He died all alone.  Alone in his bed, alone in the house, he just passed away.  Over the ten odd years prior, my father and I had become increasingly distant.   While he was never very social or much of a family man, our relationship was okay for many years.  But he was becoming increasingly bitter, having a tough time dealing with his physical deterioration and his mortality. I found him increasingly difficult to talk to – and honestly, I did not try much to find a way to communicate. We just drifted apart with only short meetings while I was in India.

I always respected him for his incredible intelligence – even till his last couple of years, his mental acuity barely diminished. He was very resilient and never cried about the bad hand he was dealt. I later found out that when he returned to the US when he was almost 50, with no job and little money, he loaded fish and meat early in the mornings in the meatpacking district in New York just to earn enough to keep him going.

But I never really tried to understand him, never took the effort to truly sit and talk to him, and thus remained somewhat critical of him overall as someone who just could not make the right choices.

This was my loss.

After he died, I thought of him.  Looked at old pictures.  Looked at all his old perfectly preserved documents.  Talked to the storekeeper in the gully where he lived when he was young and for the first time wrote down his family tree, whatever was possible.

I slowly started to understand him better, something I could have done when he was alive by talking to him – but didn’t.  My irrecoverable loss that I will always regret.

His father was fairly old when he was born, in his second marriage to his mother.  When he was still a child, his father died.  His only father-like figure was his step brother, many years older than him.  His mother was not very literate and was left to bring him up along with the two other children of her husband.  She had little time for him and so he did not experience much maternal, and definitely no paternal, affection or love.  He was also very different from the peers in his community. It was the early 40’s in pre-independence India.  He was the only person in all of his family that was interested in studying and desirous of a college education. No one else around him understood this, they all were small local shopkeepers in the paper and cloth markets.  He did it all on his own, ending up at the most prestigious college in Delhi- from where he went on to get a Masters in Physics. I doubt there was one person around him that he could talk to about this – he did it all himself.  From here, once again all on his own, he ended up going to University of Chicago for his PhD, almost unheard of back then for a person from India. He specialized in materials science and using exotic materials to develop all sorts of sensors.

His nickname when he was a kid was “Anna” – I don’t know why.   I sat at the small brass shop at the corner of the alley way in Chandni Chowk where he grew up.  When the shopkeeper learned I was “Anna’s” son, he told me how in 1959 when my father came back from the US with his PhD, it was like a celebrity coming home – the entire “mohalla” showed up.  The shopkeeper was a teenager then and remembered how a large sheet was hung in the middle of the street and my father showed his home videos of America to everyone.

When I visited India, I would often find him still reading old science text books on chemistry and materials. He even came up with some new theories on how cooking in certain ways created complex molecules that were responsible for many ailments.   I don’t know if this is true, but he was always thinking and analyzing. Science and materials was his passion and is what defined him.

 He was always drawn to a more simple life, saying how he would like to open a store in Chandni Chowk selling grains or paper or cloth – probably reminiscent of his early childhood sitting in his father’s store. But scientific intellect was his gift and not achieving the success of his full potential haunted him.

They say many of us have a higher love in our lives.  Some find it in faith and God, some in family.  When I finally opened his old briefcase, there were no pictures or memorabilia of family, no articles of religion – just all his degrees and academic achievements kept neatly and safely.  There was also a small box – with small samples of rare metals and materials.  His higher love.

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