Alphabet Soup

Begin unnec­es­sar­ily mushy pro­logue that can be safely skipped:

They had laid him in the mid­dle of the house on enor­mous blocks of ice that were melt­ing slowly — the water crawl­ing across the room, under the wail­ers perched around the body, towards me. I was con­vinced I would die if I came into con­tact with the water, and kept pulling back, back, back and into the room where they stored the sewing machines. My feet trem­bled as I sat on a stool and fid­dled with one of the machines, no one ask­ing me to stop break­ing nee­dles. Waiting.

The wail­ing went up a bit, and I stepped out to peek. The water had formed small pools all over the room now, no area was safe any­more. An under­taker and an under-undertaker had come in, and were start­ing to lift up the body. . The under­taker was at the head, his assis­tant at the foot. The foot was lifted up first, and the lifter slowly moved right, swivel­ing the corpse on the ice. The under­taker now got into the act: he held the shoul­der and lifted up the corpse and then started to walk back­wards. A foot back, maybe two. The body creaked, the under­tak­ers paused. And then, a loud noise — a hybrid belch-hiccup — came out of the body. The wail­ers stopped, star­tled. I was ter­ri­fied and jumped over a cou­ple of pools to go stand near my mom.

After that it was a blur: they loaded him into a cart, and I fol­lowed it all the way to the cre­ma­to­rium, plagued by fear, where they laid him on a pile of wood and dried dung and poured a lit­tle bit of kerosene and set him aflame.

When I think of my grand­fa­ther, the first image that springs to my mind is that noise. Not that I don’t remem­ber the other things: the height, the gruff­ness of tone and the stub­ble: unlikely ingre­di­ents for a ten­der man. He wasn’t the usual fawn­ing grand­fa­ther — he granted us our space, but let it be known that he liked hav­ing us around.

There are a lot of things to remem­ber, but the image of his dead body and the strange noise over­whelms them all.

But I won’t write about it, because my dad tells me it isn’t all that strange. Instead, I’ll write about how my grand­fa­ther named his kids, because that is cer­tainly unusual.

End unnec­es­sar­ily mushy and safely skip­pable prologue.

Begin post that can be safely skipped:

Every Indian fam­ily has a des­ig­nated form-filler. This is the per­son peo­ple go to when they need help fill­ing a form — any form — ration card appli­ca­tions, forms to apply to schools, job appli­ca­tions, forms that plead with mag­is­trates to show mercy on loan default­ers. This is the per­son that knows the lan­guage of forms, the “nils,” “as-aboves” and “not applicables.”

In our fam­ily, my dad — ex-bureaucrat, patient proof reader, class top­per in Eng­lish (he kept remind­ing us) — fit the bill just right. He fit it so right that occa­sion­ally other fam­i­lies bowed to his supe­rior skills and out­sourced impor­tant forms to him. If you are the sort that doesn’t mind the odd bad pun, I’ll tell you that he is the father of all fillers.

And thus it wasn’t a sur­prise when dad told me that a cousin of mine had approached him with a “pass­port prob­lem.” “More specif­i­cally,” my dad told me, lay­ing an undue amount of stress on cer­tain, “he asked me for help on a cer­tain ques­tion in the form.”

“Yeah,” my mom inter­jected, “ask him what has got­ten into him after retirement.”

“Which cer­tain ques­tion? What has got­ten into you after retirement?”

To cut a long con­ver­sa­tion short, the cousin had asked for help with a ques­tion on the pass­port appli­ca­tion that asked him to “expand his father’s ini­tials.” ^[1]

I can’t really say it any other way: My grand­fa­ther was a stud. In addi­tion to spawn­ing at least thir­teen kids (a tir­ing task in itself), he actu­ally pulled off the aston­ish­ing feat of bring­ing all of them up on a pub­lic bus driver’s income.

A stud deserves some slack, and no one should bear any grudges against him for bungling a lit­tle bit with his book­keep­ing — thir­teen kids can be hard to keep track of. When it was time to admit one of the kids to school, grandpa would walk them to the admis­sions offi­cer. After some con­ver­sa­tion about bus sched­ules and ris­ing petrol prices, the admis­sions offi­cer would whip out a form and start ask­ing some ques­tions. My dad, unfor­tu­nately, wasn’t around to help then.

Name? That was easy. Next ques­tion please. Ini­tials? This ques­tion con­fused grandpa con­sid­er­ably, because his fam­ily had a tra­di­tion to main­tain: they actu­ally used two ini­tials — one for the dad’s name and another one for the city of birth. He’d think about it for a minute (I think), but most of the time he didn’t remem­ber how he’d named his pre­vi­ous child. Did he name her after his vil­lage? Or his adopted town? Or maybe he had bro­ken tra­di­tion and used just one let­ter… or. This was very con­fus­ing. When all his kids had grown up and were in school, grandpa might have been sur­prised to know that there were three sets of ini­tials float­ing around his fam­ily. P.R. G.R. Just plain R. But grandpa was too busy mak­ing ends meet to care.

