Heroes

In my whole life I have written only one single journal entry, that was when my maternal grandfather died. He was hunchbacked, blind in one eye, untreated cataract in another, senile and delusional. He is my first and greatest hero. If you ask me the reason why, I can not say exactly. Probably it was the bullet wound on his leg, with which he picked up a wounded fellow comrade in the days of colonial India, traveled three miles to reach his hideout. Maybe it was because the fellow comrade turned up decades later to urge him to take the freedom fighter's pension, which he could not care less about. It can possibly be because of the Amrita Bazar Patrika article (it's still there in the house that I grew up) which talked about him being apprehended carrying two revolvers. 

My cousin and I heard countless stories of his adventures from many people from both sides of the border. But if you press me hard I will not be able to say why it was his approval that mattered to me most. It still does. 

Unwittingly he decided my fate when during one night of blackout while looking at the constellations he asked me if I wanted to be a scientist. The pious Hindu brahmin taught me to an atheist through the stories that he told me in the darkness of our house barely lit by the kerosene. Looking back to those years, the only thing I want to remember about him is the dark room with a single window looking out to the moon whose light reflected back from his silvery hair. 

My second hero was my teacher of puzzles, by profession a cycle rickshaw puller. He had an unique style of paddling, actually all rickshaw pullers do; he would put all his weight on the pedal initially and then look back with a 'bidi' in his mouth and a twinkle in his eye to ask - given an 8 liter, 5 liter and a 3 liter drums how will you divide 8 liters of water in two equal halves. Unfortunately my master riddler could not solve the puzzle of life and died of a heart attack while pulling his rickshaw. 

If you ask most people of our generation, who grew up watching Doordarshan, we will tell you that our favorite character from Mahabharat is Karna. It is probably an east-west divide. But no western hero fails consistently. But Karna, the immeasurably talented, yet outcast fallen hero, doomed to failure due to providence, becomes our alter ego. In the mean time our heroes die in squalor.