N.V. Balakrishnan, Playwright.

Thatha and me.

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(Thatha - Grandfather. Paati - Grandmother. Amma - Mother. Appa - Father. Thambi - Younger brother. Periamma - Mother's elder sister.)

Balu thatha was always my favourite. Paati would always try to rein me in. She had a million unwritten rules which she expected me to abide by, which I never gave a second thought about – what were rules for, when I had thatha by my side? Most of my childhood memories are filled with my grandparents. Appa and Amma were always at work and when they were not, they wanted to me study, do homework or learn music. Very rarely, mostly during breakfast, dad and I would eat together and we’d watch Top cat, Swat cats, Captain Planet or Josie and the pussy cats (the good old days when this did not sound perverted in any way). Every other waking, sleeping, dreaming moment would go with thatha and paati. Paati strongly believed that I was the best at everything I did. To her, I was her personal show piece. She’s flaunt me to anyone who’d come to our place for even half an hour – ranges from the milk man to the relative who’d be visiting just because they had come down to Papanasam and the water falls. I somehow found that annoying back then and I would end up yelling at her, and she at me and thatha would interfere to bring about peace. Undoubtedly, he would always take my side.

He would make me sit on his cycle and pull it along to the bus stop while paati carried my school bag. She would keep complaining about me waking up very late and how tedious it later gets to rush to the school bus after that and thatha will constantly ask her to keep quiet and try to tell me a story instead. He would tell me stories about amma’s childhood, about my childhood. There was this incident when paati one day, while cutting vegetables in the kitchen and keeping a sharp eye on me, asked me who it could be at the door, for the door bell had just then rung and my periamma (amma’s elder sister) had gone to open it. “Thatha! He will be back from Coimbatore with gifts for me!” came my immediate reply as I tried to jump from the kitchen slab where I was sitting. Scooping me up and shouting at me for being careless, paati says, “Thatha? Why he never wrote to me saying he would be back soon. Stop being stupid and so careless… If you had stepped on the knife, then…” And with that came that came thatha’s voice booming from the hall, “Why do you keep yelling at my kid all the time? You come here da, kanna. Look what I’ve bought for you!” That was the thing with thatha. I could have anything I wanted, anything under the moon, as long as I whined for it loudly within his ear shot. The very next day, I would have it. At least three fourths of his pension money went on gifts for me.

Thatha. N.V. Balakrishnan, playwright, his notepad would say. His plays were always on air on some radio station or the other. He would show me various medals and cups and the sorts – those prizes his dramas had won him and newspaper cuttings of special mention for his dramas. They barely made any impact on me. What I found most interesting was the cassette recordings he had of me right from the day I had started making stupid, senseless sounds. There we cassettes that ran completely with nothing other than me yelling childish gibberish. His favourite was the one in which paati was making us dosas and after about 15 minutes, I would say, “Podhum, thatha neenga saptadhu! Inum evlo dosai paati sutite irupaanga?” (What you’ve eaten is enough, thatha. How many more dosas will paati make?) Only God will know what he found funny enough in it to laugh every time he thought of it.

He was an expert at grammar – an expert at teaching grammar in the simplest way possible. He would try his best to pin me down to learn something from him and it would not last more than 5 minutes. All I had to do was whine. And he would immediately give in. he could never see his grand-daughter wriggle in annoyance. He never really understood how I could make sentences without any grammatical mistakes without really being able to tell why a certain usage was right and why another was wrong. “Come on, thatha! That is so simple. It is WRONG. They were. Not they was. I know which is the right one. So why can’t we just get done with this?” I’d say and he’d just gape at me. “Your daughter just knows, Kalai. What do I teach her?” he’d ask amma. He taught me cycling when he was about 75. He used to run around with me, catching the cycle and teaching me to balance. When I learnt to zoom around with it at lightning speed, he gave up trying to catch up. 

He pampered thambi equally when he came along and thambi learnt it too, the whining technique. I grew up and fights between paati and I also grew. He ‘Don’t’s never seemed to end and I never seemed to be ready to listen and thatha never once failed to back me up blindly. He took me around on his cycle – anywhere I wanted to go – until I fit into the carriage.

When he learnt I could write, I would like to believe he was a little happy. I never really bothered to show him what I wrote. Amma always forced me to share it with him, though. He would say something like, “Nice. But you should really try making your grammar basics even stronger. Your style is very different. Maybe it is the new generation’s thing”, he would say and paati would listen to this and tell anyone who would listen to her about how I was the best writer of my age. This was when I was about 13.

I have already spoken about how paati’s death was for him over here. At times I use dto wonder how he was coping. He searched among the million cassettes he had and found where paati’s voice still survived. He listened to them now and then. Most of them were of paati and I arguing. He had very few pictures with her and one of mine when I was a couple of years old, my face alone torn and saved from the rest of the picture. I’d wish him on his birthday, March the 5^th every year after his 80^th in the evening and he would always say the same thing: “Ah! It’s my birthday today! So nice of you to remind me!”

