A short meditation on writing, and its tools

I gaped, slack-jawed, at the fluid strokes that ‘Mama’s’ steady hand left, as it swept across the graph paper on which Babuji’s philatelic collection was being mounted. His calligraphy seemed an extension of his shoulder, his arm, the gentle firmness of his cupped hand, his carefully fingered penmanship. It was effortless, as though the dip pen he used was a finger trailing ink, a wand. The curlicues of his ‘H’ had me gasping for air. He rendered it with such a mellifluous movement that his years of practise to achieve that élan disappeared in what seemed, casually natural. From that moment I was determined to master at least that one letter of the alphabet.

So I practised. Over and over again; blackening paper of all kinds and shapes—brown paper bags, from the time when stuff was given away in them in shops; the backs of used envelopes, a particular favourite (I made pads of these, after slitting them lengthwise, arranging all the blank sides facing upwards, aligning at least one side, and stapling them); tooling it into the corners of newspapers’ banners; even finger painting the motions on greasy plates, between bites.

By the time I got it in a flourish, the magnet of inevitability pulled all the other letters out of the alphabet and lined them up on the page; I couldn’t resist mastering them in an italicised cursive hand.

In hindsight, now when I reconsider ‘Mama’s’ cursive on those graph-papered philatelic sheets, I can see his amateur’s lack of confidence. The samples of showcase calligraphy that flower the Internet are strokes ahead of his tentative, tremulous style. His hesitant hand may have been curtailed because he may not have been fluent in the English language, and so lacked confidence in using it. He was good at copying words placed before him. I recall now, that he made frequent mistakes, scraping off the truant letter with a few deft flicks of a safety razor. The roughened spot bore re-inking without visible blotting, which saved him the blushes. But Babuji tolerated his lapses, as he was himself in awe of that beautiful script.

Peers, and teachers at school admired a hand that delineated near perfect joint handwriting. It had to be neat and legible. Flourishes were treated with veiled derision, and I will never forget a put down in high school, when my studiously tooled penmanship was struck out with a red nib, and a gory bland letter burned beside the excised one, in all its simple wickedness.

One graduated from a simple, un-joined hand, to cursive, or joint handwriting as one grew, for that was the way to write faster. The pen did not lift off the page after each letter, wasting time. It simply glided from one word to another, magically.

One day Babuji saw my hand and was aghast, or perhaps even ashamed. Vere Foster’s writing manuals were too zealous and missionary for my Jiddu Krishnamurty-principled school, but not so in his books. They were indeed, de rigueur qualifications for a good education. I slogged through several of those slim volumes that must have trained the hand of generations of secretaries.

Soon however, there was a sea change in the entire art. Mechanical objects took over the role of speedwriting. Typewriters became the rage. Their USP’s were several: speed, clarity, uniformity of style, neater, multiple copies, and that feel-good bonus of having worked hard all day banging those typewriter keys. All those bells, and adjustments, and forceful returns of the carriage, the judiciously gathered sheaf of carbon-interleaved paper: a parchment original, followed by two white, or yellow onionskins for copies. Though typing had its own charming rituals, and ushered a revolution in the process of communication, it erased charming social innuendos from the era of longhand writing. It wiped clear the portrait of the person behind the hand. All typed upon envelopes became bland. The task of the postman became easier, but the recipient could no longer delight upon seeing a longed-for hand, nor cringe from one that bore portents. It distanced people from one another. And no one would rub a candle over a typewritten envelope to prevent ink from running in case the post got caught in a shower. The typewriter was a dispassionate medium.

A handwritten letter was often candid about the mental state of the writer: joy, sorrow, grief, urgency, fear, love, all had their own ways of inadvertent exposure, sparking an immediate, intense emotional connect that went far beyond that conveyed by mere words. The blot of a petulant stab of the nib, the faded ink from brushed away teardrops, the electric urgency of a hurried scribble, all disappeared. As did spontaneous art doodled into a letter’s margins, or words written around sketches, or even more involved artwork. And what about the giddiness of the spontaneous note, dashed off from any remote location, in any state of being, however uncomfortable, as compared to the mandatory angular furniture a typewriter required? No more ink-stained fingers identified a scribe. The typewriter was not for such people of letters. An entire facet of handwritten letters vanished with the mechanisation of the art.

