My Hero, A Myth: My Grandfather, Leo Tolstoy and the Pursuit of Perfection

I

Nothing seems to loom as large over my childhood as much as the portrait of my grandfather that hung in our apartment. Our household was defined by religious idolatry. Photos of the “Gurus” were hung at least twice in each room. Scriptures were plastered on magnets on the fridge. I am confident my mother had at least three copies of the central religious Sikh text. Still, this portrait was both symbolically and physically placed above these images.

The portrait itself was not particularly large, perhaps four feet tall and two feet wide. But placed within the confines of our small apartment, where the five of us were competing for space, he towered over us. Pictured from only his waist up, my grandfather wore an elegant white garment that proved he was a man of grace. His large turban highlighted his self-assuredness. The glasses he wore spoke to a learned intelligence while his full and distinct grey beard illuminated a ruggedness that naturally derived from being a farmhand.

Nothing struck me so much as the gregarious smile that practically filled up the picture. It depicted his gentleness, his often-discussed friendliness to family and strangers alike. It was charming, as if he were to invite you into an innocuous conversation about town gossip. There was a healthy masculinity attached to it, both upholding the redeemable part of the “Warrior culture” so often attributed to Punjabi Sikhs while shedding its pitfalls. For eighteen years, that smile was parallel to the house door frame, making it the first thing I saw when I came home from school. For eighteen years, that smile comforted me after a hard basketball practice or as I became more alienated from my family.

Like most things that filled my adolescence, the meaning of that portrait changed the first time I came home from college. Upon walking into that decrepit apartment, where the fragrance of spices and the shouting of my mother lulled me into serenity, the face my grandfather lost its magic. Replacing affection emerged a Christ-like aura of forgiveness, only to say: “I was a great man, I conquered all that was put in front of me, and I forgive you for not having the courage or strength that I did.”

The eyes of God are always watching. So too were his. Like da Vinci’s magnum opus, his gaze was seemingly omnipresent. They were judging every step, imbuing a sense of guilt in my choices, my yearnings, and my shortcomings. And while I could not resent him -- which would be blasphemous in our household -- I chose the next easiest route: I unquestioningly embraced him. To those nearby, I preached about our patriarch, the ever-generic man of principles. He was an impervious reflection of what we hoped to be. But like all heros, this unwavering belief made him more distant, unrecognizable, and even inhumane.

II

The honest truth is that I never knew my grandfather. Sure, there’s proof that we occupied space together -- homemade videos, polaroid pictures, “I remember when” statements by my sisters, and the like. But my own memories of him are nothing but fabrications. His physical presence in my life occurred at such a young age that it is hard to discern whether the recollections I hold in my head of him today are reality or fantasy. I only understood him by how others perceived him.

The phrase “great man” gets thrown around a lot. With my grandfather, it became overwhelmingly so. I was never told of any actions he undertook that merited such a reputation; I have no knowledge of if he saved lives or donated money. Granted, such achievements are not requisite to earn this moniker. What the narrative lacked in the tangible was made up for with abstract homilies about his character. “A heart of gold” proclaimed my mother. “A true leader” noted my father. Labels of “remarkably intelligent” and “deeply thoughtful” made me incredibly proud to be this man’s grandson.

Such descriptions took on an even more storied aura after his death. Tears accompanied the mentioning of his name, as if to indict ourselves -- even society at large -- for not fully appreciating him. I was so heavily impacted by these stories that four years after his death, at the age of twelve, I spent a week in a fit of hysteria, sobbing and mourning for the loss of this “great man.” I was pining for something I never experienced. My father, bereft of emotions, offered words of consolation to me shortly thereafter which encapsulated how I was to understand my grandfather: He may be gone, but we can try our best to make him proud.

III

For the last four years, I have been searching for who exactly that twelve-year old child was supposed to make proud. Having always remained comfortably distant from my Indian background, a litany of mentors belligerently challenged me to dig deeper into the roots of my cultural heritage while I was at Georgetown. I was reticent; college provided me, for the first time, the opportunity to control my environment and remain rigidly focused on “my future.” More pertinently, processes of reconciliation are a strikingly laborious task; it requires faith, patience, and sacrifices. Very few among us, particularly at the age of eighteen, have such words in our lexicon, let alone an ability to exercise them towards a spiritual journey.

So I went to the only place I felt comfortable: history books. On one hand, I admired the discipline of history because I felt it was the only place I could find truth. The value I placed on truth was simply a high family ideal; nowhere more would I garner the wrath of my mother or the disappointment in my father during my adolescence than in moments of dishonesty. So if the search for actuality was largely the need to satiate a deeply-built guilt complex, then history alone, a great thinker once put it, held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise. On the other hand, studying Indian history in a classroom satisfied the challenge posed to me. I could read enough abstract articles, feign an interest (I always had a Wellesian spirit), and still receive a good grade that boosted my metrics. In short, I could tell others that I did a bit of soul searching without fundamentally displacing myself.

So I sat in a large, yet stifling, Georgetown classroom. The congruency of the chairs that occupied that classroom juxtaposed the turbulent nausea I felt on the first day I was to study the history of “my people.” Half of those in the course were from the subcontinent itself, seemingly familiar with the curriculum that was going to be taught over the course of the term. Another quarter were British students and I unassumingly categorized them as either seeking to assuage a guilt-complex or to further advance some political career. And I filled up the last quarter of students, an eclectic mix of those engaging in a vanity project or just simply apathetic.

