Every Saturday, the entire town of Malegaon would get enveloped in darkness at exactly 6 pm. But not a single scream of surprise would be heard – everyone would be ready for their weekly rituals before the lights went out. The ladies, not spared from their homely duties despite the absence of a proper light source, would light kandeels (traditional oil lamps) across their houses and resume cooking in their dimmed light as if nothing had happened, while the men either dozed or sat on the verandah, talking about worldly matters while swatting flies with an electric racquet.
But all us kids, instead of wreaking havoc in the darkness or playing hide-and-seek, obediently filed beneath the huge banyan tree just outside the temple, and waited patiently for Sanju Dada. Dada would arrive within minutes of the power cut, a massive lamp in hand and sit on the brick platform.
A military veteran who had retired as a Colonel in the Mahar regiment, Dada hadn’t enjoyed an idyllic life for a single day since. Instead, he ran a successful generic medical store by day and taught at a night school by night. Even at 75 years of age, Dada’s 6-foot figure, sprightly moustache and upright mien commanded awe from everyone in the mohalla. He was the one people often went to for advice and counsel. He was the archetypal ‘Wise Ole Man’.
But when Dada would speak to us, it would be in a kind, gentle tone. “Oh my King Dhritarashtra, today I will describe to you…,” he’d always begin by saying, in reference to his namesake celestial seer from Mahabharata, who recounted the Kurukshetra war to King Dhritarashtra from Hastinapur. Sometimes he would take us into the 16th century to show us the shenanigans of Emperor Akbar and his quippy advisor Birbal, on others he would take us to ancient forests of the Panchatantras, with their talking animals and tales with a moral. He never treated us like kids; we were emperors and he was in our servitude. He would answer our childish questions with the same reverence he performed his morning pooja with.
It wasn’t until the streetlight besides the banyan tree flickered to life that our stupor would break. Dada would end his story with a keen quote or a flourishing cliffhanger, and send us off with “Go live as children for one week now, for next week right here you shall be kings again!”
It was in Dada’s voice that I heard Lord Krishna’s immortal lines from the Bhagavad Gita for the very first time, even before Ramanand Sagar’s “Mahabharat” etched them in my memory. It was Dada who taught me the value of honesty through the tale of the woodcutter, the merits of unity through the tale of the farmer and his sons and even the very power of storytelling through the story of Scheherazade.
“All the tales of Arabian Nights have a story behind them,” I remember him saying one Saturday night. “It is the tale of King Shahryar, who was so stung due to the infidelity of one of his wives, that he would marry a virgin and murder her the very next day before she could dishonour him. Scheherazade, a brave young girl, volunteered to wed him, and on their wedding night, she began telling him a story. But she didn’t finish the story, and the king was so curious about it that he had to let her live another day. This went on for a Thousand and One Nights, by which time, our king had begun loving Scheherazade, and he made her his queen.”
These words were all my credulous mind needed to fall in love with stories, and words themselves.
Dada’s sheer magnetic effect remains the clearest memory of my early childhood. It was then under that ancient banyan tree that the idea of becoming a writer was sown inside me. I became a writer so that I could tell – stories as captivating as a certain old imposing old man who once kept kids completely at bay during power cuts.
In the words of Muriel Rukeyser, quoted eloquently by Dada aeons ago –
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”