Bhau

10 March 1930 – 5 February 2019

When I married Bhavana in February 1984, her father had already survived a stroke. He was forty-five when it hit him. A heart attack came at fifty-six. A bypass at sixty-four. Prostate cancer in his late seventies. Any one of these might have killed a lesser man. Bhau lived to eighty-eight.

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

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, 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.

“Balwadi in the 1950s,” Bhau told me, “was fifty stone houses, shoulder to shoulder, no shade, no road in. When the monsoon broke, the two rivers ran brown and fast. They drowned the footpaths. They cut us off from the world.

“Nothing with an engine could reach us. No train. No bus. No car, no scooter, no auto-rickshaw. A man went alone on a horse. A man with family and grain went by bullock cart, on wooden wheels.

“We put out the lanterns early. We barred the timber doors. The dacoits came out of the dark for that. The forest pressed close, thick and black. Leopards waited in it. Tigers paced through the high grass.”

When an errand took him to Chopda, forty kilometres away, he rode there and back on his horse, Chetak.

Now and then a panther strayed into the village. It killed livestock. Sometimes it killed people. The sight of one emptied the lanes.

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. Dozens of family members and friends vouch for it. In Balwadi, he became a legend.

He loved sport. He woke in the small hours for Wimbledon, for the US Open, the French, the Australian. He watched Federer and Djokovic trade a long rally and clapped like a schoolboy. Cricket statistics he carried in his head. Once I mentioned that Azharuddin had scored 77 that day. He corrected me before I finished the sentence. Seventy-six.

He named his children Vivek, Vinay, Bhavana, Vishwas. Fine Hindi names, each with a weight of its own: discernment, humility, feeling, trust. He sent all four to Indore for school, for college. He stayed behind himself. He ran the farms alone.

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

He had once meant to be a doctor. In the late 1950s he went to Ferguson College in Pune. He won a seat at BJ Medical College. Then his father died. The dream ended there. He went home and took up the family’s burden. But he never lost the hunger to know things. He read. He asked questions. He wanted to understand how the world worked.

That hunger followed him to Sevagram. Whenever he visited he wanted to understand modern medicine. Once I told him about scrub typhus. How the germ enters through the bite of a mite. How a few days of doxycycline cures it. He wrote down every detail in the diary.

All his life Bhau wore a white kurta, a dhoti, a white cap, simple chappals. An old stroke had left his speech slurred, but his arm and his leg still worked. In old age he lost his balance now and then and took up a walking stick. He never complained. He did what he could do himself, for as long as his body let him.

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

For his last two days he took no medicine. No food. No water. His family stayed by the bed. Bhavana was there. Our son Ashwini. I was there too. He died in his own house on 5 February 2019. He was 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. He wore khadi all his life. He went to jail during the freedom struggle. Kamal grew up inside that movement. She never took to the khadi herself.

After completing middle school in Erandol, she moved to Mumbai, spending two years studying Arts at Ramnarayan Ruia College in Matunga while living with her uncle. She then earned her BA at Morris College in Nagpur, residing at the Sehanchal hostel in Sitabuldi. She obtained her degree at a time when far fewer Marwadi women pursued higher education than we are accustomed to seeing today. It is a pity she was never able to use that education to carve out a career, remaining a homemaker for the rest of her life. While Bhau 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. 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. He stayed behind to manage the land. In 1963 Tai moved to the city, into a rented 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 the children’s schooling was done, and she went back to Balwadi.

In those years in Indore, she filled the house she rented. Her four children. The children of Bhau’s elder brother. Two or three more from the extended family. And almost daily, someone from the village. She woke at five. She cooked poha for the morning milk, then lunch, then dinner, and every chore between, alone. Some days dozens sat on her floor to eat.

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

We are Marwaris. Our first language is Marwadi, then Hindi. Tai always spoke to me in Marwadi. She called me Kanwar Saab, the old term of respect for a son-in-law. So did Bhau. But her letters to me came in Marathi, never Hindi. The Khandesh of her girlhood never left her.

She was unassuming. She pushed her opinions on no one. She held the sprawling extended family together through quiet grace. Suman Bang, 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 family’s achievements, with pride. Often with awe.

In 1994 her eldest son, Vivek, died of a heart attack. He was thirty-seven. She bore it the way she bore everything. Quietly.

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

By 2014 her body was giving out. She fractured her humerus and needed surgery at Sevagram. In February 2019, with Bhau dying in the hospital, we asked her whether we should stop his feeds and his medicines and bring him home. “Whatever you think is right,” she said. “Please do.” He died in his own house, among his people, and she sat beside him.

Two months later she fractured a pubic ramus. A small bone. No surgery needed. But her world was closing in. She spent her last years in Balwadi, in the house where she had lived for decades, with her sons Vinay and Vishwas, their wives, her grandchildren around her. When her own time came, she died in that same house, in the bed where she had slept for years, with her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren beside her. No hospital. She left the world on 20 November 2021. She was eighty-nine.

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

Vivek

19 June 1956 – 22 April 1994

He died at thirty-seven. It was a short life, but it called to mind the old line from Anand: “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi.” Life should be grand, not 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. He failed science at Holkar College, switched to commerce, and scraped through with a third-class B.Com in 1975. He never studied again. His record said nothing about his mind, which was quick. He knew no English, not a word of it, and never needed one. He could look at a venture and know, right away, what it would yield.

