Bhau

10 March 1930 – 5 February 2019

When I married Bhavana in February 1984, her father had already survived a stroke at forty-five. A heart attack followed at fifty-six, a bypass at sixty-four, and prostate cancer in his late seventies. Any one of these might have ended a lesser man. Bhau lived to eighty-eight.

I was his physician throughout, and he trusted me with everything. He took his medicines faithfully. Even with a damaged heart and a stroke behind him, he walked miles every day.

His contemporaries called him Raja, and the name suited him. To his family and everyone younger, he was Bhau. In his youth he was dashing, daring, and afraid of nothing.

He spent his whole life in Balwadi, a village tucked into the dry hills of the Satpura range near the Maharashtra border, in the Varla block of Barwani district—formerly West Nimar. Indore lies 185 kilometres to the north; Jalgaon sits ninety kilometres to the south.

The surrounding forest stood so thick a man could not see through it. There were no paved roads, and monsoon floods routinely cut the village off from the towns. When an errand took him to Chopda, forty kilometres away, he rode there and back on his horse, Chetak.

Panthers lived in those woods, and now and then they strayed into the village. They attacked livestock and people alike, and the sight of one caused instant panic.

One afternoon in 1962, word came that a panther was prowling the fields. Someone sent for Bhau. A slightly built farmer, he grabbed his gun and ran to the field with a friend. The panther was there, moving furtively through the crops. Bhau aimed between its eyes and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. He glanced at his friend, whose gun had jammed as well. There was no one else. The panther stood an arm’s length away. Man and beast watched each other, waiting for the other to blink.

There is a jungle rule: never take your eyes off a predator. His friend, heart in his throat, looked away for a split second. The panther growled and sprang.

Bhau did not freeze. He rammed the barrel of his useless gun straight into the panther’s throat and bore down, choking it. A few villagers had gathered, but fear had rooted them to the dirt. Bhau snatched an axe from one of them and brought it down on the beast. His friend survived.

Bhau told the story plainly, and dozens of family members and friends vouch for it. In Balwadi, he became a legend.

He loved sport. In the small hours of Wimbledon, and the US, French, and Australian Opens, he woke to watch the television, clapping like a schoolboy when Federer and Djokovic traded a long rally. He carried cricket statistics in his head. When I casually mentioned that Azharuddin had scored 77 that day, he corrected me without missing a beat: seventy-six.

He named his children Vivek, Vinay, Bhavana, and Vishwas. They are fine Hindi names, each carrying a weight: discernment, humility, feeling, trust. He sent all four away to Indore, 185 kilometres distant, for school and college. He stayed behind, managing the farms almost entirely alone.

For forty years he kept a daily diary in his beautiful Hindi script. He recorded what happened that day, what he spent, the births, and the weddings. He used it to greet each of us on our birthdays and anniversaries. He wrote in it until the very end.

He had once meant to be a doctor. In the late 1950s, he went to Ferguson College in Pune and secured admission to BJ Medical College. Then his father died. The dream ended, and he went home to shoulder the family burden. But the lack of a degree never dulled his hunger to know. He read widely, asked questions, and tried to understand how the world worked.

That hunger followed him to Sevagram. Whenever he visited, he wanted to understand modern medicine. Once, I explained the mechanics of scrub typhus: how the germ slips into the bloodstream through the bite of a tiny mite, and how a few days of doxycycline can cure it. He wrote every detail in the diary.

All his life, Bhau wore a white kurta, a dhoti, a white cap, and simple chappals. An old stroke left him with slurred speech, though his arm and leg worked fine. As he grew old, he lost his balance at times and used a walking stick. Even then, he felt no self-pity. He took life as it came and did things on his own for as long as he could.

A final stroke took him to the hospital at Sendhwa, 35 kilometres from home. I went to see him. I told the family plainly that the hospital could do nothing more, and that the kinder course was to let him go. They had always trusted my judgment. Every one of them agreed, and we brought him home to Balwadi.

For his last two days he took no medicine, no food, and no water. His family stayed by his bed, Bhavana, our son Ashwini, and I among them. He died peacefully in his own house on 5 February 2019, aged eighty-eight.

I do not have the diary. But somewhere in it, between the birthdays and the farm bills, are a mite and a cure.

