Dear Baba,
Two years ago, you left us on this date. Today I post my first public write-up on you for those I know and you don’t. I wish I could have shared my world with you. This will fulfil my wish of sharing you with my world.
Baba is deuta in Assamese, bapa in Odiya, bapu in Marathi, pater in Latin, father in English, its colloquial variants being papa and daddy, paw or pop in American, pitaji in Hindi, buba in Nepali, and daata in Marwari language. One evening at our C-59, Sector 19, Rourkela, our first home, you mentioned every one of those words and their origins, in an impromptu linguistics lesson ending in the reflection that you thus in every way merited the ‘babu’, your Bengali nickname. You, you said, indicating me, yes you, you can, therefore, call me by any one of these names. I picked daddy, but you preferred papa. What about bubu, the five-year-old me offered up to you. Bubu is elder sister for Urdu-speaking Muslims, you deadpanned, adding, that was just a thought for you. If you like the sound of daddy, that’s good enough for me, you said, before solemnly walking away.
You were funny that way, Baba, with your sneaky-crafty sense of humour. You were too foolish emotionally to be crafty in any other way.
Another time, later on, when I was about 13 or more, I had enquired of you, you keep telling us about how brave our gotra rishis were come every Mahalaya, and about our freedom fighters, and about eminent Bengalis, and how members of our caste of Vaidyas are thrice-born as compared to the twice-born Brahmins who have been verily unjust to us, and your father, too, we know, was a very eminent doctor, well-regarded by everyone, but what about his ancestors? Who in our family tree is the most accomplished? Have their accomplishments approached the accomplishments of these great men and women in any which way?
And you replied deadpan that your father’s grandfather had been a gutter inspector. He held a job at the local corporation’s sanitation department run by the British raj. His work was to check the condition of the drainage system and submit reports. I remember you were smiling away as you said this, but I myself was quite thoroughly disappointed.
So your jokes were completely wasted on me; too gross, too much of an extremist, too literal and too argumentative around you as I was to pause and understand. Also, I took life much more seriously than you did — you were anxious but self-made and I overprotected.
You were the kind-clever young man built in the patriarchal mould. Tepididi, your oldest sister Gauri’s first daughter, whom you also loved, was Patty, Patricia, according to your fancy. When it came to child-raising, you were hamstrung by communication difficulties, perhaps exacerbated by my own growth curve. But you also had your cognitive dissonances.
I was your firstborn, and mother said you and she were raising me like a son. So initially I basked in that indulgence, and love, but later on my own moral rigour started asserting itself. But in any case, feminism had never been your mandate.
Still, I was the one with whom you most often shared your match analyses. You taught me how to parse tennis, and we stayed up each night for one month during Mexico 1986 to watch two of every three soccer matches at the end of which you would religiously drive me to badminton practice because by then it would be daybreak. I loved sports because it satisfied my free spirit, but I was neither very strong, nor gifted.
We watched the rise of Boris Becker together. I had missed the 1983 World Cup, so I started reading up on cricket history every which way. You told me about Mohinder Amarnath’s contribution to the win, how he was the very best Indian player of the fast ball. You would wake me at four every morning to watch the Tests together during India’s tour of Australia in one of which ‘Jimmy’ handled ball. I answered that and six other questions in one session of Narottam Puri’s Cricket Quiz telecast every Thursday at 10 pm. That is my best memory.
You kept a well-stocked library at home. Thus it is that I came to read Upendrakishore Roychowdhury’s entire works at age seven. Aesop’s fables, Hans Christian Anderson, Thakumar Jhuli. Moving on to Sukumar Ray’s limericks, Saratchandra Chatterjee’s disturbing novels and Bankimchandra’s intricately laid out palace intrigues and period dramas. There was Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s Ganodebota and Manik Bandopadhyay’s Putulnacher Itikatha and short stories. Both Bibhutis. Then there was Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekov. Shakespeare’s plays. All, omnibuses, and entire works. At school, there was before Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (though I liked Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators better), and Alistair MacCleans and Agatha Christies, Richmond Crompton and Enid Blyton. But thanks to your subscription to the public library, I was already reading Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Nick Carter and Perry Mason in standard six. Alex Hailey. You never let a book stay at home for more than two weeks. Thus I missed finishing If Tomorrow Comes that you never knew I was reading in the bathroom, so I had to wait till the end of my ICSE to get my own subscription to the library to look for the book. In the space of four years, you had exhausted its collection and stopped subscribing a few months back. I did not find the book. But I read it after buying it from a used bookstore in Kolkata after I finished college. My second best memory is that fulfilled quest.