The moments in life that are seared permanently into one’s consciousness are those that arise unexpectedly. Moments that are what then seem monumental can easily become blurry memories because they fit into a neat trajectory of what one expected from oneself or from the world around them. Over time, our emotions towards these events become neutral at best. That is how I felt for most of that course. Unfurling itself as impersonal and abstract, the history of India as I was learning it was comfortable.

Yet if ignorance is bliss, and happiness is salutary to the body, then Proust was right in proclaiming that sorrow is essential in how it develops the power of the spirit. And sorrow seized itself upon me as I was told of the violence of India’s Partition. The Great Calcutta Killings of 1946. The narratives are harrowing. Mass communal slaughter between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs resulted in the death of at least 5,000 individuals; places of shelter and livelihood were wantonly burnt down; acts of sexual violence became sources of competition.

Calcutta. To imagine a land that one never inhabited becomes a task served for only poets and philosophers. That task becomes paralyzing when trying to situate the man you’ve spent years mythologizing within it. The confirmation from my father that yes, our hero was there in 1946 brought me forth to my Professor's office. And tears flowed then as they did when I was twelve. As I learned the history of the land I never sought to interact with, I lost the history of my grandfather we all worked so hard to build -- the stoic, unchallenged, high priest was no longer an impersonal presence, gliding through life as a saint onto others. He witnessed some of the most horrific events in the modern world. What were his feelings and thoughts? Why had he never opened up to anyone about this? How did he carry these scars throughout his life? And if what they say is true, that trauma can pass through generations, what was running through my veins?

IV

Isaiah Berlin’s collection of essays on Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant piece of literature in its own right. Berlin’s assessments portray a thinker who was driven to insanity in the search for truth and answers, having concluded somewhat early in his philosophical journey that in nearly all humans, our lives are caught in an inexorable flow of history. Free will cannot exist in a world where we are the simple by-products of the whims of nature. “Great men” were thus those who were ordinary human beings who “are ignorant and vain enough” to ignore their own insignificance and impotence.

Dare I say that Tolstoy got it wrong? I will never know what my grandfather saw or felt, but perhaps I can fill in the gaps with my own imagination. Instead of being given his image, I must take agency in creating him for me. So I imagine him walking through the riots in Calcutta. He would have been 14. And at such a young age, when moments imprint themselves with authority on the trajectory of one’s life, I reckon he saw acts of violence that immediately shattered the vestiges of innocence he sought refuge in. And as fear touched his entire being, as dismay arose, I imagine that he sought refuge in the consolation of his own father as I did when I was 12. And perhaps his father whispered to him: “We are going to be OK.”

I also imagine that my grandfather felt a heavy heart throughout his life for having experienced these atrocities. There would be certain nights where the guilt of survival would be intolerable or when large crowds sparked anxiety. But this torment only furthered his service towards others. That the love he gave his son was a direct manifestation of how he was cognizant of the precariousness of mortality; his renown compassion for strangers came from his experience that no society could survive if its inhabitants did not feel a sense of unity with one another; and the smile which filled up the portrait in our home seems to assert that if we cannot be guaranteed happiness in an unpredictable and incomprehensible world, then we must keep trying to find joy in the simple things of family and the hope for a better future.

It is only through this imagination do I realize that what makes him great was not the idealized labels that were created about him but that each day he woke, he made a choice. He chose to transcend -- and not without great pain -- the scars of the past into a claim onto the future. It is in the act of choosing that I finally begin to understand what constituted his essence. In turn, I can finally be honest about myself as well.

And if I can understand the two of us to be mutually connected, then I can also imagine that he too would have been rapturously joyful about the melodic tunes of Erroll Garner. Or that he would have revelled in the guilty pleasure touting Hannah and Her Sisters as one of his favorite movies. Or rather, he would have been enraged losing money to his friends in a game of poker. Or even more fundamentally, he was as insecure as I am now when he pondered about what his purpose was in life and if he was making the correct decisions.

So to this I believe with a staunch fervor that Tolstoy was wrong. Perhaps he was not as omnipotent as I thought of him when I was twelve. Yet he was far from impotent. His inner-will, his push for redemption, changed lives, even those he never met. That is what no history book can ever capture. So while the power of historical trajectories is forceful and at times, debilitating, it is not an immutable law. “Great men” are not the ignorant, as Tolstoy noted, but the persistent. And if this is the only label my grandfather could carry, it can only mean that he was not simply “great” but my hero.

V

Being given a bit of encouragement by a good friend, I sat to write again. And for three hours, my mind went blank. What could I discuss that would make any sense to anyone in the world? What is the whole purpose of this exercise? Who is my audience anyways? Through this process of self-flagellation, I found my way towards a short poem called the Archaic Torso of Apollo.

The poet describes the still-present beauty of a damaged sculpture, imagining both its previous majestic nature and how, despite all its flaws, the image is nonetheless fully-realized. And he further implicates this art-work to be awe-inspiring and reverential, so much so that the poem ends by telling the viewer, simply: You must change your life.

I would be taking significant artistic license if I proclaimed my life changed upon revisiting that portrait of my grandfather. But what Rilke’s poem reminded me was that the aesthetic that is deemed flawless is a negligible one. Rather, true power and influence lay in the bearing of cracks and bruises. I write with confidence and pride about my grandfather not because of who he truly is -- I likely will never truly know. But I do know who he is not, and that is a myth. I will not accept him as a man who never struggled or who never was scared. He was a man who had flaws and who had succumbed to humans’ most basic instincts and desires. And if I can recognize this in him, I can recognize something pretty special in myself: I am acutely aware of my fallibility and cannot, in good conscious, maintain community among the impervious.