Gavaskar has always had time for the basic verities. His close and mutually admiring relationship with his contemporary and brother-in-law Gundappa Viswanath is rare at the highest levels of any sport. The touching sincerity of his decision to name his son Rohan Jaivishwa after the three batsmen he most admired (Kanhai, Jaisimha, and Viswanath) is another measure of the simplicity of the man. Nor does Gavaskar consider himself above the concerns of ordinary people. One journalist quoted a letter sent to Gavaskar in 1986 by the father of a paraplegic son: “My son is your great fan, but of late he is not taking his medicines at all. He is getting hysterical and uncontrollable. I request you to kindly send him a letter of encouragement.” Gavaskar did.
Imran Khan listed Gavaskar highest among the three batsmen he hated bowling to (ahead of Boycott and Greenidge): “His perfect technique makes him the most difficult batsman alive to dismiss.” But technique was not all. Gavaskar's boyhood idol, M. L. Jaisimha, wrote that the qualities Gavaskar brought to his cricket were those that would have made him successful in any walk of life—“concentration, dedication, single-mindedness of purpose and willingness to learn.” In this Gavaskar was a true professional in a country where sport had for too long been the domain of the gifted amateur.
When he was a boy, Gavaskar used to visit his uncle Madhav Mantri, and run his fingers lovingly through the former Test player's India pullovers. But when he asked for one for himself, Mantri was strict: “The Indian colors,” he said firmly, “have to be earned.” No one has earned them more deservingly than Sunil Manohar Gavaskar. He will always be, in his own way, an embodiment of our coming of age as an independent nation.
37. The Dear Departed
I cannot omit, from a section on the people who made up my sense of “my” India, Indians who are far from famous, but who profoundly touched my life and mind, none more so than my own father.
MY FATHER'S HEART
IT WAS IN 1993, WHEN I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD and a father myself, that the telephone call I had been dreading for twenty-five years — ever since my father, then thirty-eight, had his first massive coronary — finally came. On October 23, 1993, Chandran Tharoor's heart had finally given in.
For a quarter of a century I had feared this moment. I had grown up thinking that every unexpected call at an unusual hour, every unannounced visitor, was to convey the news that my father had suddenly been taken away. Three times in the previous ten years, I had called home — three of my hundreds of regular, routine, anxious calls home — to discover he was in the hospital. Each time he had pulled through. Once, a decade ago, I had brought him to the United States for open-heart surgery and had experienced the very different anxiety of the hospital waiting room, the awful moment when the doctor emerges and you scan his face for the slightest sign of bad news before he speaks. At that time, too, the outcome had been positive. But the time had come when surgery could afford no new solutions. We hoped that my father's zest for life would itself open up the flow to and from his heart. Certainly, there was nothing in that booming voice, that irrepressible spirit, that boundless type-A do-it-all enthusiasm, to suggest that life was ebbing away, that each day his heart was failing, coming closer to admitting a defeat that my father's own manner had never acknowledged.
I was barely twelve when my father first fought for his life in hospital, while I battled fear and bewilderment and prayed for him to recover. He was the only security my mother and little sisters and I had in the world. His work, his income, his drive, kept us in style, fed and clothed us well, sent us to the best schools in Bombay. I loved him: the word games we played together, the cricket matches he took me to, the magic of his irresistible smile as his warm brown eyes lit up at me, even the daily (and all too uncritical) encouragement he provided my writing. But I also understood that my father's survival was intimately bound up with my own, that his dreams for me could founder on his own mortality.
With each passing year, of course, this became less true. As I finished my studies at breakneck speed (always fearing my luck — his health — would run out before I could attain my goals) and embarked on a career, I shed my material vulnerabilities. But the fear of his loss had become so deeply entrenched that it continued to dominate me, my own heart shuddering whenever the faint hollow whine on the telephone suggested an unexpected international call.
Now it had come, and when at last I put the phone down and stood up shivering, the words that came were, “Forgive me, my father. Forgive me.” For I felt that, in recent months, I had not tried hard enough to keep him alive. Into my mind I had admitted the possibility that he would go; and perhaps, in doing so, I had removed the last barrier of desperate need that prevented him from going. For my need of him, my need for his approval, his support, his help, had been diluted over time, while his need of my need had never changed. He had spent his life always being there for me, pushing me to new heights, nurturing great ambitions. He had had such great satisfaction in introducing himself at publishing parties as “the author's author.” And he was my author: the flesh-and-blood source of my skills, of the spark in my eyes that I knew mirrored his own, of the impulse to attain what his ambition had instilled in me, and of the haste to achieve what his frailty had intensified. But over the years, I had ceased to need him as much as before. I had allowed the urgency of our bonds to slacken, and now they had snapped for all time.
If my father had lived, I told myself, I would have demanded nothing of him, just the joy of seeing him mellow into rest. But because I had nothing to ask him for, I left him with nothing to give. And it was to give, to go on giving, that he had fought with such determination against successive assaults on his heart. My father stopped being able to live when he stopped being asked to give.
So I believed. Until I learned there was more to his giving than I, self-centered in mourning, had allowed myself to remember.
My parents’ apartment was overflowing with family and friends when I arrived. For days the phone never stopped ringing; the post-men staggered in with bundles of letters and telegrams; people made inconvenient journeys to Coimbatore to pay him tribute. Former subordinates called from distant cities to weep their regret on the phone; they had never, they said, worked for a better boss. (And indeed, I found among his papers copies of notes he had sent his own superiors, crediting his staff for his achievements.) Throughout my childhood I had been obliged to make room for a succession of young men my father supported while he helped them learn a trade and find a job. Letters poured in from them, and from others my father had helped. Their grief was palpable, for his great-heartedness had touched them financially, morally, and emotionally. But strangers wrote, too, on the letterheads of professional and cultural associations he had given his energies to, to say how much they had been diminished by his death.
“He was all heart,” many of them wrote without conscious irony. With these mourners, the principal reaction was one of disbelief. My father, a physically small man, had for all of them been larger than life; always there when he was needed, always accessible, always willing to try to help, always game for a drink, a party, a session of cards, a new venture, always full of an infectious energy and optimism, a sense of the infinite possibilities of life that he communicated to others. His heart was far larger than that of sturdier men. “I cannot bring myself to mourn for such a man,” wrote a much older friend. “I mourn instead for us, that we have lost him.”