Tai

22 January 1932 – 20 November 2021

On the school registers, she was Kamal. To everyone else, she was Tai—sister—just as the family called her husband Bhau, brother.

She was born in Erandol, a town in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra. Her father, Shivnarayanji Manudhane, was a Gandhian who wore khadi all his life and went to jail during the freedom struggle. Kamal grew up inside that movement, though she never took to wearing khadi herself.

After middle school in Erandol, she moved to Mumbai for two years of Arts at Ramnarayan Ruia College in Matunga, living with her uncle. She eventually took her BA at Morris College in Nagpur, staying in the Sehanchal hostel at Sitabuldi. Bhau had never finished college. His wife had a degree.

On 10 May 1954, she married Bhau and went to live in Balwadi. Erandol was only eighty kilometres away, but no road reached the village. Rivers cut it off, and the journey took almost ten hours.

In 1962, when Bhau went out to face the panther, she was sitting at home. His brother ran from the house next door to bring her the news.

When the children were old enough for school, Bhau decided they must be educated in Indore, while he stayed behind to manage the land. In 1963, Tai moved to the city, renting a two-room flat in South Raj Mohalla. In 1976, the family moved to another rented flat on Jawahar Marg, and a few years later, to North Raj Mohalla. By the mid-eighties, with the children’s education finished, she returned to Balwadi.

During those years in Indore, Tai rented a house and filled it entirely. She took in her four children, Bhau’s elder brother’s children, two or three extended family members, and, almost daily, a visitor from the village. She woke at five. She cooked poha to go with the morning milk, prepared lunch, cooked dinner, and managed every chore in between—single-handedly. On some days, dozens of relatives and friends sat on her floor to eat.

Once a month, Bhau arrived from Balwadi by bus, rented a bicycle, and took the children out to historical sites and picnics.

We are Marwaris. Our first language is Marwadi, followed by Hindi. Tai always spoke to me in Marwadi, calling me Kanwar Saab, the traditional term of respect for a son-in-law. Bhau did the same. But her letters to me were always written in Marathi, never Hindi. The Khandesh of her girlhood never left her.

She was an unassuming woman. She forced her opinions on no one and held the sprawling extended family together through quiet grace. Suman Bang, the mother of Dr. Abhay Bang, was her father’s sister. Dr. Bang later won the Padma Shri for his rural health work in Gadchiroli. Tai followed his work, and the entire family’s achievements, with deep pride and frequent awe.

In 1994, her eldest son, Vivek, died of a heart attack. He was thirty-seven. She endured the loss with the same quiet stoicism that defined her life.

A decade later, when I went to Berkeley and Bhavana joined me for a month, Tai, then seventy-two, travelled to Sevagram to care for our son, Ashwini, and daughter, Amrita.

By 2014, her body began to frail. She fractured her humerus and required surgery at Sevagram. In February 2019, as Bhau lay dying in the hospital, we asked her if we should stop his feeds and medicines and bring him home. “Whatever you think is right,” she said quietly. “Please do.” He died in his own house, among his people, and she was at his side.

Two months later, she fractured a pubic ramus. It was a small pelvic bone that required no surgery, but it signaled the narrowing of her world. She spent her final years in Balwadi, in the house where she had lived for decades, surrounded by her sons Vinay and Vishwas, their wives, and her grandchildren. When her own end came, she too died in her own home—on the very bed where she had slept for years—amidst her sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. There was no hospital admission for her when she left the world on 20 November 2021, aged eighty-nine.

On the college rolls she was Kamal, the lotus. Everyone else used the plainer name, and she earned it.

Vivek

19 June 1956 – 22 April 1994

He died at thirty-seven, living a short life that called to mind the iconic line from Anand: “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi”—Life should be grand, not merely long.

He was Bhau and Tai’s eldest child, born in his grandfather’s house in Erandol. The old Gandhian, Shivnarayanji Manudhane, doted on him. Vivek moved through schools in Erandol and Indore, failed his science courses at Holkar College, switched to commerce, and scraped through with a third-class B.Com in 1975. He never studied further. Nothing in his academic record hinted at his agile mind. He did not know a single sentence of English, and he did not need it. He could look at any venture and immediately calculate what it could yield.

