MY appa was not an intimidating father. In my memory, he is ever present, immersed in the affairs of the world or in his writing, yet constantly with me, a large, warm and comforting presence who could change my entire perspective on an issue with just one word or an observation. My earliest memories, from the days spent in Birmingham, are of creating from rearranged sofas and chairs covered by bedspreads, darkened ‘tents’ where he would crawl in with me in between his thesis writing lying in wait for the tiger. We would both be very quiet and he would ask me to lie very still and keep a watch for the prowling beast in the vicinity. The game would go on for a while and after a successful capture (or hunt, for I was fascinated by guns and cowboys at the time) he’d go back to his thesis writing.

On other days it would be memory games, where he would make me listen with attention to a sequence of words, phrases and as I got better at recalling, an entire short poem. He would tell others about how I managed to listen to things and recall the entire piece at one go. I can’t remember now if this feat was as remarkable as he made it out to be, but I enjoyed seeing him say this to others beaming with pride, and did not feel like spoiling this.

Still too young for kindergarten, I would devise rituals at home to try and prevent him from going to the university. One of the rituals was that he would have to say goodbye several times while I hid behind the furniture and finally, as I let him go reluctantly, he would have to turn back once near the gate and wave me a goodbye as I watched him from the window above. I could not understand what this ‘thesis writing’ was all about. From watching him typing away with one finger on a typewriter, or making note cards, amidst the din of the Indian home my mother had put together, I’d sometimes declare to Martin Green, the English writer and critic who used to visit often, that I was busy ‘writing my thesis’.

We lived in a ‘poorer England’ and appa had to support the family with a meagre scholarship. Our small flat was made a home with furniture that was rented, and a TV set that was recovered from an abandoned pile of things by the roadside. Appa, who had an acumen for radio and TV repair, had fixed the broken TV painstakingly figuring out the problem with the connections of the valve and tubes device. The spool tape recorder would spew out, with the tone getting warmer as the valves of the device heated up, old Hindi songs, and the Beatles, who had filled the airwaves by then. He loved the Beatles and in later years I remember him often talk about how they created both new sounds and a new consciousness in the West.

I was nearly four when we moved back to Mysore, with my sister Anu, an addition that happened in England, and spoke only ‘British English’. Very few in Mysore could understand me, but all my relatives, I remember, marvelled at the ‘young Englishman’. The only friends I seemed to be making was with the girls who spoke to me in English and who went to the ‘best school in Mysore’ which, as someone had advised appa, was a convent run school. He had returned determined to re-establish his connections with the Kannada cultural and literary world, and it dismayed him that Kannada was yet to become my mother tongue. It was then that I joined a school in Saraswathipuram, a middle class neighbourhood. Soon after joining school I began to ask appa the meaning of some of the choicest expletives in Kannada. This had probably reassured him as he had a big smile on his face. A few fisticuffs later, bruised and crying, I had picked up Kannada from the local boys in the neighbourhood school. We lived in a house that was part of a row of houses opposite a large empty field where big ponds formed each time it rained and filled the night with the sounds of croaking frogs and chirping crickets.

 

I remember that almost for a year, on at least two Sundays every month, Shivaram Karanth, the distinguished Kannada writer and activist, would show up early in the morning, his big white ambassador parked somewhere in the field opposite, his driver Anand patiently waiting with a smile as I ran out and jumped into his car to spend a long hour or two chatting with him. As I ran out, Karanth would surprise me, posing a funny question, or sometimes just ‘meow’ like a cat! Appa, a young lecturer then at the Regional College in Mysore, regularly had diverse visitors at home, ranging from his English department colleagues, who were quite bohemian in their ways in an otherwise conservative Mysore, to the doting young students mostly from Kerala and Karnataka, who needed advice on their love affairs or petty quarrels.

Then there were the Dalit activists and even the rationalists, who saw in the writer of Samskara a torchbearer in their fight against the evils of caste and associated superstitious practices. Devanuru Mahadeva, a young man just out of his teens, was a regular visitor. I remember appa talk to his writer friends about the genius of Odalala, Devanuru’s novella that had just come out. I was quickly losing whatever ‘English touch’ I had acquired, although with some regret for this quality had given me much mileage in Mysore. As for appa, I could notice a conscious and deliberate move towards a more desi Kannada culture, in the causes he espoused in support of Kannada, causing much discomfort in some of the more English-oriented department colleagues and other cosmopolitans of Mysore who otherwise admired him.

 

My school days were a heady mix of fantasies about the girls around in school and the neighbourhood and, at home, the animated conversations that I watched or listened to in between my cowboy or police-robber games that consisted mostly of running through the rooms of our little house in Saraswathipuram, with Prakash my best friend in the neighbourhood and his little sister and my own in tow. The conversationists, who visited and mostly sat in the grill windowed veranda, formed the backdrop. Their voices in the midst of a heated discussion rose and faded as we darted in and out of the veranda.

