Losing Baba

Baba died last Sunday quite unexpectedly. It was a routine pacemaker change and the doctor had said that there was no problem that he anticipated. But the hospital handled the whole treatment poorly and I strongly suspect that Dr Balbir Singh was negligent in his treatment. It was a huge shock that I'm still reeling from. My mother is heartbroken and we are all trying to cope with life after him. I really had expected to spend another 10 years at least with him. I had wanted to do so much more for him. 

Here is what I'm planning to say at his remembrance tomorrow. Don't know if it will come out like this, but this is what the intention is.

Not many know this, but my father was born in a small village in Bangladesh and grew up there before partition. He grew up without much. In fact he once told me that the family of four brothers and three sisters and their mother survived a famine because of a coconut tree that they had at home. But it was a time that he recollects with fondness. He’d tell us stories of how he and his brothers would play and catch huge prawns with their bare hands. At independence the family moved to Siliguri where many of his side of the family still reside. Education for him was everything. He trekked miles each day to school and was a topper right through school and college. Towards the end of his college, he worked as a headmaster of a school and worked his way into the IPS in 1961. His family then went to my mother’s family with a marriage proposal. My maternal grandfather wanted an IAS son-in-law. But my father had evidently set his heart on marrying my mother. The next year he qualified to join the IAS.  He went back to my mother’s family and well, the rest is history. From that small village, with practically no opportunities, he rose to retire in 1996 as a secretary to the Government of India. It is that grit and determination that is so remarkable. He set his goal and let nothing stop him. I’ve seen and learnt that he was honest, diligent at his job and was clear and frank with his views. He was someone that my sister and I are super proud of.

He wasn’t a complicated man. He was an intense, inquisitive  thinker who questioned everything till he found a scientific logic. He was very fond of history, politics, sports and was a quiz buff. He was a fan of great lives. His eyes lit up when he spoke of Napoleon or John F Kennedy. My sister believes that there was no question he could not answer. He loved to look after his garden patch to spend time at home with his family or to read a good book. He was a big storyteller. One of my fondest memories of him is his regular bedtime stories, mostly stories of Krishna or the Mahabharat.  We love Baba and will always hold our memories of him very close.