It is Vijay Divas again, 53 years after India won the war that created Bangladesh. So, you will forgive me for reminiscing a little about my father: Sam Manekshaw, not ‘the Great Soldier’ but the family man.
As a father, he was often not there, but when he was, it was delightful: We argued, we discussed, we quarrelled over ideology, issues, viewpoints—on everything that ranged from the real meaning of life to what we should have for dinner.
He teased us unmercifully and played wicked tricks on us. When my sister was in St. Bede’s, he would write her letters full of suggestive double entendre and explicit, effusive affection and then end them signed simply “Sam.” Of course, that was enough for the nuns to call her in, scold her roundly for having a secret boyfriend somewhere on the outside, and threaten to tell the parents.
Home for the holidays, she complained bitterly to our aunt (his sister) about the trouble he had got her into. Our aunt’s eyes widened, and she said, “Oh Sam, you’re not still doing the same thing!” He had done the same thing to his sister when she was in boarding school. He remained unrepentant.
No question, he loved attention and admiration. He could be swayed by it, too. But our mother, no slouch herself, kept him grounded. When it was first made official that he was to be the next Army chief, he bounded home from office, pregnant with the news, and called out to her. She walked up to his kiss and heard the news as delivered: “You, my dear, have just kissed the next Chief of Army Staff.” Loosening herself leisurely from his embrace, she threw over her shoulder, “And you, sir, have just kissed a four-star general’s wife. But did you deserve to?” That sorted him!
He kept his humour till the very end and often turned it on himself. One time, I was at his bedside in our little cottage hospital in Coonoor. The doctors filed in to see him one after the other, all in sombre procession.
When they left and stood with their heads bent, consulting in low and solemn tones, just a little ways away, he said to me, and I quote, “Have the buggers gone?” I said, “Shh, father! They are right there. Shh!” He waited a bit, quite still now, with closed eyes and fingertips touching each other across his chest, and said contemplatively, “Hmm, I suppose they are waiting for me to go first!”
He liked laughter and being involved in everything. Retired, he was fully engaged with his adored granddaughter and grandsons, as he was with us when we were growing up. He would dress them for school, cook for them, take them on picnics, and press staff and family — like it or not — into the many hobbies he picked up and dropped with equal ease: One time, it was photography, another time, cooking, then fishing. Gardening was a perennial. He made sure, though, that he didn’t get into the messy bits. My sister had to pose under the hot lights by the hour while he fiddled with the tripod. Digging up the flower-beds, fixing the chum on the fish hook, all such parts of the job were left to others. He instructed.
But he was dead serious about some things. Once, a sweeper accidentally dropped his broom across the path of a delegation he was with. The officer shouted at the poor man to get out of the way. Even as the terrified man bent over to touch Sam’s feet in contrition, Sam drew him up by his shoulders and standing eye to eye, said seriously, “Apna seer sirf uparwale ke saamne jhukaana; koi aadmi ke saamne kabhi matha mat jhukana.” Each one of us has our own dignity. What we do is not who we are.
Each time I go to his grave in Coonoor, I am reminded that my father is not dead. The gifts of personal integrity, courage in war, magnanimity in peace, humility and approachability in fame, and devotion to country, community, and family always are the gifts he left behind.
His legacy belongs not only to us who grew up with him or only to the armed forces or even to the Parsi community, which loves apro Sam. It belongs to all of us who would emulate his good thoughts, words, and deeds and make them come alive in our own.
Maja Daruwala is senior advisor, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. The views expressed are personal
