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For some time he worked as an overseer under the British Government but then he left his job as untimely death of my father’s grandfather brought him back to take over the money-lending business in the village. Also someone had to look after the land and the shops.
    My grandfather was a well-known person in Bilaspur state; he was close to the Raja of Bilaspur and was one of his advisers. He was elected as the pradhan (head) of the village panchayat and remained so for more than sixty years till his death at the age of ninety-five.
    Bilaspur state was the last to accede to the Indian Union after Independence. The state, known as Kehloor, had come into existence at the foot of the western Himalayas more than a millennium ago. This land of legendary sages Markandaya and Ved Vyas was ruled by many progressive rulers. Not only the rulers even the common people of Bilaspur are a proud lot, even though the outsiders see this pride as arrogance.
    Dadoo belonged to the generation that saw the state capital of Kehloor – the beautiful town of Bilaspur, named after sage Ved Vyas, who is said to have meditated here – submerge when Bhakhra Dam was built. This temple of modern India changed everything for the people. Everything. Their homes, shops, fertile fields, exquisite temples dating back to seventh century, the grand palaces, market, and the vast plain known as Sandu ka Maidan went down in the Gobind Sagar Lake. The scars of this submergence and the pain of being uprooted from the land of their ancestors never left Dadoo. He always remained an outsider – an oustee – the rootless person.
    We children, who were unware of the emotional upheaval that submergence had caused, could never understand his pain and could not relate to him when he said that he longed to go back to go to Chaunta, his native village. But there was no Chaunta! It had gone down in the Satluj; it was under the Gobind Sagar Lake, the reservoir of Bhakra Dam. The village disappeared but nostalgia remained and Jagdev Verma, my Dadoo, has been living with this nostalgia all his life.
    It was not just the pain of submergence of Chaunta but also the fact that he had to leave his second home too that made him distressed. They were offered land in Jaddu Kuljar – backward area – after Chaunta was submerged. Since my grandfather was educated, he sent away Dadoo to study in a school, at the age of four, which was far away from the village. Dadoo initially stayed with his maternal uncle and then shifted to a hostel in Bhanoopli; he then moved to Mahalpur and eventually to Hoshiarpur for further studies. He was the first person to do MA in mathematics from the Bilaspur state.
    Dadoo taught mathematics to graduate and post graduate students for decades. Mathematics is all about memory and numbers, but now, he is forgetting things that are so common. How could dementia happen to him, the professor of mathematics? Mysteries of brain are so deep and confusing.
    After completing his degree Dadoo came back to his village but soon his father asked him to look for a job. And so, along with a servant Dadoo left for Shimla, the biggest town.
    Dadoo used to narrate this tale so many times with chuckles, ‘I left the house with great expectations and decided to become a deputy commissioner. I put up at a sarai [a lodge] in Shimla, as there were few hotels and my father had instructed the servant to cook good food for me.’ He would always laugh at this point.
    ‘Soon I got to know that I had to clear an exam for it which was not scheduled yet. So I walked all the way to Rampur, about one hundred and twenty kilometres from Shimla, on the banks of the Satluj. Here, I joined as a clerk. So the “deputy commissioner” became a “babu”. When the magistrate at Rampur got to know that a highly qualified person had joined as a clerk, he called me and told me to find a job suitable for my qualification. A month later, I joined as a lecturer at the degree college in