My Granddaddy

My grandfather was a man of character. He was tall, handsom and very fair. He had an air of aristocracy around him , though all his fortunes from a departmental shop that he had inherited from his father, had evaporated with the sale of the establishment.

I had heard stories of W N Kumar at the crossing of one of the busy roads of Calcutta and how it stocked the best of items in those days ranging from Huntley Palmer’s Biscit to Swallow Toffes. When I caught up with him , he was the grand old man of the house, the patriach .

He got up early in the morning and was the first to be handed the copy of the morning paper ‘The Statesman’. He read some parts of it loud with his mornin cup of tea. I presume to impress all and sundry of his understanding of the English Language. And also to impress on us young souls, the finer nuance of the language and the diction.I remember him impressing on my brother Ashoke, who happened to be his favourite , the value of reading the newspaper loud and clear every day. And so he did, which all of us next of kin followed. In fact the man who paid for the paper, my father was the last to get hold of it , after everybody had finished, around mid-day to spend some time with it and fold it neatly for archival value. In fact, all newspapers were preserved, like nobody’s business, as they do in the Library and many a friend of my father came to read it in his library. I remember one such gentleman Mullick, who lived across the road spending his weary afternoon reading and discussing varied subjects under the sun with my father.

As the story goes, my grandfather was responsible for our education in a way. He is to be credited, as in one of his sojourns in Park Circus maidan he discoverd that an English School was being built , and that too by the missionaries.He enquired and true to his findings it was an Italian Missionary School, Don Bosco . That was the beginning of our formidable education stint in one of the best schools in Calcutta. My brother Ashoke was one of the first student to get enroled in the School and us two brothers followed.

“Come and sit over here by your Dadu,” he said and motioned to the empty space next to him on the deck swing. My brother picked up the peanut packet and sat down slowly, careful not to spill the brown pellets. “You’re doin’ real well down at Don Bosco. Good thing because there isn’t another God damned any good school nearby . You must learn English, for that will keep you ahead of the others. And English he learned . Not only him, all other brothers and sisters to some extent or the other. Till date I ponder on these words.