Anagha Mahajan - Legacy

 

So, my grandfather is the biggest miser that I have ever known in my entire life. [audience laughter] Don't get me wrong, he's a good guy and I loved him. But that was after I really got to know him. But up until my early years, I thought he was quite the penny pincher, to put it nicely. 

 

So, my brother, Anand and I, we are two years apart, we both spent most of our childhood with our grandparents, because my father had a transferable job and they made the wise parenting decision of just dropping us off at our grandparents’ place. [audience laughter] 

 

So, my grandparents lived in this small town, almost a village in India in the state of Maharashtra called Chikhli. So, it was a little village where my grandfather was a lawyer. He was well respected, well feared as well. [audience laughter] His father before him was also a lawyer and a landlord. So, all that put together, ours was a well-educated and pretty well to do family in the otherwise poor and not so well to do neighborhood. So, my brother and I grew up in a neighborhood filled with lots of kids. And all the kids were scared of my grandfather as was everybody else. 

 

Now, I say my grandfather was a miser, because I noticed a lot of things about him growing up. When I was 10 or 12, one peculiar thing he used to do was he used to turn off the main power supply to our house before al he left to work, [audience laughter] before he went to court. “Why do you need electricity in the day?” he would say. [audience laughter] “Read a book.” [audience laughter] He would turn it back only after he was back and after it was dark and still we would just turn on little lights like that and never the big tube lights what we had in our house. 

 

This was all right during the school year, but it was particularly difficult in the summer vacation when all of us were home for three months straight. This was one particular summer when I was 10, my brother was 12, and it was also very hot in the part of the country where we grew up. So, it could be like 120 degrees on some days. So, it was not possible for us to play outside all the time. And without electricity, we had to come up with very innovative ways to keep ourselves busy. 

 

And one way was the kids these days may not know, but it was to play outside. [audience laughter] We used to play outside, but like I said, sometimes there was this fear of getting burned because of the sun. So, we had to play inside. We had this big house built by the British back in the day, it's 100-year-old. So, our house has this large lobby right outside, rectangular. So, the kids, our friends and my brother and I came up with this novel game. It was called indoor cricket. [audience laughter] So, just like cricket, which is just like baseball, not really. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we came up with this really intricate game where there was a pitcher, the batsman, there was a-- No, the pitcher is the bowler, right? Yeah. So, there was a bowler, there's a batsman and things like that. We came up with really detailed rules, like you couldn't do overarm bowling, you had to do only underarm, you could be out even if it is one toss catch, you could score certain runs when hits the wall, when it hit something else. So, it was a very intricate game. 

 

One afternoon, we were playing this game and I was batting whatever it's called in baseball terms, and I was feeling particularly heroic that afternoon. When my friend pitched it underarm, I swung my bat and I was-- The moment it hit the bat, you know, fuck. [audience laughter] I realized something's going to go wrong. The ball just went in top speed. I still remember, I see the ball flying away and it went straight for the wall in front of me and there was a tube light on the wall and it just hit it right in the center and splat. The tube light just broke into millions of pieces and came shattering down. And that was that. We were just panicking and we were all frozen in our feet. 

 

One of my friends, he was so scared that he ran away and we never saw him for rest of the summer. [audience laughter] But my brother and I, we had to do something, because the whole indoor cricket worked like a clockwork only, because we knew that my grandfather left at 10:00 AM in the morning and he was back at 04:00 PM in the afternoon. So, we had to get order in that particular room before 04:00. 

 

So, we put on our best problem-solving hat, and we cleaned the mess right there and then we wanted to find out what to do about the tube light. We couldn't buy a new one. We didn't have the resources to go get one. Not the money, obviously, because he never gave us anything. [audience laughter] But then, it struck in that moment that because we grew up in this household where head of household is my grandfather, Azoba, as we called him, we never threw away anything. Even if it didn't work, we always kept it. So, I knew there were some tube lights lying around in the house. I quickly grabbed one. So, it didn't work, but it wasn't broken. 

 

So, we put it back up into the slot, wherever the now broken tube light was and we put it there. We were very confident that we wouldn't be caught, because my grandfather never turns on the tube light in the night. So, yeah. He came back, he saw the tube light, he didn't find anything fishy. That day went by. Three months went by and the tube light never got turned on. One night, he was reluctant, it was winter, so he had to turn it on. I was right there and he goes like, “What happened to the tube light?” But I was ready, for three months I have been practicing when this moment comes, [audience laughter] what I'm going to do. 

 

So, he goes like, “What happened?” I just put my best practice shrug and I go like, “I don't know.” [audience laughter] And that was that. So, the tube light got replaced and it was never spoken of again. It's been years since that incident. My grandfather passed away, and I was back in the house few years after that. I was sitting in the same lobby and very fondly was looking at the slot where the broken tube light was, remembering my grandfather very fondly at that time. I realized that I've been sitting in a very low-lit room. The tube light was still not on. And in that moment, I realized that I am my miser grandfather now. Thank you.