Most Respectablest Grandfather

Today's the Father's Day of 2007. Its right in the middle of the day- the rather boring kind of day, when you have nothing better to do than to pretend to read a book. Now, there was this notoriously dense book, which my equally unintelligible Grandfather had decided to dump on me . In typically Brahminical fashion Grandfather treasured all that he didn't understand, and treasured even more all that ONLY he could understand. This tendency was much more pronounced in his selection of books. Of a particularly rare vintage was a book by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (personally signed no less), which by some rather wonderful logic traced the Aryan lineage to Antarctica. This was the book that I was sentenced to suffer for the afternoon by the imperial decree of Grandfather, who had caught me drooling over an entirely delicious selection of men parading themselves in the most titillating of circumstances.
"World is going to dogs, man has become a dog" he barked "you should know who you are," he growled as he thrust the venerable tome into my hands. He threw a disgusted look at my cousin, who's an year older to me, but infinitely wiser. He was long past the taunts and the looks and the wierdness and the whispers. "Normally", he would be fattening himself on the greasy food, they usually force down the gullets of young men who are looking to see if the girl in question fits the description of his lapsed lover/dream wife. He has steadfastly refused to be cowed down by Grandfather's angry fulminations and his mother's histrionics. It is one of his uncared-for visits "back home" - he usually haunts upmarket pubs by evening and dark public toilets by the night.


"I never should have allowed that filthy turkodu(telugu for muslim, derogatory) into my house" Grandfather had said once said in a more pensively loquacious mood. The filth he was referring to was a wonderful specimen of manhood that we called Raoof. He ferried the younger of our extended brood of cousins and siblings to school. We went from our rundown mohalla in the old city of Hyderabad to a school that agreed more with the anglophilia of my class of people. The older cousins could expect a ride to the college if Raoof decided it was sufficiently late for us to make it to our classes in time. Satish, an otherwise scrupulously punctual denizen of our small fiefdom of a joint family, slipped up far too often with his sense of time. And so it happened that Raoof had to drop us at the college-a bit too often. It was a sight to behold; a bunch of neatly washed and dried kids jostling for space in the back of the auto and two full grown boys clutching at straws to save their sorry rear-ends from landin up bang in the middle of road and a hirsute horse of a young man (I can attest by personal experience) putting F-1 racers to shame. Satish would be flush with the excitement of the ride, or so I assumed.
Grandfather had made grand plans for the wedding of our eldest "cousin-sister" who had befittingly finished her postgraduation to become a mechanical engineer and now had decided to put her skills to good use - oiling some stranger's alarmingly disappearing scalp and being called his wife. Raoof was summoned, presents were granted by a royally subtle gesture of Grandfather's bony, curved finger and the responsibilty of transporting "some minor essentials" for the wedding, delegated. Raoof had to contend with Satish during every trip made to the market for stocking up the disgustingly detailed groceries of a Brahmin wedding. One evening after a thunderous mid-summer downpour, Satish mysteriously disappeared for just long enough so people would notice. Then he came back with Raoof carrying a huge bag of rice.


Satish was summoned to the inner sanctum, given Swami Sukhabodhananda's "How to Manage Work: a Vedic Perspective", and sent away with enough counsel to last him through his next incarnation as a gutter worm (a species known only to The Brahmin of the south - Grandfather had made a prediction at a later time under different circumstances that Satish would be thus reborn). A few days later,at dinner, Grandfather contemptously looked at the artlessly simple laddus my soon to be married "cousin-sister" had made and told her even more contemptously that our grandmother could cook for a hundred people when she was her age. Arrived-lately-for-wedding-Grandaunt looked at the bride-to-be with the ever-so-exquisite disapproval that would have driven people from the outside world to suicide. But I know that we came from the family that had beheld the Original Revelation of Contempt and Prejudice, and so we did not care for her looks. Even as Grandfather returned to the bussiness of grumbling orders to his sons and daughters-in-law about the schedule for the next day, Satish again became conspicuous by his absence.
Grandfather had decided that he would take matters considerably more seriously this time. This meant he would park himself on the roof of his dilapidated ship like some modern day Nelson and wait for the enemy to arrive deep into his waters, at which time he would pounce on the hapless victim and devour him. He gesticulated with a flailing arm, which meant I had to follow him to the terrace carrying an ample and ancient armchair. It would have the honour of accomodating his bony rear end, which I suspected had a stick lodged somewhere deep in its not-so-spacious caverns. The staircase was steep and cluttered by years of minimal use. Every step we took was belaboured and heavy. The musty smell that this deep recess of the house held was never enjoyable. The lock on the door to the terrace was methodically matched with innumerable different keys by Grandfather. The darkness didn't hit us as we stepped out- it was disturbingly lit by the streetlights. What Grandfather saw I will never know, he hurriedly stepped back, face confused, sweat on the brow, panting heavily. What I saw Grandfather will never know- an exquisitely chiselled beefeater working his ride on Grandfather's not so worthy Grandson, a confused Old Man and Me staring at Satish hurriedly pushing Raoof sliding down the drainpipe