On Father’s Day in Princeton: Memorializing a father from Bangalore, India
[ This is a fuller version of the article that appeared in The Wire (category Society) on Sunday June 18, 2003 ]
Click here to see the article on The Wire.
The third Sunday of June, of each calendar year is marked as Father’s Day, here, in the USA. The day was first celebrated on June 19, 1910 but gained only a nationwide prominence in 1972.
If one’s father were alive, one
celebrated with him, and also wished other friends who were fathers in one’s
circle. Of course, those who had lost a father, would take to a commemorating
in their own way, with memories, with perhaps a familiar recall through an
album.
For me, personally, it has been the
43rd roll of the calendar, and a bottling of his memories, all this while. I
had rarely confided in anyone as to what he meant to me.
But, this year, something made me
break that cycle. I decided to share the beautiful life of a father I once had,
by seeking to go public.
It was in 1980, that I received my
first emotional and severe jolt to my adult life, when I received the news that
my father was no more. I was still in
studentship, then, in a university campus in New Jersey, struggling my way out
of difficult economic and personal circumstances, when any dream that I may
have had for my parents, came crashing down. In following my father, my mother
too, would pass away in the next short three years. Both of them had died young
at 60, and with my father having tasted just a couple of years into a retired
life back in his beloved hometown of Bengaluru.
My parent’s death bottled me up
for many years. Being that I was an only child, there was also no one around to
share it immediately with. Also, not having sufficient band-width to cope in
those early days, and in no position to go to India to attend to their funeral
rites, I had blocked all my thoughts on grieving for a father, or in comforting
a mother. With the dreams having crashed, I developed a fatalistic outlook, a
major mistake.
With life becoming more stable,
the grief that I had frozen for years, now started to thaw. A bond that I had
cultivated in a sacredness of observing him, during my own formative years, now
began to unfold frame by frame. I know that for every human being on earth,
barring some exceptions, one’s parents are always the most precious. But I knew
that there was a unique significance to my father’s nature, that I could never
wrap around sufficiently in my head, so I rarely expressed my sentiments about
him to others.
It was only, recently, that I
realized what it was that had made me revere him. It was on seeing a curio, a
common theme mime, on someone’s table top. It was an instructional set of three
figures advocating to humans not to hear any evil, speak any evil, nor see an
evil. While the curio represented a constructed attainment, it suddenly dawned
on me that my father had been a living and seamless embodiment of all that was
being advocated. Those three characters weren’t a construct in him; he had not “chosen”
to be those qualities; he had lived it organically.
No matter what his own problems
were he never complained, you never saw him in anger, perhaps just a quick
clouding in bewilderment or sadness, but always with a quick revert to a sincere,
gentle smile, towards anyone that he met.
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Growing up, ours was a colony
life. It was at the bend of India’s destiny, when the country had found itself
free from the British. Freedom was still afresh in the air, and there was great
anticipation of things to be achieved. Five year plans were to be devised,
steel plants to be built and rivers to be tamed. Things
were projected towards socialism, but how else was a giant country coming into
its own, for the first time, in thousands of years of history, supposed to bridge
a huge divide between the haves and the have-nots. Lest the country with its large
group of stragglers were bent on slacking, there was always Nehru, the Prime
Minister with a mercurial drive, always prodding you through the bull horn that
“aaram haraam hai” (complacency was forbidden). He had loved
Maithon Dam, where we were now living, and he had made it his personal showcase
to indicate India’s new willingness to forge ahead. As a boy, I had developed
very vivid memories of gawking at a whole lot of world leaders behind our very
home, coming into Maithon; Pamela and Lord Mountbatten, Bulganin and
Khrushchev, Gamal
Abdel Nasser and even China’s Zhou Enlai.
The
Boston Globe of December 10, 1957 in a feature “India Dreams of Own 'Ruhr
Area” sought to tell us, in an encapsulated form, what may have caused
someone like my Father, during those times, to leave Bangalore (then) and to seek
an employment up north. It writes
“In 1943 the Damodar River flooded. This was
not unusual for the 336 mile stream, which rises in 'western Bihar State and
flows into the Hooghly River 30 miles below Calcutta. But in this flood the
great port of Calcutta was cut off from the rest of India for three weeks. It
was a critical period in World War II when a Japanese invasion was executed.
