as he saw them from his prism and never from other people’s point of view. This, of course, created disagreeable moments when for other people day-to-day pressures were stretching this rubber band of relations to a breaking point.
You could say he was embedded in his middle-class morality, though every time you argued with him it was difficult for him to justify it. He had an extraordinary sense of duty towards the family, I guess not having his children made him more passionate about it. He wanted to judge his life with how much he had helped someone.
What RN provided was hope, hope that there is a safety net for all of us, hope that in need there was at least one person that you could turn to and he would help us to the best of his ability. A few days ago that safety net was broken and we all have to learn to stand up on our own feet. More importantly, we need to remember from where we had started and where have we reached. We all wouldn't be what we have become without him, he was our 'A TRUE HERO'.
EPITAPH:
‘
Not only those,
Who hold clear echoes of the voice divine,
Are honourable, they are blest indeed,
Whate’er the world has held – but those who hear,
Some fair faint echoes, though the crowd be deaf,
And see the white god’s garments on the hills,
Which the crowd sees not, though they may not find,
Fit music of their visions, they are blest,
Not pitiable.
Now we flee from standing firm and we stream towards evil; let us standup for goodness.
It is the final hour, the most wicked of times - be watchful!
Now we flee from standing firm and we stream towards evil; let us standup for goodness.
It is the final hour, the most wicked of times - be watchful!
‘
(Side note: I have chosen Bernard of Cluny’s verse from De Contemptu Mundi because RN had almost had a monastic life, though he had lived amongst the society. Like the poem he had a major problem with the world around him. His complaints were usual, everything in the past was better, the world is facing a tough time, we are forgetting the importance of God, everyone now seems to be obsessed with money, power, and sex. Like the poem, he glorified heaven and God. For him, a certain sense of God was important and not a full devotion. However, I must point out, unlike the poem he had deep respect for women and treated them with deep care. The poem, on the other hand is probably an epitome of anti-feminism.)
