I see his smiling face every day. Someone who is close to me and someone who shaped me is now sitting with a smiling face in my shrine, next to my other grand parents, gods and gurus. He is a guru to me, a guru who was next to me in flesh and blood and who advised me, who teased me and who played with me. It may be slightly exaggerating, but tatayya was my “sakha”, a friend like krishna to Arjuna, who was next to him and guided him. There is no arjuna without Krishna, but there needs to be me without tatayya.
Weird, right? I wanted to say Tatayya is my guru, but two sentences later, I ended my paragraph saying that Tatayya is my friend. Well, tatayya is both. I cannot force my fingers to use the word, was. It sounds gramatically correct but emotionally cold. He is within me and he is guiding me. And hell, I need that guidance a lot more. He prepared me for the first part of my journey from bachelor to parenthood, but not for the next part, the part where my gray hairs conquer the rest of my hairline and I get to get to retirement and all that stuff. I saw him in close quarters and could probably emulate him, but that wouldn’t be as good as tatayya sitting and guiding me.
A smile brightens up my face. His mischevious smile and his voice is telling me that he had to drill a lot of advise into my barren and at times stubborn head and its probably more effective for him to do that in his new form than the older form. He is probably right. I was tough to coach and tough to get access to. Very few people got that and he is one of them.
Very many thoughts come to me from several parts of our journey together. The way he says my name differently based on the occasion and his mood is something that keeps coming back to me. The way he pronounces my name with a special touch of sweetness at the last syllable when he is in a jovial form or when he is happy with me reverberates many a times. The way he emphasizes the middle syllable when he is angry or upset with me also makes its presence felt. On the other hand, my ammamma always uses the same pronunciation, always hurrying through my name with no special emphasis anywhere and no touch of extra sweetness.
I imagine that he is enjoying his new found freedom. He is probably spending time with a newer set of crowd, or should I say older set of crowd in newer forms up there and reminscing his time with stories of their native village, sitting next to his brothers and kin and having a gala time.
