Gopala Iyer had a reputation for taking risks and doing things spontaneously. When he was young, he had enlisted in the military even though there was really no need for him to do so. At that time, his father was the richest man in the village. After a serious argument with his father, he left a suicide note and ran away from home. This was during World War II. He headed straight to the military and enlisted. It was not as if he had had a change of heart and decided that it was better to die fighting for the British Empire than to end his own life. In fact, it had never been his intention to commit suicide—not even when he wrote that note. He just wanted his mother and father to suffer as much as possible, believing that their son had taken his own life. But the irony was that his father was completely unperturbed by that letter. “I have looked at Gopala’s horoscope. There is no chance for a suicide at the moment,” he said, and thought no more about it. The villagers had their own story about what happened next. Apparently, Gopala Iyer wrote to his father from Chota Nagpur, asking for some money, and the father wrote back, “Since you have committed suicide, you won’t be able to sign for the money.” We don’t know if there is any truth to this story.

When he was thirty years old, Gopala Iyer returned to the village early one morning, decked in military attire, a hat, and sunglasses. He had become quite stout. The sun had darkened his skin. Early baldness had encroached to the middle of his head. His lips had grown dark like they’d been roasted over a fire. And there was a whiff of aggression in his speech. Even five or six years after his return, no one in the village was ready to offer their daughter in marriage to him. By then, both his parents had passed away. This was how Gopala Iyer spoke of his father’s death: “Well, when he was alive he said he wouldn’t give me a penny. But now he has left everything to me.”