Before he was Appa, he was simply a little boy growing up in a crowded house where dreams had to compete with necessity.
He was one of ten children—five sons and five daughters—in a family where money was always scarce but determination never was.
Among his siblings, he often stood apart. My mother would tell me that as a young man he had once been fair, but by the time I knew him, years of work beneath the South Indian sun had turned his skin the warm wheatish brown I would forever associate with home. In photographs, I see a handsome young man. In memory, I see the face that smiled whenever I entered a room.
Poverty shaped much of his childhood, but it never defined his spirit.
He studied beneath streetlights because there was not always enough light at home.
He did odd jobs, mainly at the small laundromat that the family ran while studying at college whenever he could.
Friends shared lecture notes when work kept him away from class.
He played football with remarkable dedication, earning recognition through sports that helped open educational opportunities. What others played for recreation, he played partly for survival.
He loved English literature.
He loved Tamil literature.
He loved politics.
His mind was always busy, always imagining a larger future than the one into which he had been born.
Curiously, for someone who spoke so little, his inner world seemed endless.
Appa was never a talkative man.
He rarely occupied a room with words.
Instead, he occupied it with presence.
As a little girl, I sometimes wondered why he remained so quiet while others spoke around him.
As an adult, I realized that silence was simply where he did most of his thinking.
Growing up with so little changed his relationship with money forever.
People often mistook his desire to earn well as ambition for wealth.
I never saw it that way.
He did not chase money because he wanted luxury.
He chased security because he knew what insecurity felt like.
A child who studies beneath streetlights grows into a father who wants his children to have every light switched on.
That became the mission of his life.