My Grandparents

For most part it was a one-sided affair. Contrary to the general rule which has governed my life, out here I was fortunate - supremely fortunate. When you are loved without preconditions, and only loved and hardly chided or disciplined and even saved from the occasional justified wrath of your mother, then you know that you are lucky.

Till about a very long time, I really did not think much about my grandparents. Except for the fact that Dadu would offer all kinds of incentive to have me at his place and Didimoni would mesmerize with her mind-blowing culinary skills. And I, oblivious of what I meant to them, in ignorant cruelty, did not have time. Too engrossed in my own life, too proud of my youth and energy.

They were a strange couple. My Dadu was a typical chauvinistic patriarch. Sensitive but dominating, sensible but conservative and one who abided in almost all cases strictly by the prism of duty, responsibility as laid out by traditions. Didimoni was love. There is no other way to describe her. A beauty in her younger days, she had a smile all through the back breaking work she did all day. Not a complain. Not an indication of irritation. Fully and utterly committed to the one person who was her world. Dadu.

Dadu died when I was in college. Didimoni died today. She was dead the day Dadu ceased to exist. The transition from a bubbly, jovial woman to one who was alive merely physically having lost the will to live was shocking. To me it was painful. Having never seen her, being at the mercy of another, having always seen her as upright and capable, it hurt.

It made me realize that the terms of love and respect might not always rest with equality, that being together in peace needed nothing except faith and unflinching support, that a successful life is not measured in any other terms except the smiles you bring about with whom you are.

In my adolescence, Dadu tried with all his persuasive powers to teach me the strength of poetry. To no avail. Today, if I were to single out one single impact of him in my life, it would have to be the ability or propensity to appreciate creation, to read, read more and learn and assimilate. Maybe he did not have the power to implement it in his own life, maybe he wanted me to be a better man to be able to do what he could not - I would never know.

But together, they both were there, with me, when I had those stupid frequent fever, when I was spiritedly broken by jaundice and when I did well in my tenth, I think I have never seen anyone so happy for me - not even my parents.Is it just coincidence that of all what I have done so far, that day would unarguably qualify as one of the happiest one in my life.

As Didimoni goes to the pyre today after years of struggling to die and be with Dadu yet stoically living, possibly to meet up with the woman I am going to marry or possibly just because she had to, I have lost something more than the only two persons in this world who called me 'Tipai'. The name is dead from today. And what remains is a man richer by all of those times and poorer to some degree by that elusive and precious thing called love.