I lost my cousin, my brother, to the Big C on Saturday. He was just 56. More than family, he was a dear friend. We grew up together. We remained close through all these years. Now he has left. I guess he will be at the Gates while I wait my turn to knock and enter.

He grew up in a middle-class family of limited means, where piety and thrift were the way to a blessed life. They were to be his main pillars. He remained unwavering in his faith in the Divine and in the virtue of service till the very end.

Between us, he was the brighter and better student but was tested more by illness and ill-luck at crucial moments in the early years. These only made him persevere. He became an engineer, studied in Canada and had a successful career there.

He returned to India after several decades with his wife and a little son in the early 2000s, keen that his son grow up in the midst of family and imbibe the Indian way. Never did I hear him express regret at having left the country where he built his career, a good life, and the affluence his status afforded him. He was never one to compare or comment disparagingly about the third-worldness of India.

A devotee of Sai Baba, he immersed himself in bhajans organized at the local Sai Baba centre (in Ottawa and later in Chennai) or other devotees’ homes whenever possible. As a devotee, serving the poor and the needy and offering relief to the distressed was a creed he embraced and contributed to, with time and resources. The act of offering gave him immense peace and joy.

He liked the company of people, and stayed with the friendships formed in school, college, and at work. He kept track of who’s who and who is whose, and often surprised friends by recounting details from their lives that were forgotten by all. He was never nosey but had an ear for titbits and anecdotes which he recalled in group settings, whenever his discretion permitted him to. He honoured social commitments and made great efforts to grace occasions to which he was invited. It also gave him opportunities to renew ties with friends and expand his circle.

A family man to the core, he brought a rare depth of devotion in the relationship with his parents. As the sensitive and observant one, he saw his parents support him in his school and college years when the going wasn’t easy for the household. It was a ‘debt’ he repaid many times over with sweat and blood. He cared for them dearly and expressed himself through the many visits he made to see them, the hours he spent there and the chores he did for them.

The Covid-19-triggered lockdown was a cruel cut. It kept him away from the people he cared for. Telephone calls were a poor substitute and made the sense of distance and isolation complete, tampering with the lifeline of his aliveness.

The cancer had a way of denying him the very things that enlivened him. It wasn’t just people.

He loved food. A strict vegetarian, he relished a variety of vegetarian fare. He remembered eating joints we had been to way back in our teens, what we ordered there and what else was on the menu. Descriptions of restaurants and menus were part of all storytelling related to his travels. He was always on the lookout for new eating outlets and kept a list of the ones to visit. While the cancer interfered with his appetite, his enthusiasm for food didn’t flag. He would suggest new eating places to visit to my daughter and seek her feedback.

Money was very important to him but not in the way you might imagine. He would painstakingly compare prices of items he was interested in across a number of vendors before a purchase. He committed time to understand the deals and discounts that vendors offered – poring over piles of shopping supplements that came with newspapers, and in more recent years, by browsing the ecommerce-driven promotion schemes. Getting a deal was a win, a reward for pain and patience, for diligence and speed. Seeking more for less in the marketplace was a lesson learnt early.

Further, money was important to him not in an aggrandising way or as any indicator of success and significance. It gave him the means to be generous not just in words but in deeds. While he counted and accounted every dollar or rupee, he was indifferent to acquisition or accumulation. He was a man of limited needs, and put others ahead of self.

I imagine that he had a strong work ethic. He must have been amiable and respectful to colleagues, meticulous and ‘plan-full’. I have never seen him lose his temper or raise his voice. I reckon that at work too, he must have let his stress, his frustrations, and anger express themselves mildly – with a hint here and a quiet word there. For the most part though, I think he let it remain with him. He must have stretched his clock a bit more to make up for colleagues’ shortcomings. Long hours at work didn’t deter him but the strain must have taken its toll. He didn’t appear ambitious but perhaps believed that the invisible forces of life will be fair and just in reckoning with his competence and contributions.

He had a tremendous eye for detail and a phenomenal memory of all things, significant and trivial. He remembered how people were connected with one another, who was present or absent on various occasions, the places around the world he had visited, the food he ordered and the bills. If his heightened sense of order and organization was anything to go by, I imagine well-labelled and easily retrievable compartments and chambers in his head to store all that stuff over the years.

For one who didn’t forget much, he never ever let the things that hurt or angered him spill into the open as vitriol, venom or righteous anger. He seldom let in others on the things that bothered or agitated him and kept him pensive or sleepless. His ways of expressing his disappointments, disagreements, disapprovals and peeves were perhaps to wield silence, wear down the other with argument or to double down and mulishly resist any influence – a passivity that felt violent, and a stance that occasionally smacked of rigidity.

He was in many ways a typical Indian male, playing provider and protector to his family, and a dutiful son to his parents. He sought very little for self, gave of himself freely and liked seeing others happy. His own yearning for affection was carefully concealed and it seemed sufficient for him to know that he had a place in others’ hearts.

Not a day passed without us exchanging messages or speaking over the phone. When he stopped responding to my messages a day before his last, I messaged this, ‘Arun, I need some indication whether you want to receive messages. I don’t want to load you if would rather not.’ He didn’t respond. And, that was that.