It was a Friday!

      My grandfather is in his 90s and even now lives his daily life with a clockwork precision. His chronically tailored day commences with an inaugural walk around our residential colony at the crack of dawn followed by a healthy breakfast which sometimes goes the unhealthy way when my mom's watchful eyes are occupied elsewhere. She is the only one in our family whom he lends an ear to or submits to. A protest from anyone else over the sly sleight of hand in making the junk tit-bits vanish off the table brings in nothing more than a shrug. If mum happens to make an entry at the time of this interchange, the shrug transforms to a look of pained ignorance of a soul wronged. He then picks up the stack of newspapers and it's supplements and drinks in the stories that made headlines that day. Once the nitty-grittys have been devoured, the lesser quintessential ones are left for his perusal between forty winks reserved for his afternoons. Betwixt the two sessions of staying abreast with the current affairs, he manages to do household chores, fix broken appliances, showcase his carpentry as well as his art skills and make sure that my grandmother gets her daily dose of medicines. Evenings are reserved for detective TV shows. His timetable as well as his time management puts the younger generations in our family to shame.

      And his proneness for exactitude does not stop just there. Anything and everything associated with him or his work speaks about his meticulousness, of not a hair being out of it's place no matter how fine toothed a comb you happen to run through. It irks him to no bounds having to watch his grand-kids, far from inheriting his traits, develop antithetically not sharing an ounce of his love for the impeccable.

      His another aspect that has stood the sands of time is his unimpaired ability to recollect with precision everything that those old and experienced eyes have ever witnessed or any bit of information that his acute mind has ever assimilated. And it is always right on to the puniest itsy-bitsy level. He also likes sharing anecdotes about things from his heydays and about history in general. On one such occasion he was recounting the scene to a friend of mine, surrounding the Bombay Explosion that had occurred in the Victoria Dock of Bombay when a freighter carrying varied cargo including tons of explosives had caught fire. His workplace was not far from the dockyard so he was basically narrating the events of the afternoon as seen and experienced from his desk at his office. And he concluded the narrative by saying "This happened on the 14th of April 1944...It was a Friday!". My friend found this level of recall to be both amazing as well as amusing. The next time we happened to talk about the episode, he jokingly mentioned to my grandfather that he had almost expected him to have even given us the time when the explosion occurred, right down to the minute. To which, without missing a beat came the reply, "It occurred at 04:14 pm"! My friend and I had nothing really to say further.

      Try as I might, I cannot be anything like my grandfather. He is basically my idol, the person whom I would love to ape, my alarm, my day planner, my reminder call, my diary, my calendar, my encyclopedia, everything bundled into one; he is my Grandfather Clock :-*