Your other name used in your mamabari, by your mamas, Kalu and Animesh, had been Piyoos, life-saving nectar. But your horoscope showed great emotional suffering, unjustifiable disappointment in every important endeavour of life; it was inflicted with kaalsarpayog, so in a token bid to register the intention of his family to ward away that evil influence before the fates, you were named peaceful, Santimoy; Santi, Santida, among colleagues and friends.
You were born early noon. Your birth was greeted by a kalbaisakhi and your sisters and aunts rushed to collect green mangoes.
Although with your natural mathematical ability, you excelled in Hindu astrology, with your predictions unfailingly coming true, you gave it all up because you simply didn’t believe in it. You believed in karma, and the personal philosophy of free will being the best approximation of cause-and-effect determinism, the Hawkingian fates. Stephen Hawking left about two weeks earlier than you did. You weren’t told.
You lost your mother when you were three. Your mother resembled me very closely, you said, as did your stepbrother when we met at a family marriage. Dipukaku said he was shocked when I appeared because it was as if Renubala had walked into the room. But Dipukaku knew your mother through photographs only. Your father loved your mother, you later told me, because he had given her four children. That was the proof of his love, you said, and I did not find sufficient ground to disagree. The sister immediately older to you did not survive. We had only Gauripishi and Gitapishi. Gauripishi and Tunudida, your father’s sister, raised you. Tunudida had told Kajori, my paternal cousin, that once when you were very young, you had stomachache. Then you had gone; uje babaje pate byatha korje uje babaje (o dear daddy, my stomach aches, o dear daddy). Kajori repeated it to me in front of you, and you smiled briefly. Then we went tearing around the house, roaring, uje babaje.
By then we were living at 4/10, Gurunanak Avenue.
You, on the other hand, when you were born, lived not far from the Padma. The Meghna, too, flowed, a couple of short bus rides away. You were the one who first named to me the Meghna. Like Yamuna, Meghna is supposed to have black waters. Your family was from southern Barisal, since renamed Potuakhali. You told me about the guns of Barisal. Once you followed the roar of those guns and walked over a wooden bridge in the direction of the sea, but were spotted by a local gentleman who knew your dad and who returned you home.
You left Barisal at the age of seven. You came to Kolkata to live with your youngest uncle, Mihir Dasgupta. The name of your school was Bhootnath Vidyalaya. Because of your schoolmaster’s tardiness, you missed writing the scholarship (vritti) exam at age 10.
You captained a cricket match successfully. You were a steady bat. The name of your dog was Bagha.
You had tiny handwriting.
You cleared the academic requirements for your medical studies easily and got enrolled in Calcutta Medical College, Bengal’s number 1 medical education destination. But with your mathematical brain, engineering was your first love. The deciding factor had been your marks in the chemistry practical exam. It was a rigged one, with the name of the salt being leaked via the exam invigilator. Everyone in that hall had cleared that test. Save you, because you had felt shame in asking the invigilator to pass the piece of paper containing the name of the salt. All the others had helped themselves to it. It broke your heart.
In college, you had many friends. You were attracted to and joined Left politics.
During my June 2017 home visit, the first morning, you told me about Nalini Gupta and Ashwini Dutta, both of whom were from Barisal. Gupta inspired you. Ashwini Dutta had been with the Congress. Dutta’s house was located a few streets from your paternal home, and you described to me how everyone, including you as a young boy, would keep silence passing it because his brother was in jail for revolutionary activity; he was a biplabi.
Why did you give me this information? Did you ever hope I would remember you with its help?
In medical college, you were what they still call a “brilliant student”.
Spotted by your teachers, you had a strong knack for diagnosis. And a knack for research. In terms of ability, this put you far ahead of other doctors. Which made for conflict and negative office politics later in your life.
You were chosen to head a delegation to meet Bidhan Chandra Roy, college alumnus and then CM, when he was seeing his government’s leader of opposition Jyoti Basu. They got you to call off a students’ strike after they made some compromises. You were not impressed by Basu’s silences. This you mentioned at a relatives’ adda in one of my cousins’ homes back when I was either in high school or college.
One of your college friends was called Purna Chatterjee. He went on to have a medical career in Kolkata.
Actor Shubhendu Chatterjee was your friendly senior. You edited dialogue in his plays.
