A college friend named Susha and I were having lunch in Delhi recently. As college-mates often do, we reminisced, speaking fondly of someone who had charmed everyone at our college parties with her quick wit and elegance.
The person we were talking about was Bimla Thapar, who died a couple of days later on Good Friday at the age of 98. She was so popular with the younger generation that she might as well have been in college with us. She was always Nani to me, the grandmother of two close friends. Returning from Bangkok a couple of decades later, Susha had visited her one evening and was so thoroughly entertained that she stayed till 11 p m until Nani's nursing attendant had to wheel her away to bed.
To say that Nani had charm is an understatement; many of my friends and I were infatuated with her. With shimmering silver hair and high cheekbones, she was one of those blessed women who become more beautiful as they get older and whose turn of phrase becomes even wittier. I was introduced to her at the Delhi Gymkhana Club when I was 17 and she was 66.
As grandmothers go, she was utterly original. At the steering wheel of her hardy blue Ambassador, she looked like an Indian Karen Blixen on a car safari. She wore a faded pink cotton jacket over a sari to keep the sun off her arms and white gloves to grip the steering wheel better. There were usually drop earrings of diamonds or pearls dangling from her ears. On one occasion, a friend dropping me on his motorbike to a bus-stop near her home was able to catch up with her only at a red-light because she drove so fast.
When I stayed the weekend, I was up well before my friends Siddo and Mekhi. I am embarrassed to report that I would follow Nani's tea tray into her room. Amid circles of smoke from the cigarettes that seemed an extension of her impossibly long fingers, we would sip cups of Darjeeling tea from a silver teapot under a tea cosy and share the papers; she would casually let slip funny one-liners as often as she tapped ash. Peacocks would pay homage, peering into the French windows of her bedroom. She wore a kind of beekeeper's headscarf to bed that somehow simultaneously kept her face cream from staining the pillow and her waist-length hair from getting entangled. I marvel at how she and her daughter Premila put up with these early morning intrusions weekend after weekend. I felt completely at home because - as in my parents' flat in Calcutta - laughter-filled dinners were followed by more conversation till we kissed the grown-ups good night.
Nani regarded us as adults long before we deserved to be treated thus. One summer afternoon, I asked her to teach me how to make a pink gin. She spent about five minutes getting the Angostura bitters to spread perfectly on the inside of the glass and then made such fantastically alcoholic cocktails that I fell asleep on the bus back to Delhi University and missed my stop. When I left college, we held a party at her home. Before the guests arrived, she came to check everything was in order. Lined up on the dining table were a dozen bottles of the instant hangover-inducing Solan No 1 whisky along with countless bottles of beer.
Nani took this all in in single glance before instructing us to dilute the alcohol so that our guests were not drunk before dinner. With that, she was off to a party on the other side of town. I would not have entrusted a home to college kids in the way she did; there were rich Afghan rugs on the floor, cut-glass vases and silver salvers on the sideboards. She returned close to midnight and held court, dressed in a dark blue silk sari, her trademark bright red lipstick and matching nail polish lighting up the room.
She was the most non-judgmental of grandmothers, so laid-back that I can't remember her speaking about religion or whether we should marry, both almost universally obsessive subjects in India. Her grandson Siddo recalls having a conversation a decade ago about what to do with her ashes. Just scatter them around the farm in Chhatarpur. "Why pollute the Ganges, darling," she quipped. In the past couple of years as old age finally got the better of her, she could be lucid one moment and at sea the next. As her son Karan was leaving at the end of the Wimbledon final last July, she asked a few times when he would be back. The next day, he said; he visited her every day. When exactly, she persisted. Tomorrow afternoon. "Wunderbar," she responded with her dazzling smile.
When I saw Nani at the Army R & R Hospital last year, she remained steadfastly cheerful, enquiring about my parents whom she had long outlived. The head matron of the hospital spoke of her with awe and affection to a colleague of mine who was a patient on the floor below - just as we had as college students, just as Susha and I did only last week. In my last year in college, I gave her a little trophy from the gift store Giggles. The inscription read, "World's best grandmother." Three decades on, that seems an understatement.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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