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My grandfather prayed twice everyday, for forty two years. At some point, he was an atheist - a young rebel and all that. No one seems to know what changed that about him.

He was a brilliant man, who studied law but refused to practice it. He settled for a mediocre life - worked in a bank all his life, got married at an early age and had four children. He retired early and saved nothing. He smoked a lot and chewed a lot of beetle leaves. Highly passionate and quite exaggerated at times, he was always a bit of an eccentric. He studied English and French voraciously all his life. After he retired, he became a French tutor. Literature and cricket were his greatest passions and Kamal Hassan, his greatest hatred. “The man sounds like he's vomiting every time he utters a word”, he would say.

From the time I remember, he read with a magnifying glass. He was going almost blind from the age of forty, but so what! He was too passionate to give up on his books for such a silly reason. He also carried a black umbrella everywhere he went and made note of his every expense in a little notebook. He insisted on tallying the account to the paise, every day. If he couldn’t remember something and the account did not tally, he’d make up an expense and tally it anyway.

On January 20th 2009, he died. When he died, he was not reading, teaching, writing accounts or praying anymore. Sometime in 2000, he had a stroke that paralysed the left side of his body. Within a few years, he was completely bed-ridden. You’d never think so if you met him, but he relied heavily on my grandmother for everything. When he was bed-ridden, shriveled up to no more than 4 feet in all, he still demanded for masala dosa every Sunday and made funny noises and a disgusted face when something was not done satisfactorily for him. When someone visited, he'd complain endlessly about my grandmother in the only word that came out of his mouth: “Peru”.

In those nine years of life in a corpse, he re-discovered his childhood. From being carried to the bathroom and given sponge baths, to fussing about watching television late at night, he seemed to have become a child all over again. But he was a man driven by his pride, his good looks and intelligence all his life. And he did not let that fade. You see him lying there, all shriveled up, in an almost fetal position, growing skinnier, his skin rotting before your eyes, and you could feel nothing but admiration. He was almost a vegetable, but a proud one nonetheless. It must be that resolve and strength of character that made him live in that condition for so long. Every time we visited we’d suppose it to be our last, but the next time he’d be smiling his toothless smile, having that proud look on his face after every shave.

His death was peaceful and quiet. It was nothing extravagant, no fuss or drama - very unlike him. The last thing he did was hold my grandmother’s hand, making sure that the coffee she was pouring from the tumbler did not enter the wrong hole.

I should've learnt French. You are an inspiration. At least, not many men are as handsome these days – already balding at 30, but still strikingly handsome.