But one had to keep up with the Jones’, and learning to type was a must. The efficiency of the apparatus captivated. We became adept at operating it; developed fascinations for its few idiosyncrasies: the aluminium-cased, portable, Baby Hermes with its large letters; the paper supports that swung upright; the two-toned cloth ribbon that came into play when we depressed a special key to raise the ribbon vibrator to align the red inked portion to the hammering type bar for red impressions; the concentration required for spooling in a new ribbon; the delicate jostling of limp onionskin sheets to align edges before inserting a sheaf into the platen; the industrial power of typing full tilt, fingertips kissing the keys, the clickety-clack of the type bars striking ribbon to paper, a mechanical music. Then came electric typewriters, with thermal transfer ribbons, and memory banks; then the metamorphosing digital revolution.

I like to believe that this overpowering dependence upon complicated machinery revived the romantic charm of putting pen to paper. It’s a simple, direct, tactile system of making thought visible, and communicable. Its execution is seamless. It’s results, immediate, tangible, pliable, and effective. One connects to it emotionally, for one has crafted it oneself: each up-stroke, each down-stroke, each curve, and flourish. It imparts the spiritual satisfaction of working with one’s hands, like kneeling in the soil, and planting a garden. The elemental connect between paper, pen, hand, eye, and mind draws out thought.

All those who write, and pride themselves for it (pride being essential here, for I hear that cursive is now considered expendable from curricula, allowing artificiality to usurp another wonderful natural human trait), have favourite tools to ply their trade, collectively called stationery.

In my younger days, writing instruments, pens, pencils, even ballpoint pens, were just that. They never assumed a life of their own. They were tools to accomplish a job. Any attachment between the writer and his or her writing tools was simply functional. The need for speed, however, transformed perceptions. Pens and their ilk, which had sustained the conversion of thoughts into visible words, were sacrificed at the altar of mechanical, and digital speed, and other attendant conveniences. I too was swept up in this wave of change, but not completely.

The metamorphic gene had a spanner in the works—the diary. I had begun writing mine in college, and have kept at it since then. Our relationship has blown hot and cold over the years, but has endured—saving not just shards of a life, but also that delightful made-for-each-other relationship of pen and paper; the intensely personal satisfaction of filling a blank page with cursive thoughts.

I use digital technology all the time to write: e-mail, word processors, and the social media platforms on a smartphone. But thoughts flow only when I stare at a blank page, with a pen in my hand. My first drafts are always physical acts fuelled by the visceral nature of writing in longhand. Once done, they are copied into a word processor. Further drafts, and copyediting may continue on the computer, but often I carry with me a printed version, and copyedit on the go, impulsively, which is only possible with the simple, classic combination of pen and paper. Physical copyediting is closer to playing god with a manuscript, than digital track changes can ever be. I run sentences through with my gore-tipped Pilot Tecpoint. I even walk away from the battlefield, abandoning a bloodied, massacred manuscript.

Initially my diary comprised any notebook with a semi-glossy paper of fine quality, so that it did not blot ink. After a couple of hardbound volumes, I discovered spiral bound notebooks; the convenience of flipping them 360 degrees to bring the recto closer to my body (I am a southpaw), was not only more convenient, but also facilitated working in restricted spaces. A case in point being those palm-sized pads I use in the field when birding. But two years ago the Moleskine seduced me. I couldn’t resist its charismatic antecedence—the object of choice of that intrepid globetrotter, Bruce Chatwin, and his illustrious, multi-talented predecessors, Vincent, Pablo, and Ernest. I’m partial to blank, un-ruled Moleskine notebooks.

