Treats from the tin trunk

Cutting corners and practising thrift might be the best way to budget fickle expenses — something I have always tried to unsuccessfully accomplish. Whenever I have felt like throwing in the towel, the tale of the grand old miser — Gauri Shankar Mishra, aka ‘Gauri Babu’, always pops on my inner landscape. This was one of my favourite anecdotes from my father’s treasure trove of childhood tales.

Gauri Babu, the father of six boys, a widower who worked as a signal man at the railway crossing near the city of Kanpur in British India, gave a new spin to the word Spartan.

He earned a grand sum of Rs50 per month (a little more than Dh2 today), but managed to feed, clothe and educate all his six children who went on to do fairly well in life.

He had a simple rule in life — If he could somehow manage not to spend a penny on the three basic necessities of life — namely food, shelter and clothing — then he was fine with spending on educating his boys.

The two room mud-house was the dowry that his late wife came with, so he had no need to save for a home. On the tiny patch in the backyard he grew potatoes, sweet potatoes, a few other vegetable creepers and a banana tree.

For as long as he lived, every morning, the gaunt, scrawny man followed the same routine. He would rise at 4am, bathe at the community well, wear one of the two pairs of khaki uniforms he owned as the signal man and head to the vegetable market carrying a small cloth bag, pretending to bargain with the sellers. The grocer’s knew his game but over the years, had just accepted him as an occupational hazard. He would pick up a couple of okras (lady finger) at one stall asking its price, haggle and then throw a couple into his bag. Next he would pocket a couple of scrawny aubergines, an odd tomato, a discarded onion, a carrot, few French beans and by the end of the exercise return home with the bulky bag and set to work.

From his kitchen garden he would pull out a few potatoes and make a watery yet delicious curry of the assortment of greens on the fire wood that the children were asked to collect every evening. Next, he would mix about a kg of dough, roll out his bread, eat a small meal and leave for work. The wheat came from the ancestral patch of land shard by brothers.

As each of the boys arose, he would bathe, change, roll out his bread, pour some of the vegetable and that was the meal of the day for him. The older boys would take care of the meals of the toddlers and leave them to their designs while they attended school.

Gauri Babu’s children never asked for more because they had never known a different life. In the evening, the children would sit under the street lamp to study. He would reward them for good results at school with some fancy nibbles from the homes of railway clerks for whom he ran errands. The assortment of nibbles included laddoos and savouries from the home of a returning bride, some pickles, some home-made sweets given away by the wealthy on annual festivals. The treats were kept locked in a little tin trunk under his bed and the keys tied to the sacred thread he wore. The little tin trunk was idolised by the boys who tried every trick in the bag to impress him to part with the treats.

The boys grew up into studious academicians and research scholars, one actually managed to secure the prestigious job of a collector. In the end, when Gauri Babu died, not because of malnutrition, but old age, he left a handsome sum of Rs6,000 divided equally among the sons. For the boys who had grown up to believe less was more, this little fortune gave them treats that went far beyond Gauri Babu’s little tin trunk.