As years went tumbling by, his body kept weakening. Amma suggested him to stop making frequent trips to Coimbatore, come from Vickramasingapuram and live with us at Chennai. At least he would be eating healthy food, she argued. Thatha could not be moved. He refused point blank and kept writing his dramas through the night, dozing off on the table every single night. The room would always be a mess. Full of papers. News paper clippings. Cassettes. Pens. “I will write till my last breath. Pen and paper are what make me breathe”, he would say firmly and walk away to his messy table. After much persuasion, he came to Chennai for a ‘holiday’. That is to say, it was agreed that he would stay here for a few days and then go back to Vickramasingapuram. After the 3^rd day, he went back to amma saying he needed a return ticket as soon as possible. “I have to climb down two sets of stairs to go for a walk. I need to walk for 15 minutes to get to a tea shop or buy the newspaper. There’s too much pollution. You won’t let me go for a walk far away alone. No one to talk to! I am leaving!” he said. We tried to prolong his stay as much as a month after which he confined himself to his papers again and amma had to give in.

I never understood how he managed to drag himself to the radio stations over and over again to submit his dramas. He was hitting his 90’s and it didn’t come as a shock when he fell sick. “Bad food!” amma complained, “If only he would listen and stay with us.” She took him to the hospital where I was treated when I fell sick and as far as I heard, it was going okay. Until this evening, that is. Amma called on the landline and demands to talk with dad. He isn’t home, I say. Se closes the call. Dad gets back home in the evening. I have a wash and have my breakfast-cum-lunch-cum-dinner and appa comes and clears his throat and says, “N. V. Balakrishnan thatha is no more. Amma just called. I’ll have to leave for Vickramasingapuram in some time. Thambi has exams. He won’t get an off at school and it will get complicated if we take him now. Will you be able to take care of him for 4 days? I’ll try my best to be back in 3 days and maybe amma can come here for a day and then get back. Will you manage?”

I was shocked. Wasn’t he supposed to be getting better? I had planned to call him in the morning next year on his birthday and return safely the half a photograph of mine I had ‘borrowed’ from him a year ago. What was wrong with him? Why did he have to die? I had always wanted to get him a print out of everything I had written and make him read. I had wanted to know what he thought about my writing. Appa gets ready and leaves in a hurry, giving us last minute instructions. Thambi is wondering if he will get to use thatha’s phone. He calls up thatha’s number and says, ‘I’ll myself ask permission from him. You people won’t let me have it otherwise.”

I go online and try to be normal, like nothing really has happened. I stay on my profile page, meditating on nothing specifically. I remember how he used to thrust this one particular newspaper clipping from The Hindu that had a review about his ’50 lakhs’ drama. He would tell me how it was unique since it had broken Balumahendra’s record of a drama with the least number of characters ever – 4, including the watchman who had no dialogue. “Or it could’ve been 3”, my mind says. I feel angry at myself for never having paid enough attention all through the years to pick up even that obvious detail that probably a lot of other people knew.

I am never going to see him at our Vickramasingapuram house again. He is never again going to pull along his rickety cycle with him to go get me poories for breakfast the minute I land there. There’s going to be no hand to thrust newspaper clippings or drama scripts or recorded dramas aired on the radio for me to read or listen. No one is going to pamper me anymore like I am still 3. No one is going to tell me anymore that I was the most intelligent kid ever. I am never going to know any more of my childhood antics, or my mother’s, for that matter.

The last that I saw him was when he came to Chennai to receive a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ in the field of drama given in memory of the great Avvai Shanmugam. I remember thatha telling me that they were old pals and that Avvai Shanmugam had acted in dramas scripted by him. I realized the importance and recognition he held there only after attending the ceremony. Thatha was 90+ and still he walked proudly to receive his award. I clicked frantically with the lazy Samsung camera I had. He was a happy man that day. I told myself that I should get him the print outs soon. That I should make him read what I had written for paati. Ask him what he thought about it. Promise him that I would definitely try to write well enough to make him feel proud about me. And I never did any of those.

Most often, we get too use to having certain people around us that we forget to pause a minute to realize their value. I am thinking of amma right now and how she is coping with the loss of her dad. How would it feel to know that both your parents are dead? How did she manage to tell me to be careful while using the cooker, warn me not to blow up the kitchen trying to cook something I wasn’t sure about, instruct my brother to concentrate on his exams and take them seriously and follow these up with a hundred other instructions to make sure we are safe here while she had to take her dead father back to Vickramasingapuram for cremation? Is that why she seeked appa’s comforting voice before breaking the news to me? Is there where you need someone whom you can call your own, whose pain you can feel as your own and with whom you decide to share your life? Is that how far you love your children? How you ‘grow up’ to cope up with what should have probably been a complete outburst of emotions?

I am sitting here, typing this down for the past few hours. The day is almost up. I am unable to feel hunger. Or pain. Or get sleep. The tears haven’t found their way yet. I am promising myself that I will write – to people. To people whom I care about, to people who mean a lot to me, to people who have shown me what love is, whether or not they write back. Long, random, personal letters. Someday, when they are low, when they miss me, when they think of me and all the memories they shared, they would probably take up what I had written for them and remember all the good times and feel loved. And that love, I am sure will wrap a warm and protective blanket around me wherever I go. Just like the love I am sure thatha’s feeling towards his little girl now, as he is reading this from somewhere above or about me. I love you, thatha. I hope I live up to your expectations and make you proud one day.

P.s: I somehow like this picture in my mind where I see thatha and paati meeting up again. They smile at each other – one of those very rare smiles they’ve shared in their 80+ years of marriage, before paati’s brows cross and she yells at her husband, “Why did you have to come so soon? Who will pamper my papa now?”

-        Just Someone.