For long-form writing I use plain, un-ruled yellow A4 sheets. A sheaf of three or four cushions the pressures of penmanship, and eradicates the inconvenient step, across which the palm’s outer edge perforce rests, if writing upon a gathering of more sheets. Initially I took a pencil to the paper: the traditional, hexagonal wooden one, my favourite being the black-and-yellow Staedtler 2B. I kept several sharpened when writing, working through the lot as they blunted one by one, not breaking the flow of thought to re-sharpen any. That way I also limited the length of my ramblings. I liked the firm resistance of the table, and the crayon-give of the softer lead.

For long I’ve used those fine writing instruments produced by the Japanese Pilot Corporation. I was initially a fan of their ‘HiTecpoint 0.5’, till I graduated to the ‘jV5 Hi-Tecpoint (0.5)’, now marketed by Luxor in India. They are convenient, trustworthy, and satisfying. I still use a red one for skirmishing during copyediting.

The ballpoint pen is a marvellous and ingenious invention, but pedestrian. It has not chutzpah. No presence. It is functional, and dependable even. But lacks the “ah!” moment that the unscrewing of a fountain pen’s cap excites, “I like that pen!”

Fountain pens resurfaced in my life when my brother presented me with a beastly Montblanc Meisterstrük. Life has changed forever since that watershed. I had bought myself a Sailor before the Swiss mountain came to me, but was left uncharmed by its small size, though it is efficient and smooth. It’s improved much with constant use, and my vigorous doodling to run-in the nib.

Sometimes nostalgia shades mundane objects with romanticism. One day I rummaged in a lower drawer, and retrieved some fountain pens from my student days. They stand on my desk now, lovingly rejuvenated and recharged, and fit into my cupped fist with a startling snugness. An astonishingly smooth Parker 51, and a green and chrome Sheaffer. They’ve both withstood the test of time and flaunt their pedigree. I rue that somewhere in the past I disposed a Parker 61 I’d used in school. It was turquoise, with a heritage silver and gold cap, and sucked ink via an unbelievably cool capillary action; one just had to stand it upside-down in an ink-bottle! It had perhaps jammed with disuse. I could have had it cleaned, but didn’t know better.

I like writing longhand. It forces me to slow down amidst the sapping frenetic pace that life is lived out around me. It allows me to savour skills I learnt as a child and have retained. It evokes thought and argument in the mind, it coaxes complete sentences before they are written down, resulting in a cleaner draft; unlike the think-while-you-type hurried writing on computers, where errors can be wiped clean by pushing a button, which is not the point. It connects me with corners and alcoves of my mind, and atrophying surfaces of my heart. It creates a circle that completes me.

When did you, dear reader, write with pen on paper last? 

S is for Shikra[1]

Siraj Ahmed Taher (1942–2010). 

President Emeritus, Birdwatchers' Society of Andhra Pradesh. 

Portrait courtesy the Taher family.

In 2010 I lost two people who were very dear to me. They had studied in the same school, lived out their lives in the same city, had many common friends, at least one common hobby, and both died, within two months of each other, in the same hospital. Both were paterfamilias of more than one ‘family’—philately, and ornithology. Both had a tremendous impact on my life. Their journey into the sun was uphill.

Siraj sahib was passionate about birds. That is how we met the first time, at a meeting of the fledgling Birdwatcher’s Club of Andhra Pradesh [BCAP]. The fact that he was a generation older than me was never discussed between us, while everything else was. The Hyderabad he grew up in, the social culture of tehzeeb that made him what he was, has now vanished. He came to birds in the best way possible: First, pursuing them for sport, once a gentlemanly pastime, played to exacting rules; then swerving towards conservation, like so many of his enlightened contemporaries. I pressed him once, to tell me why he gave up his gun. He’d shot a sambhar once, a poor shot, he confessed. The injured stag blundered off into the forest. Raised in a tradition that valued a pricked conscience, he decided to follow the stricken animal and put out its agony. But the sambhar fought the inevitable for several hours, staying either unsighted, or out of range from its pursuer. When finally he caught up with it, the profusely bleeding animal was finished. The sight of the dead animal, and the realization that here was a living being that need not have died, had indeed tried to escape death, moved him immensely. With the bursting of its heart, that sambhar converted its nemesis forever towards conservation.

