My Old Man

There is not a single photograph of his childhood. When I pointed this out he laughed, saying that their house did not even have a toilet, so forget about a camera. He was one of six children, and they shared their home with three other families. The parents pooled their funds for a cart, which became the means for getting the children to school at Kandanur. The slow plodding of the bullocks meant that his ten-kilometer journey took an hour each way.

His father had dropped out in the eighth standard, so his ambition was to get further and complete high school. He studied ferociously, late nights under the light of a hurricane lamp, bent on breaking out of the confines of his village. It was with exaltation that he opened the acceptance letter from Annamalai University. The local Chettiar Association pulled together a scholarship for his tuition and he was on his way.

India had just achieved independence, and Prime Minister Nehru was determined to get the country to self-sufficiency. There was a huge need to set up the factories and assembly lines called for in the country's first Five Year Plan. So he signed up to get a bachelor's in electrical engineering, one of a class of forty. His ambition at university burned as brightly as in high school. He graduated with a first class. Impressed by his mark sheet, Binny Mills offered him a job at 250 rupees a month. He bought his first tie for his graduation ceremony. He remembers it as being one of the happiest days of his life.

After three years there, he was eager to test his mettle in a new arena. India had received commitments from different countries to get its industries going. One of them was from Germany, which was helping to build a giant steel plant in the eastern city of Rourkela.

He interviewed successfully, and was asked if he would be interested in studying metallurgy abroad. Was he ever! In that postwar boom, the US was producing a hundred million tons of steel a year. India, meanwhile, was barely producing a million.

He signed a bond with the Rourkela plant, committing to work there for five years after his return. And so it was, under the auspices of a Ford Foundation fellowship, that he landed in Ohio in the late fifties. He shared a room with his friend Anantha Krishnan at the Sovereign Hotel downtown. He studied steel making at the Case Institute of Technology for two days of the week and worked amidst the smelters on the shop floor of Republic Steel for four.

Any help the trainees needed in adjusting to their new country was provided by a thirty-five-year-old live wire who had been designated as their mentor (half a century later, my dad clearly remembers his name, Roy Clark.) He loved the openness of America, the lack of formality and hierarchy. Everybody mingled freely at the cafeteria. The president of Republic Steel had all them over to his house for dinner. Co-workers took them to the lake on family weekends.

My father was a great storyteller. The memories of my childhood are colored with tales that he told from that time. Many were the nights I would drift off to sleep to the background of laughter of guests as they listened to his adventures as a young man.

He and his roommate had subscribed to the daily New York Times, which was deposited each morning on their doorstep with a thud. In India, they had learned to sell recyclables to the paperwala, who peeled off rupee notes after carefully weighing the sheets and counting the bottles. In the hope of a big payday, they collected several hundred pounds of newspaper, amounting to almost a truckload. They were stupefied when the person they called from the Yellow Pages said that their carefully tied bundles were nothing more than trash and instead charged them fifteen dollars for hauling it away.

Another story related to a fellow trainee from the north. He had lived entirely in the rural part of Punjab before coming to the States, so he was familiar only with Indian-style toilets. In his first day in the new country, he had apparently been nonplussed by the Western-style toilet in his hotel room. After eyeing it for a bit, he had clambered on top and squatted on the seat to do his business. This had resulted in a giant mess. Trying to get rid of the evidence, he pointed the ventilation fan at the seat. Underestimating its power, he ended up splattering everything all over the walls. Finally in desperation, he called the janitor, took him into the bathroom and offered him ten dollars to get everything cleaned as long as he did it quietly. In response, apparently, the janitor offered him twenty dollars if he would only explain how he had managed to contort himself to get the molecules spread that evenly on the wall.

