Gulpi
The heady rise and dramatic fall of my great-grandfather N. Sundaram Iyer
She looked through me with a twinkle in her eye, draped in a greying shawl, seated in her preferred spot in the corner of the family room, the Kindle in her hand halfway through her re-reading of The Brothers Karamazov.
‘There was this one time, it was just before one of my MSc maths exams at Presidency, she said in her gentle Tamil, ‘the subject material that term was particularly hard, my classmates and I had pretty much given up getting any sort of decent score.’
She paused briefly as we turned toward the television; Dhawan edged and caught behind.
‘So, I was saying — it’s the morning of the exam and I’m getting dropped off at college in appa’s car. There was this one topic that we all knew would feature in a question — exact-a enna-nu ippo nyabagam illa. The proof for this, if one is successful at getting there, generally took more than an hour of effort. One hour, and maybe 10 dense pages.’
‘Appa turns to look at me, seated worriedly in the back seat, and asks if I was well prepared for the exam. I tell him about the “1-hour proof” and how it was troubling me’.
‘He picks up a piece of scrap paper, turns toward me, and starts writing. Explaining as he wrote. It was unbelievable — everything suddenly made sense — he solved the question right there in 2 minutes, in 4 lines’, she said, as Kohli walked in.
‘4 lines. He approached the question in a manner that would never have struck any of us. I stepped out of the exam with more than an hour to spare.’
She sipped on her near-black tea, with a just tea-spoon of milk. ‘The person who examined my answer would have known that it wasn’t me. No chance’, she smiled. ‘Those 4 lines were signature Sundaram Iyer’.
My grandmother Lakshmi Balasubramaniam turned 80 this week. Private and quiet, she doesn’t easily open up and share her emotions. But build her trust, get her into the comfort zone, and she’ll gently pull back the curtains and give you a peek into that fiercely strong will, that sharp intellect, that surprisingly childlike sense of humor. Keep listening, and you’ll get glimpses of the rich and tumultuous decades that she has lived through, the stories big and small that make up a life. For behind that unassuming exterior is someone who has lived through great highs and sobering lows, and retained her firm center through it all. We can’t get to her early years, though, without making an encounter with the family-legend whose rags-to-riches-to-rags story my maternal cousins and I kept getting glimpses into — a passing comment here, a lament there.
The broad outlines, cobbled together from various family sources, and factoring in nostalgia’s mysterious ways of playing with reality — born into poverty in Cuddalore, on the coast just off Madras, N. Sundaram Iyer was a mathematics genius, moving to the city and running tuition classes each evening to earn his way to a formal education. His rise in the academic circles of Madras was rapid, making waves with his unconventional teaching style that stripped seemingly intimidating concepts to their naked basics to leave students shaking their heads in awe. Overflowing classrooms followed him wherever he went, and to whatever extent one can use the term ‘rockstar’ to describe someone in the esoteric field of pure mathematics in pre-independence Madras, he was one. He was a hugely popular lecturer at Loyola College, and his guest lectures at Presidency were much awaited events. He went on to become one of the founding members of Vivekananda College and its second Principal, where he held reign for a decade.
Alongside his mathematical acumen though, he possessed an extremely sharp business brain. He read the stock and real-estate market and its complex web of cause-and-effect with an ease that few others possessed, and made investments that started to pay off. His rise as an entrepreneur paralleled his move up the ranks in the world of numbers, each successful investment compounding to catapult the man born into poverty into becoming one of the two or three richest people in Madras.
My grandmother, Sundaram Iyer’s last child, was born right in the midst of the riches. She grew up in a mansion in Nungambakkam that had Plymouths and Cadillacs lined up for her to take a pick from every time she stepped out. Iyer owned all the buses in the City Motor Service, and my grandmother talks about how, each time she or her siblings would board them, the bus drivers would readily deviate from their designated routes, sometimes quite significantly, to drop them off at their doorstep. She smiles when she thinks about how she would walk in to jewelers’ stores with her sisters and step out with their stash for the day, with nary a thought given to the bill, which would be sent directly to Iyer.
Being a woman brought up under gaze of strict and orthodox eyes, though, meant that she couldn’t revel in her family riches to the extent that her brothers did; it wasn’t often that she could make those in-and–out visits to the jewelers, and every step outside home would be in the presence of diligently nosy chauffeurs. But her long stints at home opened up riches of a different, perhaps much more valuable sort — their home had a massive library, with books stacked up from the floor up to the ceiling, and she worked her way through the shelves, starting with Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie thrillers. Her tastes quite catholic; a Mills & Boon romance would be followed by an English-translation of a Russian door-stopper classic followed by the latest Tamil fiction hot from the press.
Iyer’s rise was heady, but his fall was even more dramatic. Driven possibly to over-confidence by the string of successful business bets, heeding perhaps to the advice of friends and advisors of various levels of pedigree, or maybe just allured by the lights and color, he stepped into Tamil cinema, into film financing.