Theatre continued to be one of your modes of recreation and socialising throughout your DSP hospital days. Dara Shikoh, Antigonus and Sheernokaye Samaddar were the roles you played.
You witnessed how students of R.G. Kar and CMC would ritually clash every Kalipuja immersion over right of way.
You had vicarious, guilty fun watching your classmates target an unfortunate teacher who could not keep up with them — they had nicknamed him, Myxoedema, a hypothyroid disorder, after his slow mannerisms. They sang, Myxoedema ore, niye jabo dhore, niye jabo Dhapa, debo maati chaapa, shaar hoye jabi, dhnyarosh falabi (Myxoedema dear, you will be taken, taken to Dhapa, Kolkata’s infamous back city dumpyard, where you will be interred, turn into manure, and nourish the ladies finger). You told us of this rhyme when we were in college ourselves.
You once attended Hiren Mukherjee’s lecture.
Your father fell ill. You had two sisters to care for, and all of your seven stepsiblings for whom to provide. Your professors told you to sit for the college gold medal exam but with the pressure to earn upon you, you declined. You let the date slip away. Nevertheless, at the insistence of your mamas, who were your well-wishers, you got a seat in London to study FRCS. Your visa was ready but you had landed your job in Rourkela Steel Plant Main Hospital. Your mamas had come to see you off at Howrah station on your trip. They were unhappy with your decision. When the train started moving, they had entreated, even now you can turn back, Babu, we will book your return ticket before we leave the station. But you never relented.
Still fresh out of college, you came to be affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Undivided). You would research political and economic theories and history together with your friends, Julukaku and Swapankaku, both Rourkela Steel Plant engineers. In the Naxalite era, your bachelor’s den became the site of a police raid.
You kept hoping your father would get well and you would continue your studies but he passed away.
You went drinking at the Rourkela German Club up until the early days of your marriage. You quickly developed the reputation of being a big drinker. But one day you got sick and you kicked the habit.
You smoked Charminar and read the Statesman. You subscribed to Desh.
Later you would be reading Lancet and the British Medical Journal. I would sometimes browse them to read up the single short story written in every issue by doctors.
You spoke Odiya fluently. When we went to Puri in my fifth standard, the people there mistook you for an Odia person.
You were a laggard at housework. One puja, mother had gone to her parents for a week and returned to find 14 empty but used plates of food on the dining table. You hadn’t bothered removing or washing them.
You were the one who taught how to make tea and rice. Ma never taught me to cook. She raised me as a crippled Bengali boy, as instructed.
The mamas had got you married to ma. The practice of endogamy among Vaidyas meant mom was your third cousin once removed. You educated us about the English system of describing relationships. Your kakima and female cousins were cruel to mom, but she would move with you to Rourkela, so that issue sorted itself out to that extent. But Kalumama was rude to her, saying she must have had boyfriends just because she studied in Presidency College. You left Kalumama’s house when you heard him say it. You never spoke to him again. The news of his death came to our Gurunanak home when I was a college student.
I was born. Mother almost died. It took eight bottles of blood to save her, tissues in her belly were burnt and fused together; and she suffered diastasis recti. The damage was irreparable. It all happened because I hadn’t moved inside her belly, so there had been no contractions. The doctors panicked and gave her a hydralazine injection to induce labour. It was a huge mistake. Ma started haemorrhaging massively and they had to operate. Even while she was bleeding all over the place.
The doctor who operated on mother was Dr D.P. Dey. He died, drowning in the Brahmani river while offering tarpan to his ancestors the same year.
With all her faults, ma has the physical courage of Rana Sanga. She went on to have another C-Section and a major gall bladder operation.
Ma it was who pulled a tapeworm stuck in my throat out my mouth when I was one year old and about to choke to death. I had turned puce, it was said.
You never let me criticise my mother ever in your life.
Some years later, Mihirdadu, who raised you, fell sick and you brought him over to Rourkela for treatment. He stayed with us for several months. I remember him as a kind and quiet gentleman. When his heart condition had stabilised, he returned to Kolkata, but you told mom and mom told me that he had not been cured.
After some more months, we received the news that he had suffered a stroke and was dead. We rushed to Mihirdadu’s rented accommodation at Ballygunge Place. Mother later told me that your kakima had falsely accused you of administering wrong treatment. She had done it publicly and dramatically, over his dead body.
Ma also told me how kakima’s daily family quarrels over finances would stress the dadu out, and he had suffered the attack following one such particularly vicious altercation.
You thought you could have helped him had you been closer. Losing 10 years of seniority, you applied for a transfer to Durgapur.
