Babu...

Cleaning the study is a mammoth task in my house and a day to be noted because this the day when this item jumps out of S's looong to-do list and sees the light of the day! (You see no one is allowed to touch the study except for him!) Last weekend I was also involved (read forced to get involved) in the task and I must thank him for this! Reason? You'll have to read the post a little further...(I can sense you thinking that she is purposely doing this!)

So there we were categorizing every note, letter, statement and mundane document into not-so important, important, and very important. (we are talking 1 engineer plus MBA and one MBA here, what do you expect!) Sifting through the documents, I got to the stack of thin brown envelopes of registered posts with stamps from Varanasi PO and that characteristic handwriting...letters to me from babu. There aren't many...some are one pagers (mostly from Ma), some one-liners and there are a handful that stretched to more than 3 pages. But reading through those letters brought back so many memories! There were letters that talked about his academic achievements, letters that talked about his numerous trips, letters in which he advised me to save money either by quoting someone or using his signature terse sentences, letters in English in which he wrote the meaning of the words (that he thought I wouldn't understand) in parenthesis and letters in Hindi with his typical words like "kehne ka matlab yeh", "aanand raha"...I like his letters in Hindi more than the English ones...may be because Hindi made them more personal!

There is a constant flow of these letters through out the 2 years when I was studying...through them I re-visited the times when a cousin's wedding was being fixed, when Ma was attending seminars and conferences, when he was "helping" people to write their thesis, when Didi had come home with the kids, when his stories were being published...I could imagine him sitting at his desk, his fountain pen in his hand, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other and writing away effortlessly in that unbreakable concentration! That was one remarkable thing about Babu...his concentration...You would always find him working on tedious subjects, referring to the fattest dictionaries and frailest old books and writing pages and pages of translations in that unbearable heat of Banaras! (Anyone who has been to that part of the world knows that power-cuts are a part of life.) Distractions for him were very limited!

For me there will always be two versions of him; V1 was angry, scarily quiet and unapproachable and V2 was a friendly, chilled-out, music-buff who could give you advice on many things (sometimes advice on things that you wouldn't want to discuss with your dad :-)) The versions depended on which part of the day it was....evenings were mostly V2 and that's when I think he wrote these letters :-)

While I was reading those letters I was a naive, young woman in a big city and Babu's bachauaa (that's what he used to call me) once again! I was not a mom or a wife...it was just him and me! Now I know why he always preferred writing letters and not calling...I hope to write letters to Anna too so that she can also understand the worth and beauty of written words.

He taught me so many things...singing the beats and rhythms in a song, cursing with full passion, writing...here is one more to the list....the art of letter-writing!! Cheers to you Babu...I know you are up there somewhere sipping ur favourite scotch and discussing Manto, Begum Akhtar, Dickens, Bhimsen Joshi...the list is endless!!