A handful of thoughts

My dad, is a remarkable person and it’s not just me who’s saying that. Hundreds of family and friends who are indebted to him in some way or other accept that. But since any daughter talking about her dad is unanimously regarded as the epitome of overstatement, I shall let better sense prevail and not go on and on about MY DAD. Instead, I am here to deliver snippets about the incredible incidents he encountered in his 35 years long tenure with the Bank Of Baroda- we call it BoB.

The incidents I’ll be recounting are totally true but for the sake of privacy, I’ll change the names of the people involved. Also I’ll refer to these people with their second names since that was the tradition in govt. and govt. undertaking offices in India in the 70s and 80s.

Dubey

Dubey was a graduate from Bihar and worked as a staff at BoB. My dad came across this fabulous character while he was posted at the M.G. Road Branch. Dubey wore a dhoti with a gamchha tied at his waist, a shirt and came barefoot to office unless my dad along with a few others convinced him to wear shoes and he bought rubber slippers; more appropriately, hawaii chappals. This Mr. Dubey, had volunteered to save in my estimate, some 90% of his income and he worked quite hard but smoothly, to achieve this.

Dubey had no place to stay. He slept on the verandah of the Kolkata High Court building. However, this did not come for free- he had to pay Rupees 5 per night to the patroling police. Once in two three months, Dubey went missing from office for a couple of days. When asked, he used to say coolly- “uthake le gaya tha”. Which means he was picked up at night by the police who had to produce a certain number of cases every month and had an agreement with these people that every month some of them had to volunteer to accompany the police to court and then jail. So once in a couple of months came Dubey’s turn to sleep in jail which was again a bliss for him because FOOD IN JAIL IS FREE and at the end of the two days, Dubey would get his head shaved, that too FOR FREE, at the Jail’s coiffeur.

The dhoti and shirt Dubey wore were the only he had. Every morning Dubey went to the Ganges, took a bath there, washed his clothes and waited clad in his gamchha for the dhoti and shirt to dry. Not that he didn’t buy any clothes; he did- once the ones he wore got tattered.

This great Mr. Dubey at one point of time in his life began to receive mails from his home village with news of his wife’s illness. But of  course, he put off going home until his wife’s death because- a wife can be replaced but money once gone never comes back. If you aske me, “what next” I won’t have an answer to give you. I don’t know what happened to him after that; he had a daughter and he got her married off unhappily with a dowry guzzling brat. The rest must have been pretty conventional and therefore uninteresting- not worth a mention in a person’s website who avoids all contact from normalcy.