U.S. experts were called in to study flood control possibilities. From their
blueprints the T.V.A. (Tennessee Valley Authority) of India was born. It is
known as the Damodar Valley Corp, (DVC). Today four dams at Tilaiya, Konar,
Maithon and Panchet Hill control the Damodar. The Valley is rich in resources. While
Indians like io call this area their TVA [a version of Tennessee Valley
Authority] they are looking ahead to a bigger dream of the Damodar Valley as
the Ruhr of India. The valley has rich deposits of coal, iron, manganese, and
mica."
The Komora Name and House still lives in the hearts of many Indians since 1959
[Photo: Abhishek Shukla Executive Engineer DVC ]
It was at this time, that my father’s life, too, came into a sharper
focus with me.
He was born to parents in
Srirampura (old Malleshwaram), had attended National College and had done his Civil
engineering from Bangalore University. The rest of his service life took place
in the Eastern part of India, mainly with the Damodar Valley Corporation in the
state of Bihar. He had been brought up in a highly conservative family in the
Vedic tradition in Bengaluru, and by a father with an extremely strict Vedic
priesthood with codified morals and scholarly leanings. But, strangely, a
casual look at my father would belies any such background. His dealings with
the world were in the most cordially balanced of ways, gentle, and completely
liberal in outlook. If there was any orthodoxy left in him, you would never
guess it. He never projected it, never imposed it nor talked about it to anyone
including me. But he did practice his faith within those traditions, each day,
without fail, and just in keeping it all to himself. Each morning he made sure
he rolled out only on the right side of a bed (in a duality of life the right
side being positive), face east towards a rising sun, look towards the palms in
an invocation to three goddesses and silently beg a benediction to his life.
This would be followed by a daily bath and prayer to the Gods, attired in his
traditional vestals, and in a cramped, make-shift quarter of our small home,
before he would put a morsel of food into his mouth. Somedays, on a side glance,
I would catch him ever so gently bathe each god, wipe them delicately before
restoring each figurine to a traditional order on the mantel piece, chanting
the prayers ever so quietly. This sight would bring about a quelling in my own
heart, towards any discordant note that I might have been nurturing. He would
also live his life in meagre attire, but ever neatly, making sure to wash his
own clothes, hang them neatly to dry, and maintain the creases in his own
proper ironing.
Between 1959 and 1966, my father may have experienced
some of his most drudge years. He was not making much headway in his career and
there were not many challenges coming to him officially. All our neighbors had
departed, some even enviably to the USA, from where they would occasionally send
a greeting card or a small paper cutting of a local interview on how they were
doing. The village wore a desolate look, with empty spaces, no form of
maintenance, scorching summers and nothing to excite a person by way of an
event or even a restaurant. To dream of an outing, we would have to make it to
the town of Asansol, sixteen miles away. My mother too, at this time, had
become his harshest critic. She felt that my father was not being considered by
anybody, for anything, because he was such a “goody two shoes”. Even the card
playing and tennis spirited few at our local make shift club had stopped
looking for him.
But, unknowing to anyone, he had
trudged on.
Somewhere, in his very innocent
mind, he had cultivated the old adage that rights imply duties. So, even during
those years when life stood still, he had made himself useful, because he felt
that he was drawing a salary. He had come around to ask of himself “Ok, a dam
gets built, and there is less flooding, better irrigation and more electricity.
But what happens to a dam by itself? How long does a good thing last?” And so,
he turned himself to becoming a student, again, on his own. He turned his
attention towards the dams of the world that were built. He stared in
admiration at the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover Dam in the
USA. He started to tap into libraries for author’s names, found out who were
the pioneers in the Bureau of Reclamation in Colorado and in his own innocent
way he started to pen letters of gratitude to officials, there, commending
their work, and seeking a question or two by a way of tapping into their
knowledge. Very soon, he was bringing home quite a load of work. His object of
study now was siltation, life of a dam, and how sedimentation eats into the
latter’s life.
The scenic world of Maithon Dam these days – a picnic
spot
[Photo: Shanti Nivas]
During those years in the early
60’s, I would be away from home in college, but each time I came home for the holidays,
I could feel the cheerlessness of the place. But sometime around 1966, I could sense
changes coming in the wind. My father had suddenly started to feel busy; there
was a different kind of smile to his face, an anticipation, a renewed energy;
we were suddenly playing host to guests coming from the government in Delhi;
there were mention of new American names like a Dr. Voorduin, a Whitney
Borland, a Dr. Pemberton, a Carl Brown and more frequent mentions of Indian
names as in a Dr. A.N. Khosla, a Dr, K.L. Rao and a host of others.
