A father committed to service
“On Father’s Day, this is a dedication to all fathers who take special care of their daughters.
Mine, who I call Baba and the world knows as Col Mahendra Mathur, packs a thunderous love of life and quest for meaning at 92 with his combined passions of bridge, whisky, cigarettes, outmoded flirting military history, philosophy, deep diving into Spinoza and the Gita, the meaning of God and life, and beneath all that is an uncompromising sense of duty for himself and his children.
Early on, we knew we didn’t have to come across as pious or virtue signalling. We just had to serve and make the lives of other humans better. A man who fought three wars, miraculously escaped bomb blasts, carried dying colleagues across mud and water, and tenderly looked at the notes written in the pockets of young enemy soldiers by their mothers, who hosted the late Duke of Edinburgh in his officers’ mess in Bangalore, went to piano lessons at a blind Anglo-Indian so he could get to know my mother (he reminds us daily we could never match her in beauty or grace), yet, grew watermelons in his garden in Tobago.
Col Mahendra Mathur and his wife. Duty first, and then all of life tumbles, and rushes in. He changes with time, pays his bills online, started zumba classes after 88, and has gathered over a million followers on Quora, an online site that answers questions of the world.
The man I call Baba picked Tobago on a whim at the Trinidad High Commission in Delhi. Needing to learn about this part of this world, he came here and built the Claude Noel Highway, where his name is carved on a foundation stone. On arrival at the project, he was told 100 private dwellings were in the way of the 7.8 mileslong highway. In army fashion, he superimposed the alignment on aerial photographs and, after a ground survey, reduced the highway by half a mile and cut down the buildings to 33. When the highway was built, he was retained on contract for the development of Lower Scarborough, involving the construction of a library, bus station, post office, local roads and improvement of rivers to prevent flooding.
People in Trinidad may remember him as the head of Disaster Management, but, before that, he coordinated the improvement of Staubles Road and its protection from the sea and the refurbishment of Police, Prison, Fire Services and Defence Force buildings.
My first memory should be of a battlefield scattered with dead soldiers from the safety of my father’s arms. During a family road trip, my father had responded to an army command to survey the field. I was shocked when my father told me this. Did you make me look at the dead? “They were far. You were safe with me,” he responded.
“The man I call Baba picked Tobago on a whim at the Trinidad High Commission in Delhi. Needing to learn about this part of this world, he came here and built the Claude Noel Highway, where his name is carved on a foundation stone.”
I remember how happy I was after I graduated, working as a clerk in the magistrates’ court soporific with the island’s beaches, sea breezes, and my friends. I could have lived my days out like that. But after I broke my foot from flying down the road from the fort (we always seem to fly when we are young), I thought I was safe and could dig my heels in forever. But my dad had plans for me. I had tricked him at university, quietly enrolling in philosophy and literature when he enrolled me for a business degree, and he wasn’t taking that. He got me a place to do my masters in international journalism at City University in London.
“I’m not going,” I said. I like home. He took my hideous cast self and me to London, enrolled me, sat in lectures, and left when the cast was off, telling me he was educating me to give back.
“You know all men are bastards, right?” he thundered. “In fact, it’s more critical for you and your sister to get an excellent education than your brother. You must learn to look after yourself, and philosophy won’t pay the bills.” He said that to my 21-year-old self. I didn’t know.
I knew he was taking a loan and didn’t own a home and was opening up my world against my wishes. He said he was educating me so if I had to be parachuted out of a plane in the middle of nowhere, I must not just survive but help those around me. I didn’t understand how lucky I was until later in life. I came across many women who said they would have loved to study this or that but didn’t have the opportunity.
For a man born into a conservative Hindu family in Aligarh with an accountant (also bridge-playing) father as a patriarch and a gentle homemaker for a mother, feminism is remarkable, especially as he attended Aligarh Muslim University. Perhaps he intended a flair of life from his bridge-playing father, who won and lost with ease.
Over the years, while I struggled with one book, he wrote seven or eight, and they are all in NALIS. He took on my brother’s cancer like a project and went to three continents looking for a cure, and after Varun died in his prime, he showed us how to deal with loss, reminding us that we are all stardust.
On the day my brother died in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, instead of mourning we all followed him as he went to the grocery and bought a bottle of champagne–to celebrate my brother’s life and cement his place in our hearts.
In 2019, he insisted we must go to Kashmir, guarded by over 700,000 soldiers, where land mines thundered regularly, and we were stopped at roadblocks, the only inhabitants of a lovely hotel filled with fragrant roses where we took our early morning tea in the mist. We absorbed the beauty of snow-capped mountains from where we could see the border of China and Pakistan, where my father had fought in various wars. Even after my father got diagnosed with cancer (which he beat after getting treated in India), every day he would say he couldn’t get over the beauty of Trinidad’s sunsets, the unending fascination of military history, his joy with (even till today) answering Quora questions on philosophy and history.
I feared his thoughts when my book came out in London last year. Walking with some difficulty to a bookshop in Victoria, he asked if they stocked my book and said he would only buy it if it were good. He is my harshest critic and my most ardent fan.
So to Baba and all the fathers who support their daughters and the women in their lives, happy Father’s Day. Thank you from your son, never gone, always here, two daughters, your adoring wife, your six grandchildren and three great grands for showing us the multitude of life and the lesson that, ultimately, we are nothing without service, that we are as insignificant as ants in this unending solar system, but for service, which is nothing without keeping one eye out for the light of the stars.”