Fua

After all the pouring out of my heart, I checked the school website. There is a holiday declared for thursday. In India, wednesday is the festival of Holi and then Good friday. So now we have five days off. Hurrah!!! Someone out there is listening.  Is that you? Of course if I want to crib about this, I can start right now. Stuff like Why did the school declare it so late? If I had known before, we could have take a mini vacation, etc. But the truth is I am happy. Small joys are enough. The whole is made up of parts.

My Grand Uncle passed away a fortnight back.He was like a father figure for my dad. I could feel Dad s pain. We called him Fua ie Uncle in Gujrati.  I had spent a lot of time time with Fua and his family. A man of values and principles. he came from a small village in Kutch and made it big in Mumbai. His was the real story about rags to riches.He spread his business empire and flourished in all times. The huge joint family lived together with lot of love. There was space, freedom and discipline in the household. He used to take time out for his grand nieces too. I remember him visitng my hostel to take me and my friends out for an icecream to a five star hotel. For us hostelites, the ice cream was a big deal and to get it in a five star was a very big deal. His house was always open to me. The Aunts Uncles and cousins were always welcoming and plying us with food. For all my hostel friends it was a treat to visit their house. Remember him being the senior most relative at my wedding. He has helped us with proposals. Whenever I was staying with them, I was a part of all their activities: walking on race course, drinking coconut water on worli seaface, yoga in the mornings, swimming at NSCI, dining out with friends and at their homes, attending weddings with them. I just felt so included.Taking care of his ailing wife and mother was something he did effortlessly. The entire family was in sync and one could experience that unity on every interaction with the family. When I started working, they diverted all their client reservations from Taj to The Oberoi. I was always invited and acknowledged in front of the clients for getting them the hotel bookings. The dinner at their house as a newly married woman was comforting.I  have visited his home in Pondicherry right outside the Ashram a couple of times. The warmth and the amazing food was there in his London house too. Fua did a lot for all his relatives and enrolled his family in this vision. We would dress up in Dhanbad in our finest clothes for his visit. He would come in a sparkling white Dhoti kurta and carry white envelopes for all of us. He spoke to each and every child and we were six of us. He always had a fancy small camera where we would be captured. He got us dry fruits from the Middle East. Being in his house was a geography lesson as the places they travelled on business and vacations and the clients they dealt with all over the world.He and his brother got along beautifully. Their camaradie was a joy to observe.
He was friendly with Krishnamoorty, the philosopher. He was known to Eckhart Toole. He was a follwer of Mother and Shri Aurobindo at Pondicherry. He is no more but his spirit lives on. This could not have sounded more cliched but I can say this is all I  gathered from my childhood up till now about Fua.
Snippets from  memory which make the whole.