My dad fell in love with the music of that time, so I grew up later listening to everything from folk to Broadway and Big Band to jazz. Marveling at the vastness of the country, he covered large swaths by Greyhound bus, from Detroit to the Smoky Mountains. At the breakfast table, I would listen open-mouthed to his description of HMV gramophones, Chevy Impalas and the vast cornucopia of consumer goods that had poured from American factories. And he developed an admiration of American hospitality, something he strived to reciprocate for the rest of his life. I would sometimes come home from a day of school and be introduced to backpackers he had just met on Commercial Street, all of them bewildered at being invited for a home-cooked Indian meal.

Despite his enchanting experience in the new country, he was still infused with patriotic fervor. So he returned to India with a head full of new knowledge and a string of certifications. Back in Madras, he met my mother, who was then completing a degree in zoology at Stella Maris.

They were married in her village. He rode in to her family house on a white horse, resplendent in a gold-bordered wedding veshti and turban. At that time, they were the only ones of their fourteen siblings to have finished college. My brother and I were born a few years later.

His time at the steel plant coming to an end, he found his next challenge at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. The company had been chartered with building the first locally manufactured jet planes in India. It began constructing a brand new engine factory in rural Orissa, starting with nothing more than blueprints and a patch of land. The nearest city was four hours away. We moved to the tiny company town of Sunabeda, and he threw himself into the job with gusto, taking responsibility for the installation of the electrical plant and heavy machinery.

When I ask him about those years in the sixties, he says that there was a key lesson from that time. Closed markets sounds great in theory but you only get good with competition. This was not the case with HAL, which had guaranteed funding from the Indian government. It also had a captive customer in the Indian Air Force, which was legally bound to buy all the aircraft that came off the production line. The bureaucracy was stifling, the processes slow, and the compensation system offered no incentive to be more productive.

The seventies and eighties in India were marked by increased stasis (it wasn't until the early nineties that a foreign exchange crisis brought the country to the precipice of insolvency and forced economic liberalization.). The Prime Minister at that time admitted in a candid moment that less than a quarter of the government spending actually made its way to the people - the rest got siphoned off at every layer along the way. In a national survey, 92% of responders had had the first hand experience of paying bribes.

He had turned down an offer for US citizenship earlier in his life because he was sure that his contribution was in some small way going to help India claim its rightful place internationally. But the pervasive corruption slowly eroded that belief. He was forced to wait two years for a phone line when he refused to pay a bribe. Merchants often gave him receipts for only parts of transactions in order to avoid paying taxes on the rest. By the time my brother and I were adolescents, he was advocating our fulfillment of the family destiny in the US, where "things are clean."

I was already hugely influenced by American books and movies. I had made my way through all of Zane Grey and James Michener at the local lending library, and spent many afternoons at the Plaza theater watching and re-watching the films made by the new wave of directors of that time - Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Lumet. When I finished engineering school and had to pick between the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and a distant university in North Carolina, my choice was already made. My brother Jaikumar came west the next year.

By then, our family had moved to Bangalore for a better school system and cooler weather than the plains. A lot of people were having the same idea, and the influx of fresh graduates was transforming the city from a retirement haven to an exciting metropolis for young people to live. Dad watched the demographic change with great interest and it became the basis of his second career.

The city was expanding in all directions and offering land up for sale at the outer edges in neighborhoods like Indiranagar, Koramangala and Hosur. The auctions were frenzied affairs, hundreds of people under a tent looking at maps and bidding on plots by the square foot. I accompanied him to a few of these as he rapidly took notes and made calculations. After a few months, he had enough data to be ready.

When he was confident about a thesis, he tended to go all in. He quit his job, cashed in his Provident Fund, and started buying plots across the urban area. If you won the open auction, you had to immediately hand over a quarter of the price in cash as a deposit. So he took to carrying the family's life savings in a briefcase chained to his wrist. Six purchases later, we were land rich and cash poor.

Bangalore was then a city of 2.5 million people, growing at the rate of a hundred thousand people a year. His bet was that the rate of growth would rise dramatically and that it would take far less than twenty five years to double in population.

He was right. It took half that time.

