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A chartered accountant, he dropped his practice to run an advertising agency and an offset printing business. During the heyday of the printing business, 120 people worked in three, round-the-clock shifts. At one time, we used to meet huge orders for the adult literacy programme with metronomic regularity. As luck would have it, Rajakumar got fascinated with a grand idea. He wanted to develop a scrabble in Tamil and use it as a means for play and education. Convinced that it would be an effective tool for adult literacy, he threw himself heart and soul into the project. As a result, work at the printing unit got whittled down to two shifts a day. I complained that he was squandering his time on a dream and neglecting his business. Not one to do anything by half measures, he spent about five years listing, with the support of a hired team, all the words under each of the 247 letters in Tamil and also the frequency of each phonetic sound. By now, the printing unit was a thing of the past. Rajakumar does not have double standards. At present, I am working on a book and he advises me to give up every other work and pursue this literary ambition. Trust him to smile approvingly if our daughter says she wants to drop out of school and do something that seems more meaningful to her. At one level, this attitude seems welcome. But it is also scary.

She has been behind many of the things I have done. Apart from that, an unpublished book with poems on random subjects, originally written to be set to music is about her. I launched into the advertisement business so that we spend more time together. She is quick to anger, but comes ‘crawling back in remorse’, as she herself puts it. That I never apologise after a fight is her complaint. The truth is: she beats me to it. Just as I am preparing to say ‘sorry’, she makes up.

As told to PRINCE FREDERICK

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