Sanggeet Mithra (UnR3) pays homage to her grandfather, a man who lit up a city.
I call my grandfather, my mother's father, Tata. I lived with him and my grandmother, Atta, for the first five years of my life. He wouldn't say much to me as a child, I knew he was fond of me. He would sneakily carry my favourite lollipop in his shirt pocket after work, to the chagrin of Atta, my grandmother. He would let me rub my little hands on his unshaven, greying stubble, smiling at me as I giggled at the tickles from the short prickly hairs caressing my soft fingers. He wouldn't say much to me, Tata, but he said everything.
I was 13 when my parents packed me up and sent me on a sobering month-long trip to South India, with Atta and Tata. If there is one thing I remember from that trip is panicking: panicking at getting hit by a lunatic rickshaw driver, at getting chased by rabies-infested dogs, and panicking at losing Tata everywhere we went.
Tata had this habit of wandering off on his own everywhere we went; I think he enjoyed being away from people and being in the midst of strangers, alone. I was so afraid that he would get lost in those mammoth temple complexes. Every time he went missing, I would meander through maze-like corridors punctuated with serene sculptures of Hindu deities, in search of him. To my relief, it did not take too long before he would
end up finding me, or I, him.
One particular temple we visited was a complete madhouse; people were sardined against one another with very little regard for personal space, which tends to be the case on auspicious days in the Hindu calendar. Our group pushed and shoved its way through the crowd, losing and then finding two aunties at different junctures. We eventually snaked through and came back to the entrance, and Tata was nowhere to be seen. I started panicking, as I began thinking about all the worst possible scenarios: what if he completely lost sight of us in the mob of people? What if he slipped and fell somewhere? What if he forgot which entrance we came from? How was I going to find him?
My eyes started welling up, and I felt the fear build up in my beating chest. I ran back toward the main complex, my sight blurry from the tears, my lungs out of breath from fear. I scanned the area, my eyes darting from one bald, greying head to the other, to see which one was my Tata. I started getting angry too,
"Why does he have to do this every time?! Why couldn’t he just sit still and follow the group?!" As I wiped my tears away with the sleeves of my red kurti, I suddenly saw him, shuffling slowly to the back of the temple. Running, I called out for him, "Tata! Tata!" He kept walking, oblivious. I reached my hand out as I approached him and grabbed his arm. Startled, he turned around and sees my sweaty face, and said, "Oh there you are! I was looking for you..."
**
This trip was the turning point for me in our relationship, when I began to notice – and worry – about Tata’s body. It was around this time when his fingers started to feel bigger, more swollen in my grasp, when his shoulders and neck started stiffening from the inflammation in his joints. It was when he started discovering red, crusty patches of scaly skin developing on the lower half of his scalp – all symptoms of what we would later find out to be psoriasis arthritis. His hearing began to deteriorate drastically. Now, at age 75, he can barely hear through his right ear, while his left ear is completely deaf. A trip to an eye doctor revealed that he was suffering from glaucoma, a condition that results in a gradual loss of vision due to abnormally high pressure inside the eye.
As Time nourished my little body, it slowly and very surely, was decaying his. The man who used to lift me with one arm and throw me into the air began to appear delicate and fragile to me, always needing protection.
But he wasn’t always like this.
I know this, from photos of him in Atta’s family albums. I see my Tata, standing tall, upright and rigid, radiating the strength and stability characteristic of the head patriarch of an Indian family. He doesn’t smile. His lips are pursed yet relaxed, with a surety of himself and his faith in God. His big, hazel eyes are sharp and piercing, unfaltering with a determination that only a man with little in his hands and an entire family on his back would have.
I know this, because when I hold his sinewy hand, look at him in his eyes and ask him, "Tata, how are you?", he looks down and away, sighing, "I'm okay, ma. It's just my body, it’s not the same. It’s not like how it used to be..."
**
When Tata was a young man in his early twenties, his mother exclaimed to him one day, “Loga, look at your cousins, working in big offices. Why don’t you be like them and look for kerani work?” She dreamt of her only son working in an office wearing a nice buttoned up shirt.
He retorted nonchalantly, “If everyone goes and sits in offices doing kerani work, who is going to do the coolie work?”
Tata felt no shame about the work he did. He dropped out of school when he was 15, and did not stop working till he retired. He spent 30 years working with the Central Electricity Board, now known as TNB, where he labored long hours each day building the scaffolding for KL’s power network, bringing light to a city that was hungry for progress and development.
Once, while servicing a power breakdown, he got badly electrocuted on his left arm. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale and suffered only a mild shock. What he didn’t know then was that this incident would slowly eat at the left side of his body. 20 years later, he swallows industrial amounts of pain killers to suppress the pain of moving his left limbs. His left ear ceases to serve him any longer and he is barely holding onto his vision in his left eye.
I look at the unassuming rows of electric towers that line the highway on my drive to work everyday, and I think, my Tata helped put them there; that the very area I work in, PJ “New Town” was lit by Tata’s bare hands.
I see now; the ones who really pay the price of comfort are men like my grandfather, who paid upfront with the very fibers of their body. My grandfather was not educated, he didn’t attend university, he has never worked in an office. He didn’t have anything – all he had was his body. But he helped light up an entire city with it.
**
The man who lit a city a few decades ago is a very different man today. He lives in his own little world now, and only when he feels like it, does he let others in. He is playing catch up on the sleep that was robbed of him as a young man; he spends most of his time sleeping during the day, and stays up at odd hours of the morning watching wrestling matches and National Geography on TV. At family dinners, he isolates himself in the living room. He doesn’t join in on conversations anymore; he used to try, by sitting very closely to the person he is speaking to, asking them to repeat, just one more time, what they had just said. But I think he is tired now, of trying. When we visit family, I sit next to him, and tell him what people are talking about by animatedly gesturing with my hands and face, articulating every word for him to lip-read, so that he feels like he is part of the conversation. He participates for a while, and then stops. And then he goes off to be by himself, either with his eyes closed on an armchair, or watch TV, with the sound on mute.
**
People have not failed to prod me on my reasons for coming back home, after spending six glorious years gallivanting across the globe. Why did I come back, when there were more exciting things out there? Where the pay would be higher? Where I would lead a better life?
I tell them what I want them to hear: how it isn’t so bad being back, that there are plenty of opportunities here. That if every foreign-educated young Malaysian stays abroad, who is going to stay back and do the important work needed here – which sounds unintentionally familiar. That family is important to me.
Which are all true.
But what I don’t tell them is how, every time I had thought about pursuing an exciting job abroad, I would see his light eyes, tanned and wrinkled face from decades of working under the scorching sun. I would hear his voice, cracking as he held back tears and whispered one of the last things he said to me before I left for my final year of university, “Come back, ma. You’ve been away long enough. Come back home, only then my heart will be calm, only then I will be able to go peacefully”.
I don’t tell them that I came back because I was afraid that he would go and be lost into the ether, and this time, no matter how much I tried looking for him in the corridors and courtyards of glittering temples, or how many tears I cried, I would never be able to find him.
This time, I would lose him, and it would be forever.
This story was workshopped in the third edition of the UnRepresented: KL writing programme. Check out more writings from our alumni in the Past Works section and make sure to follow UnRepresented: KL on Facebook.
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