After a couple of outings together as part of the BCAP, we began to hit it off. To this too, there was a quirky angle, which showed the apnapan of those days.

One evening he met an old school friend of his in Riyazath Husain’s iconic bookshop on Abid Road, A. A. Husain & Co. After the pleasantries and backslapping subsided, under the convivial eye of the senior Mr Husain, Siraj sahib asked him, “Arre, ek bachcha ata hai hamare chidiyon ke club mein. Tu jaanta kya?” In a city steeped in social niceties, the use of the “tu” was reserved for those that were dear to one; unlike the rough meaning it is ascribed today.

“Apna hi bachcha hai, Siraj,” chuckled my father. Again that tehzeeb—not the grasping “mera bachcha”, but the inclusive, “apna”.

In the next outing, he stumped me with a loud, “Arrey, tum bolaich nahin ki Murari ke bete hain”. Seeing me taken aback, he chortled the bookshop episode. After that, my birding outings had no querulous or disapproving looks at home. I was going out with shareef log. Thus began a life-long association with one of the finest people I’ve known. In some matters he took me under his wing, in some we did things together.

That shareef quality of the man, I think, was ultimately what drew so many people to the BCAP, which was rechristened the Birdwatchers’ Society of Andhra Pradesh [BSAP] upon its registration. The hierarchy of the organization was never apparent to any of the participants. Except for Mr Pushp Kumar, top gun in the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department, who was thus accorded a genteel deference by the elderly birders, the subtle unsavouriness of implied superiority, whether of rank, or knowledge, never left its residue on any of us youngsters. Everyone travelled together in the forest department’s jeeps, all walked to where the birds were, victuals were mutually partaken, and the day’s count discussed later in a much-anticipated circle of friendship. Topical and irreverent banter, and repartee, were the norm. This was an exceptional illustration of the altruistic spirit of those who planned, promoted, popularized, and participated in this pastime. And to my mind, the single factor that contributed to the organisation’s successful promotion of an undoubtedly new concept of outdoor activity for the citizenry of Hyderabad. Plus, who could deny that element of thrill, shrouded in the past of fondly recalled boyhood days, of a Boy Scout’s revving adrenalin, of a golden nostalgia that tugs adults to another shot at nirvana? The wilderness, and its wildlings, does such things to men.

Every specialized activity has its own terminology, and ornithology was replete with enough to confound a polyglot; its lexicon spanned classical European languages, English, Sanskrit, and the immense mythologies of the world’s cultures! This hurdle notwithstanding, our motley group soon cobbled together a bristling argot of nicknames, abbreviated codes, hand and eye signage, and often, a whistled mimicry of surprising drollness, pulsating with distinct onomatopoeic bemusement. Newcomers stood stupefied by this bunch of loonies telling time on a tree while trying to locate a bird! Siraj sahib was privy to this notorious gang, and thoroughly enjoyed the perplexity of the uninitiated. Being accepted into the group was considered a rite of passage.

His sense of fun was legendary. It often kept in good humour a tired, flagging group returning after a day of slim pickings. A master raconteur, he spiced tea breaks with stories from vintage days. In turns becoming moist-eyed-sentimental for the Days of the Beloved, or rasping street-slang Hyderabadi in his baritone.

The BSAP ‘pavilion’ at the first Pan-Asian Ornithological Conference in Coimbatore, 9–16 November 1996. L to R: Siraj Taher, M. S. Kulkarni, Noritaka Ichida (Vice-President of BirdLife International, and Chairman, BirdLife Asia Council), Tim Inskipp, and Maj. Ahmed Abdul Aziz. Photo: Aasheesh Pittie.

For Siraj sahib, every birder was special, and welcome to his home. I met many heavyweights of the birding world there, and cannot recall even one person who was not at as much ease, as he would be in his own drawing room. The city’s birding lads walked in and out as if they were visiting their own homes. To me it was always a special place. I went there for all the reasons that a deepening friendship draws two people to spend time together. Our discussions ranged from ornithology, to social behavior, politics, the philosophy of morality, and ethics; the nuances of Urdu shayari; the importance of art in comprehending the world; the unceasing turmoil that was the status of our environment; the way to take the Society forward—several ideas springing up spontaneously during conversation, which we worked on and made something of. But the deepest moments were the silences we lapsed into between words, ruminating, pondering, or simply savouring thoughts that rush in at the end of a satisfying flow of words. I always took away the comforting thought that here was someone who I could speak with about subjects that shone with clarity once the polishing strokes of give and take had burnished their cantankerous edges.

