Uncle Pai, a dinner-time guardian angel

There’s a line that some of my close friends love to repeat whenever I’m sitting for dinner with them. “Where’s your Tinkle? How are you going to eat without a Tinkle?” Let me explain. I have this peculiar habit — whenever I have to eat dinner alone, I carry a Tinkle with me. The upside of this: I dine in excellent company. The downside: Most of the 200 copies of Tinkle that I own have curry-stained pages.

I can trace this quirk back to my childhood. Both my parents worked late hours and were hardly ever around for dinner. With the ‘No-TV in the dining room’ rule strictly enforced, there wasn’t much to occupy me during dinner. And if you were ever subject to what our cook insisted was ‘baingan ki sabzi’ day after day, you would understand my urgent need for a suitable diversion. So I took to reading Tinkle comics at dinner and have continued to do so ever since.

I have never met Anant (Uncle) Pai. I didn’t even know what he looked like till I saw his photograph in the papers on Friday. But for all these years, he has been my dinner-time guardian angel, presiding over unfinished dinner plates with, I’d like to imagine, a warm, indulgent smile.

If you think a seemingly adult human being waxing lyrical over children’s comics is a bit strange, you may be underestimating the impact that Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic books had on generations of young Indian minds.

Once, while researching a story on Indian mythology, I sent out, to a variety of people, including professors, authors and mythology experts, the question: What kindled your interest in mythology? The overwhelming answer I received was ACK. It was the same for me.

ACK was my substitute grandmother who regaled me with the exploits of the irascible Shiv. Or with saucy tales of the great Indra, who smartly hid in a lotus stem to escape the wrath of his wife. An act I’m sure any numbers of Indian husbands wish they could replicate. Even today, while reading the epics in book-form, my visual reference is guided by the colourful etchings of ACK.

So thank you Uncle Pai. Thank you for the endless debates I’ve had with my grown-up friends about whether Kaalia the Crow was justified in perennially denying the rascally Chamataka and Doob-Doob any food at all. Thank you for Uncle Anu’s Club that earned me an extra couple of marks, enabling me to pass my Class 5 science test. But most of all, thank you for brightening up those dim, lonely, baingan-filled evenings of my childhood. I’ll never forget you and I’ll never be too old to read Tinkle, I promise.