There was even the mention of a
boat and an import of something called an “echo sounding machine” and the exciting
sounds of some pioneering work going on. There was even the mention that my father
was preparing plans to head up a new division, and that he was starting to gain
a ground swell of support in Delhi. For me the biggest zing was to hear that we
would soon be owning a car, for ourselves. In a status conscious world, we felt
we had finally made out with some dignity to our lives. I felt a glowing attachment
to my parents, particularly a feel for my mother, who had come from a well-known
lineage in Mysore, but who had sacrificed any interests she might have had or
pursued in a place which just had nothing to offer. For me and my parents,
boot-strapping ourselves into making something out of nothing, had become the
mainstay to our lives.
In the heritage of a Vedic
tradition, we are told somewhere that “a human may propose, but that God
disposes,” and how he disposes is mentioned in terms of three categorical
forces. It could be in the unseen form of Adi-Daivika (the one associated with
lady luck, one’s fortune, or Karma), Adi-Bhautika (natural forces of a
lightening, earthquake, hurricane etc.) and Adhyatmika (the kind we inflict on
ourselves in a neglect of our health, in not being alert with our own
protections etc.). As I look back over those years, my father seemed always
assailable to one or the other, as the following example shows. Even on one of
the happiest days of his life, when he was granted a first trip to the USA, he
went to the US embassy in Delhi only to be told that he had contracted
diabetes, and that he had to postpone the trip, and which may not happen, until
he took the proper steps, towards medicine, and be cleared medically.
Finally, sometime in 1970, he did
prevail on his first trip outside India, to spend some of his happiest months
in the US, visit some of the old Americans who had earlier been in Maithon, and
for a long time spoke glowingly, to all of us, of the beautiful Christmas and
New Year celebrations in Denver Colorado. By the time of his return, my mother
had chosen to spend his absence, with family in Bengaluru, and I too happened
to be there on my first job after wrapping up college. On the day of his
return, I was assigned to greet him with others at the airport and give him a
rousing welcome. But I had my wires crossed that day in terms of the time
difference between the two countries, and missed receiving him. It was a
profound surprise for me to find him alighting from a cab all by himself, picking
up his luggage on his own and showing up at the doorstep where we lived. So
much for a hero’s welcome! The memory of it still haunts me, to this day.
My father being greeted by President, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan. Next to him is B. Parthasarathy, the Chief Engineer who succeeded A.M. Komora. (Mr. Parthasarathy's bungalow is still retained in his honor at Maithon)
But he always had this other
quality called a “Titiksha” in Sanskrit, a calm fortitude. He withstood
anything thrown at him with a smile, and he prevailed, never registering a
complaint on any matter. Lady Luck finally relented and smiled at him over the
next few years. His widely covering work in the field of Hydrology, in
Siltation, got published by the Government of India, he was promoted to a
Directorship, made a few more trips outside the country, and was further
honored by the Government of India with a silver medal. My most wistful
encounter with him, came in a phone call that I made to him in Paris in 1975,
as a student in Brooklyn, NYC. He was taken completely by surprise, as it
transformed itself into welt of tears. He sobbed in happiness. His own dam of
years of contained disappointment had finally burst into happiness on hearing
my voice. I had never heard him like that before.
My last and brief visit with him,
was in Maithon in 1977, during a short visit to India, before my permanent
return to the USA the same year.
His memory lingers for me, forever
as fresh as a daisy, along with that of my mother.
The true test of what he was,
came as a requiem for me, when I accidently came upon a paper published by the
Colorado State University in the USA called Hydrology Days 2004, in a eulogy of
Whitney M. Borland and the Bureau of Reclamation 1930 to 1972. It was written
by two former heads of that prestigious Bureau, Ernest Pemberton and Robert
Strands and records that
“one example of the
international significance of Whit Borland’s work is the Bureau’s referenced
material on reservoir sedimentation contained in the report, “Life of a
Reservoir” authored by B.N. Murthy. The Technical Report No.19 by Mr. Murthy
was first published in New Delhi, India in March 1977 and reprinted in
September 1980. The portion of the report on sediment distribution procedures
and methods for estimating the life of a reservoir are similar to the Borland
documents.”
His seminal study on India’s dams and the dams of the world