L to R: Siraj Taher, Richard Grimmett, and Aasheesh Pittie (1996). Photo: Aasheesh Pittie

The heady plan of collating our own checklist of the birds of Andhra Pradesh was cast during one such evening. Why could we not do it? It was the first step to more comprehensive ornithologies—but this was achievable by just the two of us. As often happens, the force with which an idea hits one, it also pushes out and lays bare methodologies for fructifying it in the same instant. I do not think it took us more than half an hour to decide our workflow and apportion our responsibilities. Subsequently, there must have been innumerable meetings to iron out creases, to enjoy quaint discoveries in published accounts from the past, to streamline every step so that both were on the same page with regard to content, presentation, citation, taxonomy, etc. But there was no major change; no rollback of methods; no U-turn on our road map.

Release of the Checklist in 1989, in the corridor of the A. P. Forest Dept., building. L to R: Maj. Ahmed Abdul Aziz, Pushp Kumar IFS, S. Ashok Kumar. I am talking about the work, a stack of which can be seen on the bottom left of the picture. Photo: Aasheesh Pittie.

Comparatively, the translation of the Birds of southern India, by Richard Grimmett and Tim Inskipp (2005), into Telugu, was a minefield. Collaborations were imperative because he only had a good working knowledge of the language, could be the ideal Telugu-speaking ornithologist, but was not proficient enough to take on the entire work himself. Translating the extensive lexicon of birding, into a language that seemed to have no specific, definitive words to suit scientific interpretations, had to be executed by a twin-nibbed pen: One, that wrote with bold hearty strokes, delineating the work; the other, with the fine point, working in all the telling details that illuminated the manuscript. I was the troubleshooter who tried to unclog detritus in the workflow, to ensure smooth progress. Not least of these was dealing with the names for the colours of plumage, “brownish-yellow,” “blue-green”, etc. Ultimately we did get our own Telugu colour palette! Siraj sahib worked hard and long at the manuscript, and may have taken it through at least six proofs, after, often nerve-wracking meetings with the translators. The fine pointed pens scratched away day and night, and I would notice fresh stacks of papers during our daily meetings. He had this thing for coloured inks and would mark up his sheets with differently coloured inks, each colour linking a unique chain of thought. He wrestled with extant Telugu bird names, which were invariably of a generic nature, and had the distinction of coining dozens of new ones. But it was mighty frustrating work, and often did I catch him in a reverie, absentmindedly sucking at the end of a pencil. The lack of a consensus, the engine that could have driven this naming work, rankled him. Invitees never bothered to respond, except a few, for which he was so grateful. Dialect, that verbal filigree of distinctiveness within a language, a culture, tortured him, till one day he realized the only way forward was to ignore it. One could not please everyone. When published (2007), it was a work that justified his sense of achievement, in that of his team, and in his pride that the Society was a co-author.

Siraj Taher speaking at the release function of the Telugu translation of Birds of southern India (2005) L to R: A. K. Malhotra IFS PCCF APFD, Asad R. Rahmani (Director, Bombay Natural History Society), and Shafaat Ulla. Photo: Aasheesh Pittie.

Siraj sahib, and indeed, Pushp Kumar, worked with an extraordinary zeal to promote an awareness of birds among Hyderabad’s citizenry, and as a consequence, highlighted the environment we collectively belong to. The media, both print, and radio, smelled the potential of an unique angle to pitch stories, and people began to discuss birds, the urban environment, and even the activities of the BSAP! Birds have always attracted mankind, and when brought out from the realms of literature, poetry, art, or even mythology, into the ambit of casual conversation, they ushered delight, rekindled memory, nudged people to look around and notice the natural world. The quiddity of our surroundings during our growing up years is deeply ingrained in our bones, recumbent though it may lie as we rush about our busy days. But comes a moment when memory stirs, awakened by a petrichor sprinkled upon our passivity by people like Siraj sahib, and a delightful facet of the natural world is miraculously visible to us. Birds can charm the most indifferent of people!

