It was one of those rare occasions when my grandfather came to visit us. He was a kind of ultra-happy guy who had nothing to do on any day, except maybe going for a doctor’s checkup. He used to smoke regularly but after his sudden brain hemorrhage, he reduced it to 1 cigarette. And more or less, he used to have paan everyday. But as the world goes – everybody has their own uniqueness. He was too pedantic, as you call it. And often this character of him befell on me as a great calamity. Like one day, I wrote my Bengali essay in the best of moods so it was actually ‘kinda’ awesome. But my grandfather’s eyes didn’t search for all that. His eyes went up to the level of the misspelling and his face became a scowl. His eyes seemed to be telling, “Hey! What the heck are you doing? Can’t you be just perfect? You are too imprudent.” I couldn’t stay there anymore. I just took my chance and blazed out of the room. There were so many of these events. But that’s nothing bad. He’s a nice grandfather and used to love me dearly.
I asked him, “Grandfather. Why are you so pedantic?”
“What does pedantic mean?” he questioned back.
But before I could answer, he had already gone up to the bookshelf and chosen a somewhat large dictionary to search for the word. Finally, he found it and continued the conversation.
“Well, yes I am, my dear boy. You see I always liked to be perfect. Call me, Mr. Perfectionist if you want. That’s how I could journey through and reach this stage of life. Extreme discipline and perfection, that’s what I believed in. Now, let’s go and have dinner. We’re getting late. Enough talk for today.”
I gave a lot of thought to what my grandfather said – and finally deduced that he was somewhat right.
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