Growing up, I was the youngest kid in my house. So, I tagged along with Amma (mom) all the time. Amma was an amazing woman with many gifts and storytelling was one such gift. Guess it ran in her family since her father (NSM) was an amazing storyteller. This post is about one such deeply personal story – simple in its contents but deep in meaning to me. And one that I often recall…
In the 1910-1920s, there was a boy named Mani who grew up in a village in India and his family struggled to make ends meet.The boy was a bright young man who walked daily from his village to the next village to attend school. When it was time to attend college, he left his village and moved to a city for college.
After graduation, Mani landed a job in a college teaching English. He received his paycheck and saved as much as he could. When he saved 100 rupees (Google tells me that is about 5,000 indian rupees in today’s value), he withdrew it from the bank as one hundred rupee note and boarded a train headed for his village.
Mani’s father had never seen a hundred rupee note in his life and the boy wanted to surprise his dad with it. He wanted his father to be reassured that his family was going to have better times ahead. Mani could not sleep that night since he wanted to see his father’s reaction to his surprise visit and the hundred rupee note.
When the train pulled into his village station, many people from his village were standing in the station pavement. Mani got down and the villagers rushed to him asking “Mania, yaaru sonna (who told you?); eppidi therinjudhu (how did you know?)?”. Mani was confused and it took him some time to understand that his father had passed away the night before. The villagers, including some of his family members were at the station wondering how to send this news to Mani and have him come right away. They could not fathom how Mani made it to the village that morning. Mani just fell to the ground and was crushed.
The first time my mom told me this story, I cried. Even today, when I tell this story to someone, I tear up. Putting myself in the shoes of Mani, I was anguished and angry. The one thing a parent wants is to see his/her children happy and doing even better than they did; in the same token, (many) children want to meet or exceed their parent’s expectations in every way. Angry and sad that his father could not see that Mani was doing well in life seemed very unfair.
That Mani was NS Mani, my maternal grandfather. We called him Amma Thatha which literally translated to Maternal Grandfather since Amma means Mom and Thatha means Grandfather. Amma Thatha went on to become a much lauded English professor, opened his own college in Madras (I refuse to call it Chennai) and made boatloads of money and a name for himself. He was friends with presidents of India (R. Venkataraman, VV Giri, and Radhakrishnan) and the social elite in Madras in the 1960s and 1970s were frequent guests at this house. Despite all that, the pain of that incident was still fresh in his mind/heart even in his 80s..sometimes life is not fair but it teaches us that the best of highs and the worst of lows are much better spent with our loved ones close to us always. That is the true treasure – cherish it when you have it!
What do you take away from this story?
epiphanu 