Remembering with smiles....

Remembering with smiles....

how you got mad at the Mills & Boons I read and exhorted me to read and watch 'real' love stories like  'Waterloo Bridge'
how I read your favourite book 'How green was my valley' and loved it too
how I trusted you more than myself to give my newborn babies their first manicures
how your knotty, almost workman's hands could be that gentle and tender and careful
how I loved to listen to your stories of wartime Britain and postwar Germany and your favourite quote 'history is written by the victor'
how you got mad when an admirer from college called up every evening and hung up the minute he heard your deep, deep voice
how you always thought such boys had something 'hanky panky' in their minds or they would not hang up
how I wanted to say "yes of course they do", but did not
how my girlfriends loved your deep, deep voice on the phone
how you invariably caught me running out of the house without an umbrella on a rainy Mumbai day and pushed that infernal umbrella into my hands
how you always said "OK, OK, you are looking beautiful, now move away from the mirror", when you caught me looking at myself in the mirror
how you tiptoed into my room and smeared my sleeping face with stinky Odomos because I did not do it myself and you were worried I would catch malaria
how you said I was old enough now and handed me my first glass of wine at 16
how you loved to make even tone deaf people sit down and listen to your Tchaikovsky symphonies
how you loved to dance the foxtrot, the waltz, the cha cha cha, the quickstep and all those 'oldie' dances
how I regret that I did not learn from you
how you and I shared a love of that king of fruits... the alphonso mango and could polish off half a dozen in one sitting
how you bought me kilograms and kilograms of the choicest seedless grapes at exam time because I needed to keep plopping them into my mouth as I studied
how you could be trusted to wake me up at 3 am on exam mornings with a sprinkling of water if I did not heed the first half dozen calls
how you loved a house full of people, music, jokes and laughter
how people you helped find a job almost worship you to this day
how you loved taking the family for post dinner drives to Marine Drive
how nervous you were when I had my Cesarean deliveries
how proud you were when at 16 I wore my first saree to a family wedding and your mother thought I looked like a  'princess'
how you wore your uniform with such pride and insisted on washing and ironing it yourself
how you did not trust washing machines because they ruined your shirt collars
how paranoid you were on Diwali nights when I went out to light firecrackers and you personally made sure I changed out of silks into safer cottons
how you taught me to always compose a picture before unthinkingly clicking the camera
how you loved to drive but drove so safely (and slowly) that we laughed and called it 'royal speed'
how you trusted only yourself with our safety on those long road trips (on 60s and 70s roads) from Bombay to Delhi or Bangalore
how proud you were of me when you and I were the only ones standing upright in a cyclone at sea that had veteran sailors retching and heaving
how you always took the best, most expressive pictures of my babies
how you insisted that people with 'shifty eyes' were not to be trusted
how you hated Bollywood movies with a passion and never forgot to ridicule them, especially when the heroine had several changes of clothes in the course of one song
how we all still benefit from the goodwill you left behind Baba .......
and how a million little things a million times a day still remind me of you ......