If passion fuels altruism, the result is joyous. Siraj sahib’s involvement with BSAP was such a phase of his life. Whether he was organizing a field outing; writing in long hand the next month’s programme on all the post cards that he would himself mail at the post office; correcting proofs of the Society’s publications; sitting with the patience of a Buddha for various permissions from a forest official; answering media persons, even when they came unprepared and posed prosaic queries; preparing environmental assessment reports of places he deeply cared about, like Kolleru Lake, and sending them to the concerned authorities on behalf of the Society; speaking to students; chairing symposia—it was all “for the birds”, as though he had an oath in heaven!

Siraj Taher being honoured as the first President Emeritus of the Birdwatchers’ Society of Andhra Pradesh (30 August 2009). Standing L to R: K. Nanda Kumar, Umesh Mani, Shanti Mani, Siraj Taher, K. Bhardwaj, and Shafaat Ulla. Seated L to R: Aasheesh Pittie, J. V. D. Moorty, Sushil Kapadia, and M. S. Kulkarni. Photo: Aasheesh Pittie.

And when his penchant for the living bird needed a rest, out would come his philatelic collection, with birds as its theme! He worked on it whenever he found time, and even displayed it successfully (winning competitions) in several philatelic exhibitions. The forest department regularly petitioned him to display it during their annual Wildlife Week celebrations, and he would willingly oblige. After all, it presented a fantastic opportunity to convert the visiting school kids to a lifetime love of birds, and philately!

He took great pleasure in the company of life-long friends, in the earthy delight of seasonal fruit, in the song of garden birds, in the pressure of his granddaughter’s tiny hand around his finger. In a sense, he did see that world in a grain of sand. And when the end came in the month of January of that fateful year, he had a befitting farewell. A gentle evening descended; the annual numaish that he enjoyed with his dear Ayesha flung high its illuminated, rotating, giant-wheel; Mukesh’s poignant, pathos-filled, “Jeena yahan, marna yahan”, wafted from that direction; and as clods of his hometown earth sprinkled the path of his onward journey, a pair of spotted owlets, his endearingly named Chakwa-Chakwi, exchanged yarns inside a dusty tamarind.

Two months later, that other person, his friend, my father, too passed away.

---

[1] The title is a reflection of Helen Macdonald’s visceral account of coming to terms with her father’s death, through the numbing ordeal of training a Goshawk. I’ve borrowed and changed her book’s title, here, for recalling my time with Siraj sahib has been no less wrenching. Too, he celebrated the shikra.

What Shri Zafar Futehally meant to me

When he moved on to happier hunting grounds last year, the world lost a great earth citizen; I wrote of my loss and what Zafar sahib meant to me, to Mrs Futehally.

D.I.Y. Dad

It's four years now, but not a day passes without remembrances of things past. Here are some I've managed to jot down.

Once I overheard Babuji telling mom that he liked hosing the driveway after a particularly stormy late-summer night, that had left a riffled carpet of glistening mud, decorated by wind-blown leaf motifs, in the uneven driveway, and collected a pool of fickle water in a shallow concavity, where the cement had settled into a subterranean gap created by the exploring roots of a mango tree.

Those were times of an abundant supply of water, and the aspect of wastage, in the process of washing clean a driveway, was unheard of. The collected muck, deposited from the detritus of an entire summer’s dust-accumulated rooftops, and washed down here through sucking, gurgling, flooded drainpipes, one even disgorging a thoroughly disoriented toad, was a couple of inches thick, and even the robust jet of water lacked sufficient force to wash it away. Ergo a maali swept the muddy gruel that Babuji hosed farther and farther away from the house.

