Baapa!
I never planned to write this post beforehand. This post and everything in it is very dear to me.
I have a few questions: Do you have anyone in your life whom you look up to? With whom you dont talk with and still remains your idol? Your inspiration? Someone who takes care of you from afar and never lets you know? Someone with the ability to make you cry diamond tears even from his memories?
I had such a person, my grandfather, whom I fondly called “BAAPA” (this word is used in Gujarati).
Today (16/01/2023), 7 years ago, marks a day when I lost him. Although I respected him a lot when he was there, since that night when we lost him, there’s been this sense of incompleteness that I’ve felt.
By the time he came to understand things, we never spoke; in fact, he was generally a quiet person. He never spoke from the heart, and he didn’t say much. He used to always be cheerful. My mom always spoke about how he took care of me, shielded me when I used to mess around the house, breaking and destroying things. My best bet was to go hide behind him, and no one dared to even speak a word to me. He really was my Savior.
I think my schooling days would’ve been incomplete without him. He always came to take me from school. Never saying a word, he was just standing last behind the wall and waiting for my eyes to search him, and when they did, we set out to reach home without speaking a word.
Reaching from school to my home was a different task altogether. Being the first one, you’re always pampered and envied by your younger sibling (high five to all the eldest ones reading this). I always would ask him to buy me a Rs 1 kulfi, half of which would get eaten by my school uniform and face (again, Bapa shielded me from this once I reached home). Even if my demands were to buy the expensive Rs. 5 Lays chips, he never said no.
I always used to sit besides him during lunch, where he made me eat green curd rice (green chillies with curd rice). I haven’t had that kind of rice ever again.
This post would not be enough to describe him as a person and how important he was in my life. Looking at who he was and how he was, I always aspired to be like him. He’s like a friend in disguise who is not currently with me, but still I look up to the stars and wait for some kind of signal to be sent from him.
When you lose someone, there’s always some kind of memory or any object that becomes a part of you, and for me, that song was, “LAADKI,” which had lyrics, “O re o parevada tu kaale udi jaaj re, Mari haathu rahi jaa ne aaj ni raat.”
This was the song I heard the night he left us, and whenever I miss him or listen to this song, I really wish he was there with me one more day. Talked to me one more day. Shielded me from the rest of the world one more day. Came to take me from the office one more day. I just wished… he had been there one more day.
Listening to that song, the tears from my eyes do not stop, just like they are doing right now.
The blog post image says a thousand words more than I can type.
I know you are beside me all the time. Thank you, Baapa!
