I burst into laughter remembering my  uncle’s comments a few days before his end.  “ Hey,” he said,  “I am a holy ( holey) man.” He had made this comment just a week before his death, even as his body was riddled with outlets made for the various tubes.

We could not help remembering the innumerable one-liners that my uncle had the penchant for making on most occasions. It was his funeral and the flat was filled up with all his own and acquired relatives. Though it was a solemn occasion, there was a burst of laughter as we remembered this great man who made his own and others’ lives a big laughter zone. At the time of his making the above joke, he was aware that he was fast losing the battle to cancer that had spread all over his body. He had to have his leg amputated just the previous year. All his relatives poured in when they heard the news that doctors had given him just a week’s time on this planet.Yet, he made his loved ones laugh one last time.

A relative shared this with us on the day of the funeral. An elderly family doctor had been in to visit my uncle ten days earlier. After his visit the relative asked my uncle what the doctor had to say….

“ He asked for my prescriptions to follow the medication…” was his reply.

He lived a full life. A renowned bridge player and a retired employee of Bharat Petroleum (erst-while Burma Shell), he was the life and soul of any gathering. Thirty years earlier, the doctors found a small tumour in his leg very worrying and he was asked to have it operated upon. My father ( his younger brother) rushed from Hyderabad to be by his side at the time of the operation. The doctors were explaining to my father the situation, when my father commented,

“ By tomorrow, we will know where we stand.”

To which my uncle quipped, “ or whether I stand at all…” That was his statement when he was just in his forties.

The operation was getting delayed because his pulse rate was rather irregular. A pretty Goan nurse while checking once more commented to my uncle, “ Be calm or else your pulse rate will never come to normal.”

My handsome uncle replied, “ how will it come to normal when you hold my hand? Ask that bearded man to come and my pulse rate will be more than normal,” much to the nurse’s delight!

On the day of his surgery, his surgeon tut-tutted and removed a small hair that the ward boy had missed out while preparing my uncle for his operation. My uncle groggy after his anesthesia commented dryly,  ” I have the world’s most expensive barber! ”

The surgeon saw to it that he was present when my uncle came back to his consciousness to smile down at him and comment, “ The world’s most expensive barber is looking down at you.”

Even simple things like the collecting of blood samples  for various tests wasn’t spared by my uncle. After one such visit by a junior doctor, my father walking in just to see the white coated man leaving my uncle’s room wanted to know what the doctor wanted….

Pat came the reply, ” He is after my blood!”

By God’s grace he survived the fright and his leg was saved except for a small limp. He was the soul of the hospital and when he was discharged, the story goes that the nurses gave him a small token gift for being “ a wonderful patient.”

Such was his famous one-liners that kept the whole gathering in splits. His wife was devoted to him. Yet, she was the brunt for many a jokes.

“ Meena, Meena come fast with a candle….. Want to know what happens to Jeetander” was his urgent call for help when the power failed during a Doordarshan movie. The good-natured aunt rushed in with a candle but very soon joined in the laughter. He was a versatile man who could mingle with people from all age groups. Small children loved him and adults of course loved discussing carnatic music, politics, cricket and almost all things under the sun with him.

There was a time when he was caught in the airport with an in-ordinate delay of the plane he had to board. Finally, the call came and the passengers were asked to move to the security check. When someone commented that this check was causing further delay, my uncle told the clerk in-charge that if any of them had any arms they would have used it by now!

When he visited me in Lucknow, under my urging, he asked my husband to bring in a video cassette of a movie, which my husband felt was a big bore. My husband procured it for him but with a warning that the movie wasn’t that good according to reports.

After his return from office he asked my uncle how the movie was. To which my uncle said, “ it was good and would have been better if we were all cats!”  The movie was almost entirely shot in the dark as it was one of those art movies.

His leg was always his Achilles heel. The second time the leg gave him trouble and he had to undergo another surgery a decade back, the doctor assured him that he would see that my uncle walks home.

“ So, you mean to say that I have to sell my car to pay your bill?” was my uncle’s tongue-in-cheek query. He was left with a noticeable limp after the second operation. One fine day, he had walked over to my parent’s house during one of our visits, when we asked him if we need to fetch an auto rickshaw for his return journey, to which my uncle replied;

” No need, I have a walking stick on one hand and  a talking stick ( meaning my aunt) on the other!”

Alas, the family gathering will never be like before without his larger- than- life presence. We are all glad that his suffering of the past three years has come to an end. We will continue to live with the memory of his famous witticisms and that would be our legacy to our children. We all hope to emulate this person’s take on life. He never took out his frustrations on others. He knew how to see only the bright side of his life and almost took a child-like pleasure in most things.

To lift the lines of the Bard, Here was the wittiest man,  when comes such another?

We continue to miss you, periappa…

 

Wrote this originally for sulekha.com and pratilipi .com

This blog post is part of ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’
hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla
in collaboration with Dr. Preeti Chauhan.