Mom’s angst was, with so many helps idling around the property, why did he have to do these menial jobs? There was a simple, direct answer to that question. He enjoyed working with his hands, and a job was a job. He used them to get as close to a task as possible, the only way of extracting maximum satisfaction from a chore. He would have ensured, that the hose was fixed to the storm valve so no water dripped, and the jet he directed, projected at subtly varied pressures of his bent thumb expertly angled, swung around, worked the knotted mud loose just as the broom descended to it. He would have overseen the completion of the task, had the broom swished till no drops flew off its limp bristles, and then stood it in the sun so the remaining stubborn droplets acquiesced to gravity, and the hose eased off the valve, and looped towards its free end, lying exhausted in the driveway, oozing spurts of water as each successively rolled loop drained water through its flaccid length, till not a drop remained in the now flat, multi-looped hose, lest moss and scum form inside it. Both tools had to be returned to their proper places in the garden-cum-tool shed. Only then would he come to lunch, the happiest man on earth.

Dad belonged to the D.I.Y. generation. He relished handyman type odd jobs around the house, squeezing himself underneath washing basins; he didn’t have to try hard, as he was short-statured, but what’s interesting is he’d place himself quite naturally into the best possible position for the physical work involved. There had to be enough elbow room to exert pressure or rotate a monkey wrench, when loosening a sink’s drainpipe.

He also maintained a number of tools to aid him, always pulling out the right ones for a job. If he lacked the proper implement, he would not proceed till he’d procured one, or called in an expert. He had small tricks up his sleeve that worked in a cinch, like when a spanner being used was too big for the head of the nut. Babuji asked for a large screwdriver and wedged its flat head between the side of the hexagonal-headed nut and an arm of the open-ended ‘C’ spanner in a tight fit. When he torqued the wrench counter clockwise it caught, and loosened the nut.

Babuji just loved sending greeting cards and New Year calendars to his family, friends, and acquaintance’s. He supported UNICEF, and bought their greeting cards every Diwali, and his New Year calendars were always of Indian miniature paintings, printed by Chimanlals. The entire process, from choosing and buying cards, writing in and signing them, affixing postage stamps and mailing them, was a closely monitored operation, in which the only step he did not do himself was type addresses on the envelopes.

He maintained serially numbered handwritten mailing lists, with the help of which he set down his salutary greetings inside the card, signing in Hindi, all in red ink, which was a “happy” colour on his palette. Every completed card and envelope used to be numbered lightly in pencil, to match a number and name on his longhand list. This helped the typist retain order on the envelope. Babuji’s oeuvre was in dressing the envelope. The quintessential philatelist, he venerated the stamps he pasted on them. First he chose the most colourful and showy squares and rectangles, forever keen to showcase the best from India, to the world. Then he began pasting them. From a sheet, he folded an entire strip along the perforation, and tore the strip of stamps carefully. Not a corner could be damaged, as it would reduce the stamp’s value, plus reveal a careless philatelist to the world. Once, when I suggested he get the entire lot of envelopes franked at the post office, he looked at me as though he would disown me. No philatelist worth the glue on a stamp would substitute a mechanical device for the gentle little pleasures derived from the use of postal stamps.

Once a strip had been torn, it would be gently folded along the serrations into a gathering of accordion pleats. The first in that face-to-face bunch would be eased open and laid flat on a moistened sponge, held in its round plastic receptacle, so that the film of dry glue succumbed to the moisture; and while the stamp curled upon itself from the sudden moistening, it was instinctively aligned to the upper right hand corner of an envelope, and pressed flat with careful reverence, the pressure maintained till the glue caught. Only then was it separated from the rest of the strip, cast away, perforation by perforation, till it remained in solitary shining splendor, a corner on the envelope, forever Indian. He performed this ritual, without flagging in his zeal, on every envelope.

Then on the upper left-hand corner he would press a self-inking, dual coloured, rubber-stamp that left an impression of a blue aircraft and a red-lettered Par Avion. That envelope-decorating embellishment had to create a perfect right-angled triangle.

The last act was to impress his name and postal address, again with a self-inking rubber-stamp, in the lower left-hand corner of the envelope.

