Grandfather Blues

I missed knowing one of the men who could have truly inspired greatness in my life, all by a fraction of a decade. Now, to put it "technically", I was around, albeit at the innocent age of five, there's only so much information you can absorb from someone with such a strong personality.
With a natural ability with instruments and an almost instinctive skill in music, he could play about eight instruments, that I know of, his favorite being the violin and the trumpet.
I've grown up on stories of how he could sans instrument, write out orchestra music in all its complexity and sight sing, one of those true old world abilities lost to most of these progressive software reliant modern musicians (Me included).
My earliest memory of him, has to show of his devotion to his job as my caretaker. Whenever I played in the small little stretch of land connected to my building, he'd watch over me with eagle eyes and the moment I got out of eyeshot, yelled out my name at the top of his lungs. His job, one that he'd taken on himself, was to protect me from everything! Speeding cars, bullies, open sewers, cow stampedes, cyclones, planes falling from the sky and even from the devil himself. He did this with a flair that cannot translate into any of the words my language may employ.

Another aspect of I fondly remember is that he drank like a fish. It could be the rose tinted glasses i wore at the time, but i remember him as a warm, happy drunk. He drank his morning and afternoons away and loved the night. My first introduction to Igor as a character came from his 'friend' or as I now understand 'drinking buddy'. After he was done with his morning rituals, he would dangle himself half out of our window and yell out his name. "VINCENT!!!!!!!". Only a true Goan belonging to a historic time now gone by yells out a friends name every morning as an indication that it was time now for said friend to pay a visit to the local bar and get a bottle of the local stuff, country liquor.

Thus they sat, in the cherry morning, laughed amongst themselves at unknown inside jokes, stopped to eat and sometimes even through the golden light onto dusk.

He had figured out, that life was what you made of it and yet, life was a bitch.
Life gave you the blocks to make it with, but each block being a bit tainted and spoiled.

Did i mention he lived his life in poverty? Oh yes, extreme poverty.
Being a musician back in the day didn't pay enough to raise four children, especially by himself. So he begrudgingly took up a job as a compounder in a doctors clinic, that would be the man back in the day who actually gave you the pills after the doctor had written his prescription.
Also, did i mention that he was an academic genius? The man was a bachelor of science, which in the day equaled to a Harvard education. Doesn't fit in with the poverty does it? Confounds me til date.

It is hard to describe the sense of nostalgia I feel recounting these memories, fully aware of the fact, that did he really exist today, there's a distinct possibility that we'd be mirror images of each other. My father tried hard to become everything he wasn't. So much, that he used his failed attempt (if i know my grandfather, i know he probably didn't really attempt anything) at musicianship to not be one himself. My father became restricted and controlled, didn't throw his life away drinking and always strived to provide, so much so that his motto for life was "if your children have no food to eat, you work, rob, cheat, but you carry out the responsibility you've taken on".

I've of course, become everything my father isn't, so hence the logic applies that i'll revert back to what made my grandfather. From his wacky sense of music, to his love for life to his disgust for the drudgery of living.


Sometimes, probably the only time I self admittedly would believe in a concept of heaven, would be the times I'd secretly wish he was still around, watching in approval of what I've become, secretly sitting by the window of heaven with Vincent and a glass of heavens local liquor in hand, smiling to himself.