Editorial»
Kaka’s gift
DEC 29 - Recently my eldest sister, Babibhen, sent me an unexpected gift in the form of a letter from a third person.
The writing is bold and well-formed, the ink faded on the brittle, yellowed paper. The letter is 62 years old, and was written to my sister on the occasion of her formal engagement to a young man she had never seen or communicated with. The writer of the letter is her father — and mine — whom everyone called Kaka.
The letter was discovered recently by chance in an old box by Babibhen and she sent it to me. It was written six years before I was born; the man who authored it, and me, died when I was five years old. I have hardly any memories of him, and came to know him through the stories about him told by my mother, sisters and others.
In many ways Kaka was very much a man of his times; in many ways he was far in advance of them. A staunch traditionalist, he never once entertained the thought before fixing his daughter’s engagement with a boy she’d never met that she might have her own ideas on the subject. So pervasive was his conviction, that she didn’t harbour such thoughts either. Not a very politically correct position in the light of today’s feminism. But Kaka never had much time for political correctness. He was among the first Indians — or anyone else for that matter — publicly to endorse Marie Stopes controversial birth control programme by writing a letter to the editor of The Statesman underlining the urgent need for the country to control its population. That the published letter created an uproar in the conservative Kuchchi community in Calcutta fazed him not a whit. Nor was it incidental that the womenfolk in his life, my mother and three sisters, did not just love him; they adored him.
Not a large man physically, Kaka was big enough to accommodate his many contradictions. A nationalist who always wore a dhoti in preference to trousers, he also firmly believed that we had a lot to learn from the British. Notable among these were the English language and discipline. The two often seemed interchangeable in his mind as necessary requirements for both the individual and the country. No more than a matriculate, he had trained himself to speak English with an impeccable Oxbridge diction. Babibhen recounts how Kaka would give her reading lessons. Seated on the first floor of the three-storey family house in Calcutta’s noisy Barra Bazar, she would read out aloud to my father who was on the third floor doing his office accounts. He had to hear each word absolutely clearly. The lung power she developed as a result stood her in good stead in her career of over 40 years as a redoubtable schoolteacher. Teaching her students not English, but Hindi. Contradictory lot, Kaka’s family.
A businessman who hated business, having been forced to take up the family trade at his father’s behest, Kaka as a youth had wanted to be a barrister, or a member of the civil service. Ramrod discipline was the steel frame within which he organised his life and those of others around him. Discipline was the backbone which helped you follow the first, last and all the intervening eight commandments: Do your duty, and hang the odds.
And the odds ranged against him were often fearsome. Like the time at the family rice mill when he gave a workman hell for slacking on the job. The resentful labourer tipped over a heavy sack of paddy which would have seriously injured Kaka had it landed on him. Kaka jumped up on the wagon and gave the mutinous worker a sound thrashing. Then, with no residual rancour, Kaka walked off to get on with the job of running the mill. Minutes later, the terrified mill manager came running to him saying there was an angry mob of workers outside the gates demanding Kaka’s blood. Kaka went to the bolted gates, opened them and stepped out to face the mob. I beat this man because he was not doing the work he is paid to do; he was behaving like a namak haram, bringing dishonour to all of you, he said. I see he still hasn’t learnt his lesson, and needs another thrashing, said Kaka and gave the unfortunate fellow another drubbing in front of his co-workers. Then, whistling cheerfully, he led the way back into the mill. The chastened workers followed, some scratching their heads sheepishly and not a few grinning broadly in approval. Not a very enlightened concept of labour relations. But it seemed to work, for Kaka.
I wonder what Kaka would have made of his prodigal son, or of the history the son has helped to invent as reflected in the national community of which he is both product and propagator. There is no way of knowing. But I doubt that Kaka would be much impressed by either. Nonetheless, he sent me a posthumous and indirect gift in the form of the letter he wrote to his daughter. And I offer this as a token in return, realising only too well that I’ve got by far the better end of the bargain. But that’s never been an excuse for not doing what you see to be your duty, has it?Posted on: 2003-12-30 05:13
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