Once in Durgapur, you and ma asked me if I wanted a brother or a sister. I opted for a brother. Someone told me that girls are boring because they are docile. Ma underwent another Caesarian section at great risk to her life. She was spunky. My sister was born.
You always hoped to continue your studies, do your post-graduation once things got better, when you got them to become better, all by yourself.
Now in Durgapur, sidelined because of your egalitarian work ethic, not closing your eyes to injustice and not backing down, lost seniority resulting in being passed over for promotion, you wanted to pursue your post-graduation dream. The management sent you to Bombay on a two months’ training assignment. It was a sop. But you were hopeful and happy.
You were yet to know the ways of the world.
You enjoyed your time in Mumbai-Bombay. You loved the city. Because it was an atmosphere of openness and learning, you made good friends. One of them, one Dr Jain, visited us later with his family. You sent us telegrams for fun. One night after it hailed. I wrote you an inland mail that contained my hand-drawing of a hailstone with the caption, this is the size of each one of them. Mother made me draw and write the caption. You returned bearing gifts of pairs of denim trousers and plaid blouses for me.
Those were my first jeans. I enjoyed wearing them.
About the Bombay local train, one of your teachers there said, it is “such transport that you get up on like Dilip Kumar, and you come out like Mahatma Gandhi”.
In your absence, sister, born a year ago, transitioned from being the jovial baby (you called her ‘joker’) to a quiet one. You noticed upon return and pointed it out to me.
In a major operation, ma’s gall bladder was amputated. Ma rallied well.
You were the hospital’s chief negotiator with workers’ trade unions. You argued with the management in favour of nurses and got them their rights. You lost your second promotion.
I documented your conversation with your senior regarding the matter after you reported it to mother, mentioning what was said and what was not said. I handed it over to you when you returned from work the next day. Go to the management with this paper(s), I had said. You said it was not to be done, but that it was a good document.
The central government introduced mandatory Hindi studies. You stood first in all three parts of the course.
You then applied for postgraduate studies, again. The MD, let him not be named, did not approve leave. I asked mother, why doesn’t he go anyway. Who will put you and your sister through school, she said.
You closely monitored developments at the World Health Organisation. You were the doctor instrumental in starting the Eliza test in Durgapur Main Hospital. The other doctors bore an irrational fear of AIDS. Only you volunteered for the test.
You were incidentally the one who told me about the world’s first Ebola outbreak when it took place.
You exposed malpractices in the hospital dispensary, stealing of medicines, promoting of high cost drugs by pharmaceutical companies through junkets and inducements to doctors. You did this in a very fair manner after giving due warnings. You received threats. Someone called you up at your hospital phone to say, “You do commute home through that unlit dirt road, don’t you, doctor?” You simply said, yes.
You worked in the pathology and haematology departments, also briefly in clinical pharmacology. You now wished to be a haematologist. Your PG hope was dying hard. You tried again, and this time, as a final gesture of politeness, they sent you on a short course to Delhi. You liked the weather. It was good for your psoriasis. You ate desi ande (country eggs) but did not break out. You could not eat them but coconut and eggs were among your favourite foods.
You stayed in Vasant Kunj with the other doctors. You visited the Lotus Temple. You brought back T-shirts for my sister and myself, one red, another blue, and, only for me, salwar-kameez — three pairs of them. The shopkeeper sold them to you saying they were ‘suits’. You got sold on the word, suits.
I, pants-loving, hated the salwar-kameez. I wished you had got me jeans instead, like the time you went to Bombay.
You said they sold jeans in shops in the markets, and you did not visit. You got the salwar-kameez from a stall by the roadside.
But when ma expressed that she did not like the poorly tailored salwar-kameez sets, you said you had not made postgraduation, after all, and salwar-kameez is suitable attire for the daughter of a non-specialist like him. And I chafed at that pronouncement.
Of course, that was because I did not link women’s freedom of dress with social class, and much more than that I wanted all women to move freely and wear trousers democratically. But I hankered, too, for the social currency that came with wearing trousers.
You were confident that I could pull off retro, the style that even today is commonly called conservative, with equal casualness. You rightly believed that it was character that built one’s social currency.
I chafed at your words. I was full of feeling.
In feeling the way I did, I missed the story of your feelings.
You did not mention your PG study plans to the hospital authorities again.
You saw patients for free. You hated the idea of private practice.