They were from diverse backgrounds – political activists that included both Lohiaites and communists, young Kannada writers and critics, budding theatre artists and, I remember as this had caused great excitement, a young and upcoming magician who had brought with him a entire box of sleight-of-hand tricks as a present for me. All of them came to share their experiences, often for advice about their work and sometimes because they continued to be mesmerized by a speech he might have given at a college, or bank employees association (I remember the magician was a bank employee about to quit his job to follow his true calling). Once, the ‘math wizard’, Shakuntala Devi, showed up at our doorstep, Samskara in hand, wanting him to autograph it while she narrated her life story!

 

It could have been that appa was somewhere fulfilling my appaiah’s (his father) desire to see him take up mathematics as a career choice, for he would readily offer to engage himself in our math homework. He had an uncanny ability for solving algebra problems, or proving geometry theorems. Anuradha didn’t seem to need much help at school, but I did, especially in math. We had a wonderful math teacher in school but he mostly spent the class hour talking about atheism and Russell. So, all the real problem solving was left to appa, who would first ask me for some basic information by way of brushing up and then sit down and neatly derive something or provide the proof of a difficult rider in geometry. Anu and I had a nickname for him when he professed his math or analytical abilities. We called him Bertek when he put on the hat of a mathematician or scientist. So we’d tease Bertek about his ‘scientific interests’ to pull him down, especially when he gloated about solving a difficult problem that had bothered us for long.

But growing up wasn’t all just to do with math and science. Appa had a passion for nonsense rhymes and poetry and encouraged us to make up long strings of interesting sounding words that made no sense. A photograph in an old magazine with two characters in a pool had caught my fancy making me christen them ‘fussy fuzzle fut and mooshi moot’. Appa and I delighted in looking at this photo from time to time, and each time these names would come into my head. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were our big time favourites and he used to read out different passages from these works to us. One way that appa and Anu would get back at me was by inventing new languages with some simple rules and conversing rapidly with each other. One such was sa-bhashe, where they’d prefix a sa to the normal Kannada sounds, reeling off sentences in this manner till I became really irritated at failing to decipher as quickly as they spoke by taking off the sa from the syllables.

 

The seventies saw appa arguing his way through Maoism and China with the leftist friends who came home. When I think back I can’t recall when these political ideas and discussion seeped into my head and got me interested in them, but I recall that I often talked to my classmates at school about some of the things I heard at home during appa’s conversations with these visitors. He educated both his brothers through their college and they stayed with us in turn. Anil, the younger one studying MBBS, had a large circle of Marxist friends who were regular visitors. One of Anil’s classmates, Lakshminarayan, kept us abreast with the latest events in China. The Cultural Revolution was a topic of much discussion. It all seemed quite exciting. What I picked up from the animated discussions, jokes and loud banter, was a liberal sprinkling of terms like ‘petite bourgeois’, ‘adventurist’, ‘lumpen proletariat’, ‘comprador capitalist’ and so on. Appa’s disillusionment with China’s experiments seemed evident from his later remarks about the irony behind Mao’s Long March that eventually led the Chinese to Coca Cola! This disillusionment was to slip further into a deep sense of anguish after the Tiananmen Square incident he happened to witness on a visit to China.

 

The mid-seventies had a very special effect on me and appa. I had found many new interests by then, many of them having their origin in a bag of musical goodies consisting of cassettes and vinyl records that appa’s hippie and campus radical friends had helped select for him during his first long stay abroad as a visiting writer and fellow at the well known Iowa Writers’ Programme in the US. These records and music, ranging from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the seventies bands such as The Band, Bob Dylan, and to classical music (Rachmaninoff, Dvorak), transformed into a continuous musical extravaganza in our little study. To this was added M.D. Ramanathan’s deep tonality of Carnatic renditions and a record of Kumar Gandharva gifted by A.K. Ramanujan on one of his annual visits from Chicago (his visits were received by the whole family with great rejoice). The Allahabad High Courts’ indictment of Indira Gandhi was out and her arrest seemed to appa as if they were ‘hanging her for a parking offence’, although her authoritarian politics had deeply disturbed him.

The news of the Emergency came amidst his activity with other socialists and student political leaders in the university. Although it was believed that Karnataka’s chief minister at the time, Devaraj Urs, was being somewhat kinder to the opposition, many politicians in Karnataka, as elsewhere, went behind bars under the infamous MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act). Many of them were appa’s friends. He threw himself into many underground type of activities. Much of the discussion with sometimes mysterious looking visitors to the house, amidst amma’s worry that appa was entangling himself in ‘quite unnecessary things’, would be in hushed tones, while the music continuously played in the background in our little study. As a thirteen year old, my own interest in politics and the events in Karnataka were kindled by these goings on.

An invitation to appa around that time from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla was an opportunity to take the entire family on our first big tour to the North. In Delhi, we stayed – both en route to Shimla and on the way back – with appa’s close friend, the Hindi poet Kamlesh. I remember the days spent in his house vividly. Kamlesh appeared preoccupied with many other matters amidst the generous hospitality and late evening dinner parties he arranged in honour of his good friend. After all the guests had left he would talk to appa about someone’s visits or about some of the socialist friends who had been arrested. On some nights, on our way back from the local sight seeing tours, he could be seen near the house on the road waiting for ‘someone’.