He returned home to Balwadi to farm alongside his father. But farming was only the beginning. Vivek looked at the remote village and saw possibilities everywhere. He grew cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and pulses. When he needed to move his yields, he bought a truck, and then a fleet, building a transport business from the dirt up. He opened a seed and fertilizer shop, brokered cotton, walked the thick forests for tree gum, and traded in bidi leaves. In 1984, he opened a village video parlour, charging locals to watch Bombay cinema. No business was too small for him.

He was tall, powerfully built, very hairy, and possessed a rugged, masculine face with broad shoulders. He walked briskly, cutting through space with an innate, unforced authority. Yet an infectious laughter was always on his face, and his eyes twinkled whenever something pleased him. Though he cared nothing for academic study during his Indore days, he carried a perpetual, mischievous smile that disarmed everyone.

Whether he was riding his first bullet motorcycle (bought by Bhau in 1976), driving his Mahindra jeep (GJC 6364, bought in 1982), handling an old second-hand Fiat, or driving a Maruti Zen in 1991, he commanded the rutted forest tracks of Balwadi without fear. He belonged to no single social stratum. He could sit on a rough wooden bench sharing unrefined sugar with Adivasi laborers, or host city-bred visitors from Bombay and Nagpur, holding them all spellbound. He moved across economic and cultural divides with a rare grace.

Yet, he was no ordinary village moneylender. When Adivasi farmers came to his shop for loans, he gave them cash. If a harvest failed, he did not hound them; he gave them time, waived the interest, and sometimes struck the entire debt from his ledger and let it go. Not every risk paid off—a planned chemical factory partnership with his maternal uncle in Jalgaon collapsed before ground was broken—but his appetite for enterprise never flagged.

Once a year, I traveled to Balwadi and stayed with him. We took long walks along the edges of his fields, where he showed me his crops and laid out his visions for the future.

His energy drew people to him. His friends treated him like a raja. Whenever Vivek traveled to Indore, he gathered his old circle: Suresh Agrawal, Rohit Jain, Ashok Jain, Anil Arora, Mir Ranjan Negi (the famous Indian hockey goalkeeper), Dinesh Jain, and Manzoor, who owned the shop Paakiza (which had started as a handcart in 1975). Though Vivek was a strict vegetarian who never touched alcohol, he was always the center of the table. He ordered lavishly, ensured everyone was fed, and paid the bill before anyone else could reach for a wallet. Anyone who came to him for help left with it. If you ask his friends why they remember him, they talk of his nerve, his lack of pretense, and his perpetually open hand.

Vivek married Sunanda Navandar from Aurangabad in 1982. Two years later, I married his sister, Bhavana.

In April 1994, the failed factory partnership with his uncle left him heartbroken. He traveled from Jalgaon to Balwadi, and then pushed on to Indore in a Tata Sierra to find Suresh Agrawal. Though Suresh insisted on driving him home, Vivek refused, hired an autorickshaw, and headed straight to Bansi Plaza. Already carrying a tight, crushing pressure in his chest, he arrived at the fourth-floor flat. There was no lift, and with no other option, he had to climb the entire staircase.

That night at eleven, sitting in that fourth-floor flat, the chest pain worsened, accompanied by severe breathlessness. Sunanda and Bhavana were with him. Before anyone could find a doctor or fetch a tablet, his heart stopped. Bhavana tried whatever basic cardiac resuscitation she knew, pressing on his chest, but the engine had simply quit. Together, they managed to carry his heavy body all the way down to the ground floor, where his friends had arrived to rush him to Gokuldas Hospital. He was declared brought dead.

He left behind Sunanda, who was thirty-two when she lost him, and two children: Tushar, nine, and Tulika, six. She chose not to remarry, raising them entirely on her own. Today, Sunanda lives with Tushar in Indore, where she enjoys the company of her two grandchildren. Tushar, inheriting his father’s enterprising spirit, is well settled, and Tulika became an architect, living in Kolkata with her husband, Mayank Jain.

Bhau was shattered, but he buried his grief and turned his absolute attention to the young widow and his grandchildren. Six months later, when Bhau needed a cardiac bypass in Bombay, it was Vivek’s friend Suresh Agrawal who booked the flights, flew with us, and paced the hospital corridors until the surgery was done.

When Vivek’s children eventually married, his old friends arrived and managed every function as though they were marrying off their own children. Three decades later, they remain fiercely protective of Sunanda. When they gather, they still talk of the eighties and nineties, when Vivek sat at the head of the table.