Was it simply a case of bad luck? Or was the man of numbers just out of out of his depth in these new surroundings, in the world of song, dance and cinematic dreams, where the box-office success of a film cannot be pinned down to formulae? In either case, the slide was humbling. Some brief successes (‘see, here’s Gemini Ganesan’, paati would point out, as we look through the album of her flamboyant wedding) were followed by failures. One failed movie leading him putting even larger sums in another, with the hope that this one would make it big, and so on… Failure begot more pressure from various lenders, until the whole empire crumbled in a heap. Almost overnight, he had to file for bankruptcy. Iyer and his eldest son had to make repeated visits to the courts to defend lengthy lawsuits. The home, the cars, the line of buses… gone. The elite of Madras that was courting Iyer in his prime were nowhere to be seen.
And all those books, including hordes of classics in English, Tamil, and Sanskrit, all of them were sold for their weight as scrap.
Google has the last word in the matter — when I now look up N. Sundaram Iyer, all I can find is the Madras High Court judgement authored by a Justice J. Jagadisan, declaring “the respondent-debtor as insolvent under the provisions of the Presidency Towns Insolvency Act…” The date of the judgement is 13 September 1962, less than 2 weeks after paati gave birth to her first daughter, my mother Vasuda.
He also continues to live on the walls of Vivekanada College, his stern eyes looking straight past you, a small but perhaps fitting ode to the mathematics teacher that he ultimately was.
Newly wed and now firmly middle-class, my grandparents moved to Bombay where thaatha worked in the textile industry. The girl who grew up surrounded — quite literally, as I later found out — by bars of gold, was now in a small apartment in a cramped building in heaving, overflowing Bombay.
Her memories of the next few decades are less flamboyant, but, to her, much more meaningful — the joys, small and big, of a family growing together; mother, father, 3 daughters…
In fact one of the things that strike me the most about paati is her matter-of-fact, stable approach to life. She might be going through emotional turmoil but you wouldn’t have a clue by looking at her. ‘Yes we had all those riches back then, but so what. Money comes and goes. Things good and bad happen. But I got a great husband, loving daughters, so many friends.’
I couldn’t be with her on her 80th, stuck temporarily on the other side of the planet, but I’m thinking about her… about her exasperating stubbornness about things she believes in, her quiet but warm presence, which doesn’t announce itself yet is something that we bank on (and would be rudderless without). I’m thinking back to the days and weeks before my tenth standard exams in Bangalore, when she would sit my friend Bharadwaj and me at our dining table, and in her meticulous, organized way, go about melting away the complexities in algebra and geometry (she’s her father’s daughter, after all).
I’m thinking about her pragmatic, progressive views on the inevitable changes in society around her (a trait that she shares, amongst many others, with my other grandmother, my father’s mother, who has been another solid presence throughout my life). I’m thinking of the long debates we have had over religion, always illuminating and never rancorous. She is religious without being too ritualistic — in fact, by most definitions of the word, she might be termed agnostic (but I don’t want to be the one to announce that to her…)
I’m thinking of summers in Coimbatore filled with her delectable cooking, all the vegetables cut into tiny identical cubes. I’m thinking about her love for cricket (and in particular — in recent years — for MS Dhoni).
But most of all, I’m reminded of her partnership with my grandfather (P. Balasubramaniam), and how beautifully they complemented each other. At over 6 foot tall, sharp featured, with a flamboyant and infectious personality, an outrageous sense of humour, and a clear, booming voice, he owned every room he walked into, while paati receded to the background. He wore his heart completely on his sleeve; his short temper was renowned both for its force and its lack of prejudice — during his final days at the hospital, he tore apart, for various reasons, both the head doctor and the peon who attended to his room.
He called my grandmother gulpi, a meaningless - and I suppose affectionate - term (he had similar gibberish names for most others in the family), and it stuck - she was gulpi to all of us.
He would laugh wholeheartedly after pulling his latest victim’s leg; he would shed a tear spontaneously on listening to a song he loved. Gulpi, on the other hand has always been rock solid. The only time I have seen her break down was at my grandfather’s funeral a few years back. I don’t think my cousins, my brother and I have ever been as shattered as we were that day, when we saw gulpi crying.
I point to the Kindle — ‘which part are you in’, I ask.
We talk about the epic monologue by Ivan to Alyosha, and that leads us down a meandering trail… She argues that you and I might not need religion to be moral, but what about the vast masses, without some overarching restraining factor what’s to stop the world from descending into anarchy. I argue back that this can be viewed as condescending, that we are ok without god, but the masses need to be kept in check… arguments that we have made hundreds of times before. We seamlessly shift tracks to the happenings in the recent elections, to deconstructing the fine rasam we had earlier in the day, to analyzing the mixed reviews of the newly released movie, to…
She stops in midsentence. The commentators are screaming; there is a flurry of activity; the fielders converge in celebration; the fourth wicket down. She puts on her headset, her focus now fully on the television screen. MS is walking in to bat, and trivialities like politics and philosophy can wait.