He came home to Balwadi to farm beside his father. Farming was only the start. He looked at that remote village and saw what others missed. He grew cotton, sugarcane, soybean, pulses. When he needed to move the harvest, he bought a truck. Then he bought more, and had a transport business. He opened a shop for seed and fertilizer. He brokered cotton. He walked the thick forest for tree gum. He traded in bidi leaves. In 1984 he opened a video parlour in the village and charged the locals to watch Bombay films. No business was too small for him.

He was tall and powerfully built, hairy, with a rugged face and broad shoulders. He walked fast, cutting through a room like he owned it. But the laugh was always there, and his eyes lit up at whatever pleased him. He cared nothing for books in his Indore days. He carried a grin that disarmed everyone he met.

Bhau bought him his first motorcycle, a Bullet, in 1976. In 1982 came a Mahindra jeep, GJC 6364. Then an old Fiat, secondhand. Then, in 1991, a Maruti Zen. He drove all of them down the rutted forest tracks of Balwadi without fear, and he never seemed to run out of energy. He belonged to no single class. He sat on a rough bench and shared raw sugar with Adivasi laborers. He hosted visitors from Bombay and Jalgaon and Aurangabad and held them spellbound. He moved between these worlds like the line between them did not exist.

He was no ordinary village moneylender. Adivasi farmers came to his shop for loans, and he gave them cash. When a harvest failed, he did not chase them. He gave them time. He waived the interest. Sometimes he struck the whole debt from his ledger and let it go. Not every risk paid off. A chemical factory, planned with his maternal uncle in Jalgaon, collapsed before the ground was broken. It did not slow him down.

Once a year I went to Balwadi and stayed with him. We walked the edges of his fields. He showed me his crops. He told me what he meant to do next.

People were drawn to him. His friends treated him like a raja. When he came to Indore, he gathered them: Suresh Agrawal, Rohit Jain, Ashok Jain, Anil Arora, Mir Ranjan Negi, the hockey goalkeeper, Dinesh Jain, and Manzoor, who ran Paakiza, a shop that had started as a handcart in 1975. Vivek never drank, never touched meat, but he sat at the head of the table all the same. He ordered too much. He made sure everyone ate. He paid the bill before anyone’s hand reached a wallet. Whoever came to him for help left with it. Ask his friends why they remember him, and they talk about his nerve, his lack of pretense, his open hand.

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

In April 1994 the chemical factory in Jalgaon failed. His uncle’s partnership broke apart, and something in Vivek broke with it. On April 22 he drove from Jalgaon to Balwadi, then on to Indore, in his Tata Sierra. Onkar drove. Sarla rode along. He reached Indore by evening. There was a marriage proposal to see to for Sanjay Jain, so Vivek went to Mhow with a few friends to look over the prospective bride.

He came back to Indore. He sat with Suresh Agrawal, his old school friend, and unburdened himself. At eleven that night Suresh offered to drive him home, a few miles off. Vivek said no. He hired an autorickshaw instead and went straight to his flat at Bansi Plaza, on MG Road. Already his chest was tight, a pressure building under the ribs. There was no lift. He climbed four flights on his own legs.

He reached the flat and dropped onto the sofa. He was breathing hard. Sweat stood cold on his face. Then he went still.

Bhavana knelt beside him. “Vivek bhau,” she said. “Vivek bhau.” He did not stir. She pushed his shoulder. “Vivek bhau, Vivek bhau,” louder now. Still nothing. Panic rose in her. She shook him and shouted it. “Vivek bhau, Vivek bhau!”

Sunanda and Bhavana kept calling his name. Their voices went hoarse. He did not answer.

No doctor, no tablet, nothing at hand. Bhavana pressed on his chest, the little she knew of it, but the engine had quit and would not start again. There were no cellphones then. They rang for help on the landline, and friends came running. Together they carried him down four flights. A car was waiting to rush him to Gokuldas Hospital. He was dead on arrival.

He left Sunanda a widow at thirty-two, and two children: Tushar, nine, and Tulika, six. She never remarried. She raised them alone. Now she lives with Tushar in Indore and spoils her two grandchildren. Tushar has his father’s nose for business and has done well. Tulika became an architect and lives in Kolkata with her husband, Mayank Jain.

Bhau said little about it afterward. He simply moved his attention onto the widow and the grandchildren and never let it move away. Six months on, Bhau needed a bypass in Bombay. Suresh Agrawal booked the flights, flew down with us, and did not leave the hospital corridor until the surgery was over.

Years later, when Vivek’s children married, the same friends came and ran the weddings themselves, as if the bride or groom were their own. Three decades have passed. They still call on Sunanda. When they sit together now, they talk about the eighties and the nineties, when Vivek sat at the head of the table.

His cousin Shailja Asawe remembers him this way. “He was a hero,” she said. “A young man of charm and potential, the kind who commands admiration wherever he goes. He was a natural leader, always at the center of any group. We were a few years older than him, but we never saw it that way. To us he was a man for whom nothing was impossible.”