You were among the first people to be truly exercised by gratuitous tests ordered by private hospitals, the generic versus branded drug debate, the refusal of doctors to serve in heartlands. You had endless information on these topics, both thoroughly and tirelessly researched as well as personal stories. I never wrote any of those stories.
You had great knowledge in biochemistry. When I got jaundice, you put me on a prescription of phospholipids which was not the jaundice drug in India at that time but was being experimented upon in the US. In the space of one month, you cured me and sent me back to my Webel engineering job. I also started smoking at the mazaar at the same time. I was unable to hold that job, though not for the smoking.
You did not take care of your body. From the time Mihirdadu died, you developed psoriasis. You neglected your psoriasis. Instead of using creams liberally, you let the sores spread, and then used steroids to suppress them. It gave you high blood pressure and affected your heart. The heart was to kill the kidneys. You were anti-physical to that extent.
You prescribed antibiotics conservatively to patients and told me about B.C. Roy’s placebo story, but you yourself abused antibiotics.
One afternoon, you and I discussed that marriage and children makes one less powerful, as even if they could stay upright if they so chose, it meant they had to absorb losses. I want to be powerful, I had said. I want to change the world. I don’t want to have children.
By the time I was in my 12th, it had been mutually decided that I won’t marry because it is difficult to balance duty to provide for family with risks taken to change the world. You had said after becoming independent I could contact the organisation, Child Rights and You, and sponsor a child without a home — you and I could together sponsor a child — while reading out what was possibly CRY’s first print advertisement.
You taught me how to make rice and tea. You did not know to make anything else. The skills you had you transferred to me. Once, when mom had gone to Kolkata, I had tried to cook cucumber with tamarind. You were furious. Don’t I know enough chemistry not to try cooking water, you snapped at me. You drank milk tea with sugar. You asked me to time the brewing of the leaves and I found it was three minutes.
You would make tea for me in the mornings to wake me for studies. Or watch cricket. But I did not take to tea drinking for pleasure until in my forties. Even in 2016 when I visited, you made me tea. I made you tea.
When I got 76 marks out of 100 in Bengali in my Class XI essay on Narayan Gangopadhyay’s Lal Ghora at Samir Ghosh’s tutorial lesson, you offered me a cigarette out of your packet. Sadly, I never gave you another such occasion again.
You gave me my first drink — Ballentine’s — after my tenth at Santiramkaku’s (Santiram Das) place.
Despite all of your professional setbacks, you became assistant director and technical assistant to the MD of the DSP Main Hospital. I fought with you to not include your designation on my biodata because I wanted to make it on my own and it was important because of my feminism and our differences. You took it personally.
I learned C++ on your office computer well enough to write a binary tree software program that ran. I stood first in that Allahabad Bank programmer job entrance, but was not accepted on a criterion discrepancy. You said that entrance was rigged. You had insisted on accompanying me out of town. For that sole reason I opportunistically misbehaved with you on that trip.
You bought me coffee on the train on the return trip.
You retired in the post of assistant director.
After you retired, you took up one social work and another job wherein you conducted blood tests for poor patients in Benachitty for a nominal monthly salary. Every morning you rode to Palashdiha on your moped to treat villagers for free. During one visit to Durgapur from Kolkata, you told me about a woman, as young as I was then at 27, who was a mother of four and a domestic employee. Her children regularly fell sick. They had diarrhoea. She worked all hours to sustain them and had to leave them in the care of her eldest who was about 10 every morning. You said her story could be written. I was new to journalism, desk-bound, wanting to write about other issues when I could. I had other quests.
I was not excited by that story.
Thus you did not get to know that all the important things about journalism I know today it was you, it was you, it was you who taught me; unknowingly by both of us, gave me the leads.
You told me about alliteration in newspaper headline writing one late evening during load shedding. You would rip apart The Statesman for “blowing hot and cold”, as you said on developing stories. You told me about why words were important and one needed to be specific while using them, that there was a thrust in some headings as there was a slant in some stories. All of that went over my head.
I am a mediocre headline writer by the way.
What I do know now though is that the reader is far cleverer than the best journalist, that’s been my takeaway.
So many things we should have discussed because you had introduced me to them I did not because we fought and because you are now dead. So many others we did not discuss because of my own insufficient journalism.
The Ranbaxy scam you had told me about when the news broke. You disdained me when I did not react to the news. I had missed it and did not read about it until after your death.