In the nineties, the growth curve steepened even more as the city became one of the world's premier IT and outsourcing hubs. Land prices began rising, kept going and never stopped. The same plots that had gone for thirty rupees a square foot got up to six thousand by the time he started selling (the city's population today is now over twelve million, and land in Indiranagar goes for twenty thousand rupees a square foot.) Even accounting for inflation and the long-term weakening of the currency, it meant that the rest of their life was covered.

My brother and I had moved to the States by then and were navigating our own paths through grad school, first jobs, and relationships. Whenever I was tense about change (career switches, moving homes, working at a startup), a conversation with him was enough to calm me down. When I remained single into my thirties and my mother panicked about my being the World's Oldest Unmarried Indian Male, he was there to help lower the temperature of our trans-Pacific phone calls.

He raised the first toast at my wedding, delighted at meeting hundreds of new people in San Francisco. He marveled at Silicon Valley, at the evidence of all the innovation and industry that he had so admired the country for. Family reunions became a way to see new parts of the world - Canada, Thailand, Greece.

The grandchildren came along, and he followed their paths with delight. When my oldest daughter began college, he could barely contain his happiness. She represented the third successive generation of engineers in the family, an arc that stretched over seventy years from a hamlet in South India to a freshman dorm at Stanford.

Then, three years ago, we got the phone call that we had long feared. He had gone for a routine checkup, and the doctor had found a dark mass wrapped around his lower intestine. It had tested as malignant.

My brother was developing software at that time for Dr. Devi Shetty, a prominent doctor who had gone back to India to found a large hospital chain called Narayana Health. He was the soul of helpfulness. He urged us to come as soon as possible and promised that he would get an operating room ready to go with his best surgeons.

We landed on a Thursday night. My father could not have been more stoic. He had spent the week getting all his affairs in order and he made us spend the next day walking through the family financials with his banker. We had dinner at home and then drove to the hospital to check him in.

As he was being wheeled into the operating theater the next morning, he was the only person among us not weeping. He looked us in the eye and said that if he didn't come out alive, we were to know that he had lived a happy life. There was not one thing he had wanted to do that he had not done. And besides, "I'm eighty four and I've played a full inning."

I don't remember anything of the rest of that day. When we saw him next, he was strapped to monitors and an IV at the Intensive Care Unit. But he was breathing and that was all that mattered.

A day later, Dr. Kudari, the gastroenterologist, came by to tell us that they had gotten all of the tumor and that it hadn't spread to any other part of his body. Dad was conscious now and did we want to see him? When we walked into the ward, he was sitting up, surrounded by three nurses. He was giving them investment advice.

He recovered quickly from there. Solid food in a week, back to his daily walks in four. He resumed meeting his regular group, sharing jokes and opinions. His friend JT told me that he was the only person in their circle who knew both where to get the best idlis as well as all the things that Alexa could answer.

A few weeks ago, my parents celebrated their sixtieth anniversary. They were surrounded by family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors, many of whom they had known for over half a century, and who had traveled vast distances to be there.

That night after the celebration, I found myself marveling at the sheer accomplishment of their sixty year partnership. Between them, they had weathered childhoods during the second world war and the country's subsequent struggle for independence, had to fight for their education, move to a new country, adjust to each other, find their feet economically, establish a household, make a livelihood, and educate their children only to have them both leave in their teenage years. Ambition, work, home, family, children, empty nest, the full catastrophe.

I hearkened back to the frantic time in 2016 when I had thought I was going to see my father for the very last time. I was not at all prepared for what was likely ahead. A friend had recommended the book "Being Mortal" by the great medical writer Atul Gawande, about his own father's last days. I devoured it on the flight in from Frankfurt.

I had bookmarked these lines: "The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. We have purposes larger than ourselves. All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writer of our own story."

How had he been so calm that morning on the gurney? How had he displayed such equanimity when all of us were collapsing around him?

These then are his lessons that I have taken away. Start where you are. Live out loud. Work at your friendships. Do the things that really matter to you. As you get older, make sure to provide, nurture and guide. And when the inevitable arrives, as it will for all of us, the best way to end well is to have lived well.