Lessons from my 100-yr-old father

For two people whose minds continuously churned with questions about everything, it was surprising how little we spoke. He just wasn’t a man of many words

My father was not destined to ever be 100. Two years back, when I turned 68, I felt a shiver realising that I was as old as he had been when he died. That was 1990. The Berlin Wall had just come down. George H. W. Bush was America's president. The Soviet Union was breaking up.

For two weeks, my father had been miraculously pain-free; his diabetic neuropathy had apparently receded. He was waking up cheerful and full of dad jokes. I remember him asking me my opinion of Gorbachev.

We didn't normally discuss politics. We didn't normally discuss anything. For two people whose minds continuously churned with questions about everything, it was surprising how little we spoke. He just wasn't a man of many words.

Instead, he did things. Jiddu Krishnamurthy's school at Rishi Valley had taught him to make every moment matter, and that's what he did. He was my first Renaissance man - engineer, cook, tailor, musician, teacher, dutiful son - and as poor as a church mouse all his life.

I'm only just beginning to understand how this saturnine human, so difficult to reach or fathom, somehow shaped so much of who I am. I believe he did it just by demonstrating what it means to be true to yourself. Here are five lessons from his life.

1.Never stop learning. He once took to spending hours outside a clothes shop, watching tailors in spectacles hunched over their work. After a few months, he brought home a Singer sewing machine. We never saw a tailor again. He stitched all our shirts, knickers, even our winter school uniforms.

Scientists now know that learning new skills and languages renews your brain cells and staves off diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. Knowledge brightens your eyes, and lights up your soul. That was him, all right.

I personally believe, though, that he overshot his mark when he tried dry cleaning. The house was a fire risk for a week and we lost many dear friends because we reeked of petrol.

2. Don't feast off your own generosity. We only found out after he died how many people he had helped back on their feet while he lived. The list included vendors whose carts had been impounded by cops they couldn't bribe, colleagues in distress where he worked, and others. He understood that charity can sometimes belittle the receiver, so his loans were always repayable, though at a time convenient to the beneficiary. Dignity mattered.

The one time he spoke about giving, a rare conversation that overshot two sentences, he said, "You're not great because you're generous. It was your karma to be generous to that person, and that person's karma to get it from you."

3. Music is life. As children we weren't allowed to listen to western pop music. So of course that was exactly what we did. My brother and I would take turns, ears glued to the old Murphy radio. It was a war between father and sons, Carnatic music pitted against western pop.

Victory was ours. One day, we heard the man humming in the shower in his distinct Chennai accent. The words were English. I wanna hold your hand, repeated over and over. Pretty soon he was humming Penny Lane and Hey Jude. Pretty soon he was sitting with us when we listened to A Date With You on the radio every Friday. The Beatles changed that old Brahmin soul forever.

My father taught us that music isn't a door, it's a window to let the universe in.

4. Take care of those you love. Obvious as it sounds, it's not what we see these days. When my mother was misdiagnosed with cancer (instead of TB) my father became everything to all of us. He'd cook lunch and dinner before leaving for work, hose down the house against the summer heat, come back to his tailoring and his music, and tend to his wife till she healed.

5. Disagree, but never close the door on a loved one. In 1969, my father stopped talking to me. I'd disappointed him deeply by not moving towards engineering or accountancy, choosing to be a journalist in Delhi rather than living with them in Bombay. He cut me off without a penny.

Undeterred, I began writing for a living at 18, earning enough to survive a whole year on my own dime. Then Christmas came; he visited Delhi on work. Of course, the angry father visited the unrepentant son, still undecided whether to forgive me or forget me.

I was in bed with a high fever in my wintery terrace room in Lodi Colony. He sat for hours by my bedside without saying a word. He just was never good at that.

Then he leaned down and hugged me. "You followed your nose," he whispered. "You were right. I was wrong. Your father is so proud of you."

The next day, he blew his Christmas bonus buying me utensils, household linen and blankets.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.