Never say die

When my father first spoke of his bosom pal, Professor Puran Singh, sometime in the early 1970s, I missed the import. An impish school-going kid can’t be expected to decipher life’s cryptic messages.

Almost 40 years later, burdened with that much more maturity, I might as well assume my father’s role to convey his message. For that, I need to tell you about this titan with a frail exterior, Puran Singh.

A feisty Punjabi poet with a penchant for the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, Singh used to teach English Literature in Japan in the 1950s. My father reminisced that Singh’s poems followed the Whitman route, penetrating, steeped in realism and spontaneously poured forth in free verse. He was as passionate about literature as he was about life. “You have got to know how to survive defeat, that’s how you develop character. Remember what president Richard Nixon said, ‘Where a man of unassailable character treads, others follow,’” was his oft-quoted refrain to his students.

Singh suddenly decided to give up teaching and returned to India and settled in Dehradun in the 1960s. He was originally from Panipat, which was part of undivided Punjab then. For some time, he taught at Roorkee, but soon abandoned that and settled for farming. “It’s not the job, but the dedication to the job that matters,” my father quoted him as saying.

Singh toiled for six months, sowed seeds, tilled the land — did everything himself. Probably, the weather gods didn’t like the goings on. That year, unprecedented floods wiped out all the grain. A pellicle of gloom engulfed the village. But Singh was unfazed.

Always prolific with words, he started dancing in the rains with the famous Punjabi couplet on his lips, “bhala hoya mera charkha tuta, jind ajabon chhuti” (it’s good my spinning wheel is broken; my life is free of all encumbrances). His vivacity proved infectious. The others joined him in the rain-dance and all pain was forgotten. They were ready to start all over again. Not the weather gods, but Singh was the victor.

Somewhere down the line, my father lost touch with him. Somebody told him Singh even started a soap and chemical factory in Dehradun, which also sank. A day before my father told me about Singh, he was informed about his friend’s demise. The message that was incomprehensible to me then, I will now sum up for you in the words of author Paulo Coelho: “…it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you are fighting for.”            

N Raghuraman is an editor with DNA