Locomotoring

This photo isn’t my memory. It is my mom’s memory. I was too young to remember. I have memories of seeing this photo in my mom’s album. I do remember dad’s watch. He wore it for many years. It was a little loose on his wrist and would invariable climb up or down and swing about. I remember his glasses. Again, he wore them for many many years. They went out of fashion and came back into fashion during his lifetime. I remember his thick curly black hair. In my childhood photos, my hair is curly like his. I remember his broad shoulders and his chest press machine. He had a resting unhappy face but he would laugh very easily. I am like that too. I have inherited his hands and feet as well, narrow and small.

After he passed away last year, I read tributes of his colleagues. Many remembered him very fondly. One story touched my heart especially. This was someone who was newly posted to his office, the National Institute of Communicable Disease (NICD), India’s equivalent of CDC. In those days, job postings of civil servants was decided by government committees. It was his first day and he was nervously waiting to speak to my dad whom he only knew by reputation. Dad had kept him waiting for a bit. And then when they met, dad bombarded him with many technical questions. This colleague had felt that my dad’s interview was a lot harder than what he had gone through in the government’s bureaucratic process. At the end of the interview, he was assigned his first job by my dad and that job was to present the office at a prestigious conference the very next day. He was scared at first to speak at the conference, but as he participated, he felt more and more confident, eventually coming out feeling victorious. He went on to work with my dad for many years and referred to my dad as a great mentor of his.