The earliest recollection that I have of him -- other than, of course, of indulging me with toys and other usual goodies -- was his obsession with our Ambassador car, WBF 600, that he had purchased in 1963 or 1964 for the princely sum of Rs 14,000. Ours was the only car in the entire neighbourhood and, since our house did not have a garage, it was kept in the house of one of his wealthy friends. Nevertheless, every Sunday he would bring it to our house, park it at the kerb, and tinker with it while I would hang around trying to help him with whatever had caught his fancy on that day.
This car was the source and platform for many of our adventures. First, every year during the Durga Puja vacation, we would travel to my grandfather's garden villa in Purulia, and we did so in two cars—ours and my uncle's (meshomashai’s) car. This was a grand affair. We would start off at around 6 AM, have a quick break at Burdwan at the Burmah Shell Highway Service restaurant, and then have lunch on the Durgapur Barrage. For this lunch, my grandmother, Didima, would always take along luchi and alur dom, and we had an exciting picnic in the gardens alongside the barrage while watching the water frothing and foaming below. Each year, before starting out from Calcutta, my father used to hire a whole set of spare parts from Howrah Motor Stores (located at Hazra junction, not at Howrah) as insurance against breakdown. Those that were not required were returned after we came back. In general, there would always be one tyre puncture, and I learnt from him to take this in our stride. The passengers would get out of the car and wait by the side while he would jack up the car and replace the wheel. I would, of course, help him—and this practice would be of immense help to me later on.
From Purulia, Babai used to drive us on long expeditions in the Chotanagpur area—Hazaribagh, Netarhat, Chandil, Ranchi, and of course to Shirkabad and Bagmundi on the Ajodhya Mountains. It was in one of these expeditions that he tried to follow the Kansai (Kangsabati) River to its source in the Ajodhya Mountains, and I remember that our car got stuck in the sands of the dry river bed. My mother was furious with him for embarking on this 'stupid' adventure, but at the end of the day, we managed to extricate ourselves and get back. Unfortunately, we never made it to the source.
My father had induced my mother to learn driving, and this led to another interesting event. That year, my uncle had suddenly been called away to Delhi for some university work, and it was planned that he would fly back to Ranchi. My father and mother would drive the two cars to Ranchi, and once my uncle landed, he and my father would drive back. But on reaching Ranchi, we learnt that because of some technical snag, my uncle's flight would not land in Ranchi but would fly directly to Calcutta—and this put us in a soup. While my mother was a licensed driver, she had never driven at night and that too on a narrow highway. Would she be able to do so? Everyone was concerned, but we had no choice. Finally, we started off with my father driving slowly in front and my mother following him with my grandfather sitting next to her for encouragement. The normal two-hour drive took twice as long as we travelled very slowly, but eventually, we reached Purulia safe and sound. My grandfather was so excited to see his daughter driving at night that he went to the bazaar the next day and bought a new saree for my mother.
In another similar expedition, we travelled to Deoghar to visit the famous Shiv temple at Baidyanath Dham. Here, we met an enterprising photo studio owner who convinced my father to rent an Agfa Click III camera for me so that I could learn photography. My father had a keen interest in photography, but he had never owned a camera. So he and I took quite a few pictures of the temples, but more importantly, after we came back to Calcutta, he bought an Agfa Click III camera for me, and the two of us went around the city taking many pictures. At this time, foreign cameras were very expensive and difficult to buy except through smuggling channels. But my father arranged to buy a 35mm Kiev camera from Russia for me through legal channels, and that was my first introduction to professional-grade photographic equipment.
Another piece of technology that my father showed me was a calculator that had recently appeared in Calcutta. His office had purchased one and, one weekend, he brought it home for me to see how easy it was to do big multiplications and divisions at the press of a button. My father was always keen on new technology, and he talked about the wonders of the Telex system that had recently been installed in his office and through which, if one typed in Calcutta, the text would immediately appear in Moscow. Unbelievable! He also used to follow the emergence of computers, and I remember that he had bought a book on "An Introduction to Computers" that I still have. Written in the early seventies, this book talked about ferrite cores and magnetic storage devices that we would barely recognise today. Nevertheless, it introduced me to the concept of binary numbers, which is something that we all use today.
Sometime around this time, Hargobind Khorana got the Nobel Prize for his work on genes, and I remember my father excitedly explaining the concept of genes to me. Not that I understood much, but I could sense that this was something interesting -- and of course, later on, I realised how important it all was.
Even though I could get around my school syllabus on my own, my father encouraged me to go above and beyond what was taught in school. Whenever he visited Delhi on company work, he would buy books on science and technology from Daryaganj and leave it to me to figure out. This gave me a head start in my National Talent Scholarship examination. He also encouraged me to explore more complex concepts like quantum mechanics and calculus and when my doubts and questions in these matters went beyond his ability to address, he would cheerfully take me to meet some experts in these areas. I remember that once I had a great doubt about something in nuclear physics and he and I went to meet Bultu Kaku, who was the brother of my father's class mate, Arun Mitra. This gentleman was a PhD in Physics from Canada and was happy to help me out.
In addition to introducing me to cars, photography, computers, quantum mechanics and genetics, the most important thing that Babai introduced me to was our Brahmin heritage rooted in Sanatan Dharma. As in the case of technology, it is not that I understood everything, but he initiated in me an interest and a liking for Vedanta by sharing with me his own excitement and interest in such matters. He had also arranged for us to go to Haridwar and then on to Badrinath and Kedarnath, but unfortunately -- for reasons that I have forgotten -- we could only reach Badrinath and had to miss Kedarnath.
Like most Hindu Brahmins of that era, he was regular with the Sandhya devotionals in the morning, and of course he had initiated me into my own second birth of being a true Brahmin with the Gayatri Mantra during my Upanayan ceremony. Subsequently, he crafted -- or rather curated -- a very simple version of the Sandhya devotionals for me to follow so that I could carry on with them wherever I went. This compact sequence -- beginning with a welcome to the Divine Feminine; followed by a description of her three states at dawn, noon, and dusk; her invocation using the Savitri mantra in Gayatri metre, repeated 10, 31, or 108 times depending on the time available; and concluding with her departure and a brief apology for any errors -- is something that has stayed with me over the years, across continents and through thick and thin. In its own unique way, it keeps me connected to my Brahmin heritage -- an unbroken tradition that spans more than a hundred and fifty generations and reaches back beyond the Mahabharata era, to the earliest stirrings of intellectual inquiry in the human mind.
To the world in general and the social circles of Calcutta, my father, like me, was as anonymous as any other Indian could be -- but to me, he was a hero who showed me the path to where I am today.
"Never Born, Never Died, Stopped by the World between 1927 and 1992."
