My father, Jai Nath Misra – known to everyone as Mick – who has died aged 87, was a mechanical engineer turned maths teacher who taught in schools in Hertfordshire for more than a quarter of a century.
Born in Jaipur in India, he was the fifth living child of Susheela Chaturvedi and Kailesh Misra, and grew up in Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh. His father left the family when he was two years old and he grew up with his mother in an extended household consisting of his siblings and a number of cousins, uncles and aunts.
Susheela sold her wedding jewellery to enable him to come to England at the age of 21; he took the boat from Bombay (now Mumbai) and arrived at Victoria coach station in London in 1957 with a small suitcase and broken English.
Mick’s degree in mathematics from Agra University was not recognised in England, but before he could enrol at the University of London he needed to be a taxpayer for four years. He therefore took up work hauling milk churns at a dairy, as a postman and cutting sheet metal in various factories, before he was able to sign up for his maths degree.
In 1965, at a tea dance at Chelsea town hall, he met Mary Peggie, a civil servant from Rosyth in Fife. They married in 1967 and moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire.
After his degree Mick worked as an engineer in a factory in Dunstable in Bedfordshire, helping to design and build car parts – in particular carburetors – until he was made redundant in the early 1970s. He then did teacher training at the University of London’s Garnett College in 1973 and subsequently had a 25-year career as a maths teacher at St George’s school in Harpenden, St Columba’s college in St Albans and what is now Oaklands college, also in St Albans.
In 2001, newly retired, Mick and Mary moved to the village of Spexhall in Suffolk, where they spent eight happy years enjoying rural life.
In 2010 they moved to Belsize Park in north London, where Mick became a volunteer for Age UK and joined a group of UK-based Indians keen to support a new political party in India – the Aam Aadmi party – whose aims were to sweep away corruption and support ordinary working Indians. Mick went to India for three months and campaigned for the party in Delhi.
After Mary died in 2014, and in between time spent with his grandchildren, Mick threw himself into travel, including to Israel and Myanmar. In 2018 he flew to Chicago and drove around Lake Michigan, and in 2019 he took part in the huge Prayag Kumbh Mela religious gathering in Triveni Sangam, Uttar Pradesh. In 2020, aged 84, he went kayaking in the mangroves of the Andaman Islands and later that year travelled to Bhutan.
He loved turning up somewhere new, having a beer and striking up a conversation with whoever happened to walk into the room.
Mick is survived by me and his three grandchildren, Rufus, Jemima and Gilbert.