He did not have to do any of these things personally — he could have all of them done professionally at a printing press. The whole she-bang of it, like many of his friends and family did. Many were the greeting cards he received that were printed inside and out without, apparently, the sender’s otherwise busy digits, ever even touching them. Their only connection with that operation would be sanctioning a budget.

But for Babuji, this was an annual ritual through which he touched those that had been a part of his life, whether closely connected with him, or distantly, and he refused to make short shrift of those relationships, of that visible-invisible, blazing-glowing, radiant flame or ember that did after all fan the spirit of his circadian life.

When the bundles of greetings cards were ready to be mailed, guess what the dear man did? He took them to the post office himself, and ensured that the man who smacked cancellations willy-nilly on the tooth-edged paper square, besmirching, defacing it with all the pent up government clerk fury he could muster, desisted his hammering arm and instead, carefully inked the tiniest possible bit of stamp-corner, just sufficient to warrant it “used”, or de-minted, twice over [the first time being when the glossy gum arabica had been irrigated into a colourful limpet on the envelope. That was the quintessential philatelist’s parting watermark. I wonder how many recipients fathomed that shadowy dance of love?

When a spark burnt the lead fuse, he would bring his trusted brown leather toolbox to the electricity panel, unplug the porcelain kitkat fuse, and pry away the burnt remnant of fuse wire. Then he would unspool the requisite length from his fuse wire roll, and insert the new wire in its place, tighten one screw around upon one end of it, and wind the other end clockwise on the screw, so that the length tightened as he wound the screw leaving no slack. Then the lower parallel brass tines were inserted into place, followed by the carefully aligned snap of the upper tines. He beamed a QED when the power was restored.

His experiments with matters electrical frankly scared me. He had no theory to back his forays, except a keen eye that digested how electricians dealt with common electrical problems, and a probing mind that demanded simple and clear answers. I especially feared the clandestine looping of electrical phases, with a ‘C’ of thick wire, to divert part of the electricity coursing into one phase, to ignite the outward supply in a phase temporarily with supply from the APSEB.

But the DIY guy would take a powerful battery-operated torch and descend to the cobweb shrouded electric box. Invariably a help was asked to wave a broom to snare the strands of spidery silk, and then, creaking open the wooden shutters he would hand the torch to the man, directing him to hold it thus, so the beam lit the exact spot he wished. An electric current tester, which stood in the pen stand on his desk just for such emergencies, and which he had grabbed on the way, would then be inserted into an upper crevice of the kitkat to ascertain the ‘dead’ fuse. After unplugging that heavy duty kitkat, he plunged a section of the house into a numbing heavy darkness, stalling every activity momentarily, till he looped the mysterious electricity from one fuse to another, magically, illegally, creating light and dispelling darkness.

Yes, I know it was illegal, what he did, and unethical too, and I don’t have an answer why he did it, except to please his family. And, yes, he was a D.I.Y. dad. One more thing, he wouldn’t touch the electric fuse cabinet with a barge pole, were he, and his help not shod in flip-flops.

Babuji wrote down everything he thought important. He filled books with quotations of all sorts. I never heard him use any of them in his conversations, as he was a man of few words. But he had a firm, set hand, and he chuffed up to the time spent over his cursive exercise books. When my school report complained about my hand, it was a personal affront to him. From the next day I had to show him a page of my cursive detention diligently. I have no complaints. The practice, I think, bore fruit.

Babuji’s worldview was clear. Things were either black or white. It was a bright day when he perceived shades of grey. There was only one way of doing something—the right way.

A book could not be opened and laid flat on a table, as that would crack its spine. A page had to be turned away from clothing while the volume lay in one’s lap, for if its edge scraped cloth, it might tear. There was a way of turning the page too. No hurried and noisy sliding of fingers across page surfaces, no moistening digit tips to gecko pages over. The pointer had to be slid on the upper right hand edge of the page and with a delicate dexterity, and minimal pressure, it lifted enough to slide a few fingers under it, and thus supported, turned. And if, in the process, you got a paper-cut, well, that was the tree’s last act of revenge on being mistreated.