He Was a Man, Taken for All in All: My Father’s Memoir

Perhaps, for some of us, mourning is solitary and silent act, best articulated via writing

It has been a month since my father passed away. Long enough for the noise to settle. Long enough for borrowed mourning phrases to fall silent. Long enough for memory to begin arranging itself on its own. For most of his last three weeks, he was in the ICU. In the first two, it never felt final. That wasn’t denial; it was habit. He had always come back. Illness, exhaustion, setbacks — he treated them as pauses, not endings.

We spoke often in those days. About people. About ordinary things. About memories that surfaced casually, without ceremony. Only later did it strike me how much of a life reveals itself when continuity suddenly breaks.

Long before illness entered the picture, he had lived as an athlete. In the 1940s, he ran the 400, 800, and 1500 metres. His timing in the 800 metres was 2 minutes 3 seconds. In those days, on those tracks, without modern training or equipment, that placed him among the very best. He went on to become a state champion for almost a decade and represented at the national level year after year.

Once, almost dismissively, he mentioned that there had been an entire storeroom filled with cups and medals. He couldn’t remember how many there were. He had never counted them. The medals existed somewhere in the background. What mattered was the running — the joy of it, the discipline of it.

One story stayed with me. In a decisive race, he was clearly ahead. Near the finish, he slowed down deliberately and let another runner win — his uncle by relation, but in age only a few years older, and more importantly, his coach. When I asked him much later why he had done that, he seemed genuinely surprised.

“He will never win at this level again,” he said. “He taught me. How could I go ahead of him? I can always win later.” And he did. He won again and again — at the state level, for years, and at nationals. Yet he never spoke about victories. He spoke about people, about effort, about showing up properly. Sport, to him, was never about domination. It was about grace — knowing when to push and when not to.

That understanding stayed with him. On the squash court decades later, he played the same way. He would slow the game down, concede points, repeat rallies until the other person found rhythm. He didn’t play to overpower. He played to elevate. That instinct ran through everything. But his compass had been set even earlier.

He was the son of a freedom fighter — not one whose name appeared in textbooks, but one whose life was shaped by secrecy, restraint, and risk. As a child, he had seen the country before independence. Once, almost casually, he told me that when he was around seven — sometime in 1943 — his father leaned in and whispered to him to stay alert, to be careful. People, he said, were being quietly picked up.

He grew up in a city where history was not abstract. Allahabad — now Prayagraj — was deeply woven into the freedom movement, not as spectacle but as lived reality. It was a place where people understood what it meant to choose consequence over compromise. My father would mention, almost in passing, how Chandra Shekhar Azad ended his life in Alfred Park — by his own hand — because he refused to be captured alive by the British. The detail mattered to him. Not the violence, but the choice.

It was also a city that would later give the nation several Prime Ministers — a place where public life, political thought, and national responsibility were part of everyday conversation. My grandfather moved quietly within that world, teaching and mentoring without visibility, far more concerned with the idea of the nation than with position or recognition.

There was also a smaller, more personal episode my father spoke about with visible discomfort. As a teenager, caught up in enthusiasm and loyalty, he and his friends tried to play a role in a local election from the area where we lived then. One of his closest friends was a national-level archer; another was a boxer — strong, impulsive, fiercely loyal. An argument escalated. A punch was thrown. A man from the opposing camp was knocked down in public view.

That single moment shifted the mood. My grandfather lost the election. What stayed with my father was not the loss, but what followed. His father never raised his voice. Never scolded him. Never mentioned the incident again. He simply withdrew — not in anger, but in clarity.

Only much later did my father understand why. For his father, the nation always came before position. Public life mattered less than personal responsibility. Losing an election was insignificant compared to preserving the idea of how public conduct should look. That silence, my father once told me, taught him more than any lecture ever could.

Much later, in my forties, I began running. A half marathon under two hours felt like a milestone. A full marathon a little over four hours felt earned. My fastest kilometre has always been around four and a half minutes. Only with time did I realise something humbling: this endurance did not begin with me.

When I ran my first long distance without preparation and somehow finished — gasping, managing one step at a time — it didn’t feel like achievement. It felt like inheritance.

The same thing happened when I returned to squash after nearly twenty years. Movements returned without thinking. Anticipation came back before intention. Muscle memory surfaced that I had never consciously trained. That, too, was him. Education mattered to him in the same uncompromising way.

English was my weakest subject, especially in a convent school. He didn’t negotiate with the system or soften expectations. He found a British teacher to teach me English. When Physics mattered, he found the best teacher in the town. When mathematics needed to rise further, he found the best teacher in the state. There was never a conversation about money. Or return. Or whether it was “worth it”. Weakness had to be removed. That was all. His ease across people was extraordinary.

Power never impressed him. Status never frightened him. What moved him instantly was vulnerability — especially when someone had no voice. Only after he was gone did I begin to understand the scale of it. A peon cried. A watchman stayed back. Then they spoke. An engineer who had lost everything during Covid and had become a watchman — his daughter’s education quietly supported.  A tailor whose business collapsed — the fans in his shop paid for, my father’s old phone still in his hand. A taxi driver whose daughter wanted to study engineering — help given without ceremony. People who had never met each other kept finding me and saying, “I just wanted to tell you something about your father.”

I stood there, mostly silent. And then there were the birds.

Wherever he lived, the day began with feeding them. Rice. Water. Quiet presence. He would not eat before they had. It was not sentiment. It was a reminder — to remember where one came from. There is one moment I want to share — briefly. In his final days, on BiPAP support, struggling to speak, he looked at me and said quietly: “Tumhare jaisa beta ek vardaan hai.” That one sentence ended striving. In that moment, I wanted nothing more from life. No achievement. No validation. No success.

That sentence was the richest thing I will ever receive. For me, life felt complete. Somewhere along the way, I realised this was not really about RIP, Om Shanti, or sadgati prāpt ho. Those words carry comfort and faith. But what stayed was something quieter — the clarity that comes when presence turns into absence, and how much becomes visible only after it is gone.

Even in his final days, dignity never left him. Composed. Graceful. Present. Only after he was gone did the full shape of his life come into view. Not through titles. Not through achievements. But through what remained. As Hamlet said of his father: “He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”

(Author Manish Jaiswal, Advisor to the Board, Ex-MD & CEO, Grihum Housing Finance)