 

One afternoon a visitor, who looked like a sadhu, arrived at Kamlesh’s house. He asked appa if he recognized him and upon drawing a blank remarked, ‘Good that you don’t recognize me’. I ran inside excitedly and told amma that I recognized George Fernandes even in disguise while appa had not! After he left, I realized that the Mark Twain book I was reading on that trip had vanished! George Fernandes had to spend many long days in rooms in churches or places where quiet supporters of his fight against the Emergency accommodated him, and appa tried to console me that my book was being put to some good reading. We didn’t realize till much later, when Kamlesh, along with C.G.K. Reddy, George Fernandes and others was charged with conspiring to disrupt the peace through violence (what became known as the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy), that all the gelatin sticks had been stocked in the house we had stayed in.

 

In Mysore, appa continued to be actively involved with a mix of people, all arraigned against the Emergency – leftists, Jana Sanghis and also RSS activists, then in hiding or with pseudonyms. The RSS network was responsible for passing on messages across the country and appa was genuinely impressed by the discipline and commitment they had shown in this enterprise.

We used to have a ‘Saliyan’, a dark complexioned person, visit our home at all odd hours. He was the only visitor who would also talk to me in between his conversations with appa. Soon after the Emergency was lifted and the RSS shakhas started to be held in the open, Saliyan gently suggested that I visit one of their shakhas. I went one day and stood on the side watching. I was quite drawn to the games they played and the exercise and drills. So I went and asked appa if I could join. He said he would have no problem but what about my friend Alamdaar who used to come home to play with me every evening? ‘Could he join as well?’ I asked Saliyan. He only said that Alamdaar may not join even if I asked him to come along. I never went to the shakha nor did Saliyan try persuading me again.

Appa was not an authoritarian at home. He never forced me or Anu to pursue any particular career. He lived a life steeped in a universe of ideas, ideas that often complemented each other, or came into conflict. Being a teacher was for him a way to pursue these ideas. We were brought up in a milieu wherein worldly pursuits were looked down upon and lucrative career choices regarded with disdain. One lived a worthwhile life only through living a life of the mind! So my decision to pursue science was welcomed, for appa saw the life of an academic and teacher as worthwhile. When Anu, who was studying medicine, moved away from her Carnatic music practice, he was saddened that she was giving up the pursuit of a great art form.

 

Appa continuously fought the Brahminism that he saw around him and opposed other kinds of casteism that he encountered in others. Although it was love that drew him to my mother when they married, the fact that she was Christian, I can’t help feeling, had a strong role to play in both his rejection of his own encumbrances attached to his upbringing as a Brahmin as well as his attraction later on to asserting his caste identity at a personal level through rituals that he started to observe. In the habits of our quotidian life, wherein mother did not practice her religion actively, nor went to church, nor tried to steer her children towards the Christian faith, but left out all religious ritual and served non-vegetarian food on the table, we found him, much more in his later years, asserting his vegetarian Brahmin identity by refusing to eat the non-vegetarian food served.

Mother’s family is Protestant Kannada Christian, and my grandparents from her side were devout church goers. My thaata (grandfather), a man of great self-contentment sat quietly, often deeply engrossed in painting and sketching wildlife. He would be found sometimes upon visits to our Mysore home, notebook and pen in hand, translating the Bible into Kannada. My grandparents’ view of their Brahmin son-in-law, initially with a little trepidation about the possible eroding of Christian values in our household, later transformed into adulation and pride as they watched his growing fame in the Kannada literary and political worlds. His long discourses about aspects of the Bible and gentle admonishments to other younger members of my mother’s family about not studying the Bible with enough care, helped matters further in earning him the favourite son-in-law spot.

 

My first big move away from the comfort zone of my home and the warmth and security of my Mysorean existence in moving to Kanpur was the point in time when I felt ‘grown up’. Appa continued to be a large presence in my life even then in advising me on all kinds of matters related to love – I had taken quite seriously a college love affair that then seemed to be the cause of my reluctance to study in a place other than Mysore – growing up away from home, and the pursuit of knowledge. Appa, upon seeing me in a state of agony about this affair, quietly went one day to talk to the girl’s parents and her brothers. He returned grim faced and looked rather upset at being lectured about life and decisions to be made by her still wet-behind-the-ears brothers. He gently revealed this to me, and I could see he didn’t think much of them or their advice! By his tone, I could make out that he was saying that he had tried, but that I was free to follow my heart. I did move out of Mysore and also away from the affairs of the heart. He continued being this presence even as I left to study in the US, and in bringing close to me many friends who are writers and artists and who I met because of him, while studying there. Appa became guru to many of them.

I was thirty when I returned to Bangalore, with much travel and years behind, but none the wiser from these experiences, when I re-encountered appa. He had grown enormously in stature. Our exchanges as adults marked a different phase in my life, but that narrative I will save for another time.