Daily Fix

The Legacy From My Father:
Passion for Learning

T. SHER SINGH

Growing up as the eldest sibling in our family, I may have been the beneficiary of the best years of my father’s life.

It’s not that he didn’t give his mostest to his other four children. He did. He loved us all and gave his all to each one of us, materially and emotionally.

It’s just that I had him all for myself when he was still young and chomping at the bit to fulfill his dreams and to make his own mark on life.

He was forever frustrated that his formal education had been truncated at the Matriculation level … that is, short of entering university and pursuing further studies.

There were many reasons: limited access to higher education in the immediate area they lived; family finances spread thin over a large brood; the self-imposed Punjabi pressure to be self-sufficient; marriage; the cataclysmic intervention of the Partition of Punjab and the resulting loss of home and homeland; precipitous migration to an alien land; and the struggle to survive … and flourish.

And flourish he did.

But always nagging and haunting him were the missed opportunities to have studied. The interests remained alive, though: religion, politics, social justice, travel. But life had taken over and brought with it a bundle of responsibilities.

So, not surprisingly, he saw in the child in me ways in which he could live out all that he himself had missed.

I was not the first born. But effectively, I became one, since a son who preceded me died shortly after child-birth. Another son who followed me died at the innocent age of two years. Medical facilities weren’t the best then in a country newly carved out of turmoil and upheaval!

The days were long for my father during those nascent years of his struggle to establish his business. So, when he came home late at night, he not only wanted to spend time with me but also, after dinner, sit down with me and teach me.

I was two. My earliest memories are of both of us sitting cross-legged on the bed facing each other, my mother sleeping not far from us.

First, it was the English alphabet, followed by the primer. Numbers, followed by simple arithmetic. And the beginning of multiplication tables -- escalating steadily as I progressed until, in a couple of years, I was adept at, I recall with trepidation, 16 x 16s and all that led to it.

I qualified for admission into the kindergarten class in Mount Carmel Convent easily, even though I was way below the minimum age. My father’s tutoring had paid off.

So, once the school and its good nuns took over the task of teaching me the Three R’s, my father turned to the task of introducing me to the Gurmukhi alphabet and numerals at home.

As I made my way up into Grade One and then Two, a new crossroad loomed ahead: Mount Carmel could only have me till Grade Three, because thereafter it was exclusively a girls’ school, progressing into the Patna Women’s College within the same palatial campus. I would have to move.

I remember overhearing my father’s long discussions into the night, or wherever we went socially, canvassing all the options for my “further education” -- that is, beyond Grade Three. He knew it would put me on a stream, whichever one, that would ultimately shape my life.

So, no stones were left unturned. Every major school in the country -- yes, across the length and breadth of the country -- was considered. Applications and calendars were acquired, filled and sent out; visits to remote places to survey, inspect, assess, were made.

I even recall a few days when my father and I had to travel overnight to Allahabad in the next state. All so that a local institute could test and evaluate me and assess my strengths in order to help decide the course I should take in life.

I was in Grade Three then.

I still have their report. It makes interesting reading, not unlike the ’janam patri’ -- astrological chart -- I also have, something a friend of my father’s gifted to him shortly after I was born. Of course, I give them no weight, but they amuse me nonetheless.

Well, I was finally sent to a boarding school a dozen miles outside Patna. It met my needs well. I stayed there until I graduated from high school at the age of 15.

But my father did not rest merely because my formal education was now in the hands of others.

Summers and lengthy vacations home -- there were many: Easter, Durga Pooja and Dusshera, Diwali, Christmas, to name a few!  -- meant I not only had to do home lessons in Punjabi and Gurmukhi, but had to progress into gurbani. First, I began readings in the Vaars of Bhai Gurdas, completing which I was initiated into reading from the Guru Granth.

Bhai Vir Singh’s novels. And Nanak Singh’s. His “Chitta Lahu” (White Blood) was the first Punjabi full-length book I ever read. I was hooked, and proceeded to finish his entire repertoire. And then Amrita Pritam … and so on.

Lessons in Urdu too. I would sit with my father on the customer counter in his store and, between customers, he taught me my Alaph Bey Pey.

In Grade Seven, Brother Johnson in school had introduced us to an aggressive regime of reading. We began to voraciously consume anything in print with the ferociousness of piranhas.

When my father saw me at home during vacations going through a book a day -- there were three massive, well-stocked libraries in town that kept me well-supplied -- he had an idea. Surely, I was ready for a break from regular school and should spend a year in a seminary.

The logic was that all education should be balanced, and to have balance, one needed to study the scriptures in equal depth. Not just Sikh scriptures, but all scriptures. How could you understand your faith by studying your faith alone?

And, he concluded, he couldn’t help me in this regard. I needed expert help.

So, another search began, zeroing in on a number of taksals (Sikh seminaries) in Punjab. One run by Nirmalas was chosen, and arrangements were made for me to start with them at the next end of school year.