It might be of inter­est to note that the kids also had com­pletely ran­dom birth dates — my aunt insists she is younger than her doc­u­ments show, and the date she claims to have been born and the one on her doc­u­ments are per­fectly uncor­re­lated. Nei­ther month, nor day, nor year match.

Which is why my cousin’s ques­tion was not as triv­ial as it sounds. His dad had a P.R in front of his name. “What does the P stand for,” he wanted to know.

“Pub­lic Rela­tions,” I told my dad. He chided me on jok­ing about a seri­ous sit­u­a­tion, and pro­ceeded with the narration.

“Palakkad is what the P stands for,” my dad told the cousin. “That’s where your grandma is from.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’s true.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because grandpa him­self had a P in front of his name, and I think that’s why he added a P to my dad’s name. And I don’t think that P stands for Palakkad because Grandpa’s fam­ily has no Ker­ala connection.”

“Hmm.. think you might have a point. Let me find out.”

My dad was excited about this pass­port ques­tion. Prior to this momen­tous ques­tion, the sternest test of his form fill­ing career was when some­one asked him to fill out an appli­ca­tion form that was entirely in Hindi. He had passed the test with ease by direct­ing the asker to the Hindi teacher that lived down the street. But this, this was dif­fer­ent. Almost like sleuthing. He started mak­ing enquiries. ( By the way, this explains the “What has got­ten into him after retire­ment?” ques­tion). I find past tense very hard to write, so I will switch over here. If you are so inclined, please con­vert the para­graphs that fol­low into past per­fect tense and mail it to me.

My grandpa died old, so con­tem­po­raries are hard to find. Espe­cially sane ones. Dad went around the small town, flit­ting from house to house, ask­ing the older peo­ple what his father-in-law’s ini­tials stood for. Blank stares. What were his ini­tials again? I don’t know Eng­lish, I can’t hear well. My daughter-in-law treats me badly, how ’bout yours? How is Amer­ica? We should get together some­time for cof­fee. You look fairer these days.

After about a week, my dad changed tack. He assumed that the P should prob­a­bly stand for grandpa’s ances­tral vil­lage, and so he went around the small town, flit­ting from house to house, ask­ing the older peo­ple where his father-in-law’s fam­ily came from. Blank stares. I don’t know Eng­lish, I can’t hear well. My daughter-in-law treats me very badly, how ’bout yours? How is Amer­ica? We should get together some­time for cof­fee. Do you use a fair­ness cream?

Frus­tra­tion, thoughts of quit­ting, an urge to ask cousin to write Palakkad there and be done with it. But urges were resisted.

Like it hap­pens usu­ally, the answer came from an unex­pected source. It wasn’t that dra­matic (plus my call­ing card was run­ning out, so I asked him to hurry up and get to the end), but appar­ently an old guy that my dad met on the street later that week answered his ques­tion for him. (“I didn’t think he’d be able to answer because he looked too young to know.” Quotes proverb on judg­ing books). The grand­par­ents of the old guy who looked too young to know had grown up in the same vil­lage as grandpa’s fam­ily. “In fact,” the old man said, “your father-in-law’s fam­ily mem­bers even led the vil­lage pan­chayat for sometime.”

After a lot of ques­tions, dad was con­vinced enough to travel to the place in place in ques­tion, and after some more sleuthing he got hold of a few records from the vil­lage pan­chayat that con­vinced him beyond doubt. He knew what the P stood for.

Loud laugh­ter at this point on the phone. Not from our end. Story con­tin­ues amidst chortles.

A phone call is made. The cousin comes on line.

“I know what the P stands for.”

“Really, what?”

“Pan­ni­madai.” Which in Tamil means Pig-Sluice. Or some­thing like that, but it was undis­put­edly pig–some­thing.

“Panni madai? That’s funny. So, what is it really?.”

“I am seri­ous. Pan­ni­madai is the answer you were look­ing for. I even read a ledger that proved it.”

“This means… um, on a pass­port they might put, eh, my dad’s expanded name after mine, and when I go to the US..”

“…”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll go with Palakkad.”

“I fig­ured.”

Rumor has it that said cousin has filled many more forms after this inci­dent. He must’ve changed his form-filler, because he doesn’t ask dad anymore.

[1] In Tamil Nadu, peo­ple have no sur­names. We make do with ini­tials — the son of A Oaf would be called O Imp, and O Imp’s daugh­ter would call her­self I Suck. Which is all well, for rarely are Tamil names as con­cise as Oaf or Imp and we could do with­out the extra let­ters a sur­name would add.

[2] Res­i­dents of Pan­ni­madai are requested to please excuse the author. He is the great grand­son of your Nat­ta­mai, by the way, so cut him some slack.

[3] Let it be said that the author is known to be delu­sional, so it is ques­tion­able if said events really hap­pened in his life in said sequence.

[4] Inspired by Tilo’s post on M.S.Subbulakshmi, grand­moth­ers and cousins.

End safely skip­pable post.