“Always ask what is inside the package”

Said the smiling, imposing man with the handlebar moustache and the unmistakable demeanour of someone used to having his instructions written down and actioned upon forthwith. You could also tell from the firmness in his voice that he had an army background.

This is 2006, and I was back home in Chennai on vacation.At that time, San Antonio, Texas was home.It was also home to the girl I was going to marry, and she asked me to do her the favor of picking up new clothes her mom had bought for her and bringing it back to Texas. Just the usual “Kuruvier” service.

Just one thing she failed to mention.

I’d be collecting the package from the Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Diamond, a joint venture between the Government of India and DeBeers, a retired IAS officer, and an ex-army man who spent months in a tank fighting in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. And sporting above-mentioned imposing handlebar moustache.

And oh, he also happens to be her father, who will be meeting, for the first time, the distinctly unimposing 28-year-old IT guy that had popped the question (accompanied by the ironic non-diamond ring material choice of cubic zirconia) to his youngest daughter, the darling of the household. It was, for all practical purposes, a job interview in the guise of a package pickup.

And I had already failed the first test.

“Always ask what is inside the package”, he instructed with bemusement as I collected it without posing that very question. I wanted to signal my undying admiration for his daughter by offering to courier anything from contraband drugs to black market nuclear material, and he essentially schooled me for being, um, irresponsible.

Velaydhan Pillai Madhavan Nair was born on April 18 in Parvathipuram, Nagercoil and was one of 8 children. He went to Scott Christian College, joined the army (14 Scinde Horse), served in the 1971 war, joined the civil service, became collector of Tuticorin, then MD of Cholan transport, was Transport secretary under MGR before finally retiring as SEEPZ Development Commissioner, where he had a ringside view to the growth of the very company his 2 daughters & 1 son-in-law would go on to work at – Tata Consultancy Services.

His steadfast refusal to yield to political pressure resulted in a life filled with transfers. He smoked Wills Filter all his life till he decided one day in his 60s to stop cold turkey. He liked his whisky with water and because he had seen actual action in the war, even 2 large pegs never loosened his tongue to unleash war stories. In my experience, people who speak volubly about war have usually never experienced it. He had a green thumb.We turned our terrace into a food paradise, and his stint in the Army made dal, chicken curry, and roti his comfort food over Onam sadyas.

He died from chronic kidney disease on November 15, 2025 after a lifetime of serving the nation and his family.

Writing about fathers-in-law is hard.When my father passed away, I had a lifetime of experience being around him as a child, but men being men, we rarely let our guard down and share our insecurities with each other when we are alive. We hold binary images of the men in our lives – they are either the supportive friend or the dictator. In either case, emotional distance is typically measured in light years. It like men speak at each other, not speak to each other, and I was no different. I’d discuss politics and technology with him, but never desires, disappointments or regrets.

We don’t choose our fathers, but we do choose our fathers-in-law. They arrive in our lives playing, to varying degrees, the role of the chap outside Buckingham Palace wearing what looks like a bear on his head. Almost every wedding ritual in India feels like the changing of the guard. “You are now given the responsibility of taking care of my daughter”

But Madhavan Nair, or Maddy, as my wife would refer to him, had no such delusions. He told me that his younger daughter took excellent care of him and will now take excellent care of me. When the priest at my wedding asked him what gotra he was so that he could initiate the Vedically sanctioned “Gotra transfer protocol”, his response was “Manusha Gotram”, subtly suggesting that there was going to be no “transfer” of any kind.

Maddy lived the good life. He always hired people to get work done, and then ensured that their children got the best education and jobs. His wife and daughters would regularly be exasperated at what they believed was his “Ambala Singam” (Male Lion) behaviour, but in the truest sense of cognitively dissonant Indian multifaceted-ness, he was a progressive conservative, a pacifist soldier and a patriarchal feminist. And he kept control of the TV remote. And he truly loved his sons-in-laws. A few years back, he surprised me with a giant file – with newspaper cutouts of every single column I had written since 2008. They say the internet never forgets, but I’d be hard pressed to find everything I wrote.

That file was a ostensibly a collection of newspaper clippings but hiding an act of quiet devotion, the kind that involves scissors, glue, and the patience to wake up every morning and check if your son-in-law’s column made it to print. We live in an age where we can bookmark, screenshot, and save anything to the cloud, and yet we save nothing. We hoard terabytes of photographs we never look at, while that generation built careful, physical shrines to the people they loved. These objects carried weight, literal and emotional, and the act of preserving them was itself an expression of love and respect that never needed to be spoken aloud, almost compensating for our quintessentially male habit of never sharing feelings.

Some years ago, we were sharing a drink, and I decided to dig into his army past just to see if a private conversation would make him share.I asked him why he, a Malayali, would wear a Kada, the traditional Sikh bangle. He told me that his Army jeep driver took him to the Golden Temple in Amritsar before they were deployed to the front, and got it for him for his protection. The driver, he added, died in a landmine explosion during a recon mission, and he continued to wear it in remembrance.

And like many soldiers who build their own quiet armour against the traumatic memories of war that don’t leave, he smiled and added that the man (his Sikh driver) made the finest curry from chickens that were “persuasively sourced” from villages urged to support the war effort.

He remained an army man right up to the end, opting out of invasive treatments and a few days before he passed away, told his attendant nurses that his son-in-law was going to get him discharged because he was sick of having tubes stuck into him, and his daughters and wife weren’t listening to him. He died peacefully in his sleep..