Fortunately or unfortunately -- I waver on this one perennially -- my school Principal, Brother Comber put his foot down. Backed by Brother Johnson. I couldn’t take a year off mid-stream, they insisted … because it would harm my educational progress; and they wouldn’t guarantee a spot waiting for me when I returned.

Well, that put a damper on my spiritual growth, didn’t it?

When I graduated from high school, going to university was a given. The only question was what I would study.

In the meantime, I had nine months of down time before university began. How would he keep my idle mind busy?

A month-long apprenticeship with the Exide Battery manufacturing plant in Calcutta followed. 

And then a month's apprenticeship at the Diamond Taxi Meter factorty in Poona at the other end of the country.

We were authorized dealers for, inter alia, these two products. Though I wasn't the hands-on type, my father said it'd do me no harm to learn first-hand how things were manufactured. And marketed.

Shorter stints at the Firestone and Ceat tire plants in Bombay followed in quick shrift.

While discussing long-term career options, though, my father was unusual in that he did not particularly want me to head into any one of the popular directions: engineering and medicine being the two main magnets. Or even business. The Indian civil service -- IFS, IAS, IPS, etc? Do you really want to work under politicians, he asked?

But while we talked incessantly about the roads that lay ahead, a new element had crept into the dynamic between us. A wrench of sorts.

I was now a teenager, showing clear signs of teenage-hood.
 
I felt my father’s eagerness and determination, but the hero-worship that I had had for him up till now was wearing off slowly under the influence of teen angst and arrogance.

I bristled under the weight of his ardour.

The result was that I resisted. And pushed back. Fought on every issue. Even revolted.

The net result was I would rather not do what he wanted me to do, and do what he didn’t.

He wanted me to head into law.

So I ruled it out unequivocally.

He wanted me to consider journalism.

So I ruled it out too.

I even abandoned what had originally appeared to be my strength -- mathematics! -- and fled into the arms of Arts. English language and literature, to be precise.

Not a problem, said my Dad. Do what you want … you’re young and you have a whole life ahead of you.

So I studied for my BA with Honours in English. Then, joined the Master’s program … in English.

Around this time, we as a family pulled our roots and moved to Canada.

But in the interim between the decision to move and the actual date of departure, we had several months to prepare. So, my father hired a French tutor for us -- a Nancy Gerein from Edmonton, Alberta, who happened to be in town working as a nurse in the local Holy Family Hospital. Canada is bilingual, he said, so we'd better learn French in a hurry. 

Once in Canada, I continued my studies in another Master‘s program in Northern Ontario in Canada.

Soon thereafter, I became ‘independent’ -- which meant I was no longer under my parents’ wings. I moved out to live on my own, had a job and income. Joined a large stock-brokerage firm as an internal auditor. Got married. We had a baby.  

It was at this point I realized that there was a large hole in my life. I missed academia. I began to yearn for study and learning. It became an obsession. I wanted to be back in a university setting, doing what I loved most: be buried in books and language and ideas.

I began to look at doing my Ph.D. in English and go into teaching. I started looking at the options.

One thing led to another. The lure of language and ideas sent me off on a tangent. And I joined law school.

I remember feeling I was in heaven as soon as I stepped into the university. The years that followed, in school and then in law, remain the best in my life.

While in law, I sought a further distraction and turned to journalism. Print, radio and television. Before long, it became a parallel life, almost a second career.

Now, I was a full-fledged lawyer. And a full-fledged journalist at the same time.

And then, one day, it hit me.

I had become exactly what my father had wanted me to be. Oddly, by expressly avoiding what he wanted me to become.

I recall calling him the day I had been admitted into law school and had put my condo on sale in preparation for a move to the university in London (Ontario). I told him that I had had an epiphany, that I wanted to go back to school and study, and become a lawyer.

There was total quiet on the other end.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m here,” he said. “That’s very good, Beta. That’s very, very good.”

He sounded truly happy and I left it at that.

It wasn’t until much later, while driving on the highway one day, that it hit me. I pulled up on the shoulder, parked the car, turned off the ignition, and burst into tears. I had forgotten during all these lost years that it was my father who had wanted me to go into law, and I had had said no, never.

And now, I actually thought I had had an original idea! I realized I had enjoyed the fruits from the seeds he had sowed, the tree he had nurtured in me.

I’ve often written of all that I have learnt from him … of my endless admiration for him … of my hero-worship. But little about our clashes … our inter-generational, father-son conflicts …

Why? Because I’m still trying to understand them and sort them out from the immense love we had for each other.

When he died a few years later, I was visiting my mother one day. We were having tea. She stepped into her bedroom briefly and emerged with a thick file in her hands.

“This is a file your father kept on you through the years. He didn’t tell you,” she said, “because he knew you’d get upset that he was keeping a file on you. But I think he’d want you to have it now.”

It contained every newspaper clipping of every thing I had done as a lawyer and activist that had been reported in the press. And every thing I had published in my newspaper columns as a journalist and writer.

He’d bring out the file, my mother explained, when they had visitors, and he would pull out each shred of paper, one by one, and pass it around, a simple smile of contentment hidden in his beard.

Happy Father's Day, all!

June 16, 2013

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