Grandpa did not play cricket with me

"I wish I knew what my dad was like. All the mundane things.  Did he like music?  Did he dance?  What did I inherit from him?" she said wistfully.

She was in utero when her father died.  He remains a mystery to her as she nears the end of the fourth decade of her life.

I was reminded of one of my aunts, who was a barely fertilized ovum past the first trimester when her father died. 

Growing up in the extended/joint family of the old days, my aunt did not lack for parental affection.  Her father's older brother treated her on par with his own daughters.  Odds are that in the cultural norms, she did not ask questions about her father.  I assume that the elders did not talk about the tragic death nor the person.

My father's experience is not that different.  He was a 40-day old infant when his father suddenly died. 

The death did not even happen in the village.  Grandfather had gone to Madras (Chennai now) all the way from Pattamadai, a travel that back in 1930 would have taken two full days.  Grandfather was about 22 and my grandmother was almost 18, and my father was their second child at that young age!  Grandfather was a healthy, normal, young man when he left the village.  Not even a week after his departure, a telegram arrived informing my grandmother and others that grandfather was dead.  A shave at the barbershop led to a nasty nick of a skin tag that rapidly got infected in those bad old days before antibiotics.

The older my father got, the more he talked about how maybe he should have found out more about his father from grandfather's relatives and peers.  But, in the old culture, they preferred not to talk about tragedies like my grandfather's death.  Even if father had attempted to engage in such conversations, I am sure he would have been quickly rebuffed.

A couple of years ago, father commented that perhaps his long life, and the long life that his brother had, was the cosmos compensating them for grandfather's brief existence on this planet. Who knows; our comings and goings continue to be a mystery.

My mother's father also died young, when he was only 51.  I was barely three years old when he died.  I grew up without a grandfather.  Whenever other kids talked about their grandfathers, it pained me even more that I didn't know what it meant to have a grandfather. 

In my mind, I knew that I was always looking for elders who could be grandfatherly.  My father's uncle filled that void really well even though he probably was not aware of my emotions, which is why I overlooked all his flaws, and which he had in plenty.  Well, who isn't flawed really!

In one of our chats about grandfather, mother's regret was that she did not get to interact with him as a full-fledged adult.  She felt worse for her youngest sister, who was only 15 when their father died.  But, my mother had known her father well enough for her to comment that grandfather would have been delighted that I was a university professor.

We miss the parents and grandparents that we know and love.  We miss the ones that we did not get to know.  Some choose not to know the parents and grandparents even when everybody is alive and well.  Such is life.