People are remembered in many ways. A human being has God-knows-how-many dimensions, but when people are asked how they remember him long after he has gone, the way they summarize him, offers a realistic glimpse into one of those dimensions, sometimes revealing rare aspects of his self.
When I try to remember my Grandfather, an image of a man of a medium stature, clad in a soft almond-yellow kurta and a white dhoti appears. He is carrying a stick in his right hand, and is wearing a vintage HMT watch in his left.
The stick is bent in a u-shape at its handle, and has a black spot in the middle of the handle, resembling a serpent.
Although there were an array of reasons why he left his job of a revenue collecting official (Patwari) halfway, the most prominent one was that the pay was too meagre to support his large family.
Immediately after resigning, he started his private practice of writing registries for people of nearby villages that his Tehsil covered, majority of whom, were rural farmers.
One evening he came home with a hedgehog (locally called jhaumusa). He had caught it using his soft-reddish gamchha.
He took me and my brother to the edge of our garden, and then released it. It came out, curled into a ball of spines, and before we could chase it, it immediately vanished into grass and shrubs, and ultimately into the rural hinterland.
~ Ashutosh
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