Apart from investigations, reportage and analysis, journalism is also the recording and research of history, though mostly as and when it takes place. While appreciating the role of dialogue in democracy, you held the opinion that pacifism and non-violence was a position of the privileged, and an inherently hypocritical one when presented as hard policy. Way back in 1985-86, you were the only person who informed us about the conversation between ex-British PM Clement Attlee and then Calcutta High Court Chief Justice P.B. Chakraborty wherein he said the British decided to leave India because of fear of mutiny post the Azad Hind trials and that M.K. Gandhi’s influence on the decision was “minimal”. You were the only one who told us about MN Roy’s character sketches of our national figures. I read them in 2017. Not a word was different from your telling. Never got to tell you.
You were the first to tell us about matriarchal societies in India, and Bengal’s Kali-based culture, where Rama and Hanuman had no place, during our early middle school days. Perhaps I was in Class VI then. You told us about how Bengalis differed from North Indians in that they curdled milk to make chhena and used sugar that was processed through bone char, a practice intrinsic to our cultural heritage of chhena-based sweets.
You were clued to the news, though not through the internet. What would you have thought about Garga Chatterjee’s rabblerousing and attention-seeking and Anuj Dhar’s red herrings? I will never know.
You were the last of the quintessential good Bengalis. But you were a bad Bengali, too, in one or two or perhaps three ways.
Egalitarian as you were you were also a protofeminist, a patriarchal protofeminist, whose protofeminism had not faced the test of reckoning.
One early morning at our back verandah of our Gurunanak bungalow, the morning after we had moved into those quarters, yes, from our 20/10, Edison Avenue, home, and I was seven then, you taught me the atomic theory, sitting on the patio. Molecules and atoms. Electrons, protons and neutrons. Anu and paramanu. In English, and in Bengali. Then you narrated the interview of Bak [Yama shapeshifted into a crane] and Yudhistthir. What is heavier than the earth? The mother. What is larger than the sky? The father.
Recently, I watched the movie, Village Rockstars, where they told a wrong version, transposing these couple of answers. It was successful for a different reason, and that had a lot to do with the mother being a person from my generation, a Gen X person from an Indian village.
But coming back to the idea, why can’t mother be larger? It could be a natural question to a young mind, though it was one that I didn’t ask. The comparisons themselves had seemed a bit far-fetched for me to process, and I was busy absorbing the information.
You, however, chose to pose that question, and then go on and answer it yourself. You said many things change with time. And with time, this concept might change, too. But it hasn’t, and will not in the future that you can foresee. I have to admit you have been right about that.
When you retired from your vocational job at Palashdiha three years before you would pass away because it had become too strenuous on your physique, weakening from the vicious cycle of bad kidneys and a blocked heart that no one but you knew about, you were angry to have to admit before me that you were, in fact, giving up, letting go. You wanted to keep working, keep pushing back, keep giving.
Last December, when you had begun your final decline, BBC released the clip of a 1953 interview of BR Ambedkar on digital media which you, being unconnected and with no one to inform you about, knew nothing of. In that interview, Ambedkar talks about how democracy is set to fail in India because of its unequal, unfree social structure (based on and run by the wrong values, my addition). Asked what is the way out, he actually says Communism might be an alternative.
When I was in secondary school, I remember you narrating this very talk to me in our living room in Gurunanak Avenue, saying it was in the tone of his voice and the promptness with which he thought of the answer that betrayed his respect/sympathy for Communism and the Communists. And today, watching the clip for the first time, coming late to it, as I am not so clued in to politics, I nevertheless noted that on my own so keenly. Ambedkar also later says that the Communists trust him, and you mentioned that, too, saying there must have been reason for that trust, and unlike other Congress leaders, he did not shy away from disclosing that.
You then went on to say that Ambedkar’s basic ideology was Buddhism and he had once said Buddhism differed from Communism in its attitude towards violence (and Ambedkar adhered to that traditional attitude). I heard that clip, too, a different one, on YouTube one winter back. By then, you were already dead.
You ended saying you did not believe in that thesis, that Ambedkar did, but that Buddhism otherwise was agnostic, really atheist, and placed very high value on moral integrity, that no religion, even the philosophically rich Hinduism, did not.
When I told Siddhartha, he mentioned Rahul Sankrittayan, formerly Kedarnath Pande’s similar journey. You had mentioned him to us, too, but during a different talk.
When I was in college you showed me a Statesman article on Andre Gidé and surrealism. But this article also talks about Gide’s criticism of Communism, I said. All the great minds, though first to become enamoured by Communism, came around to grow out of it, you said. At that point, I hadn’t read Ayn Rand, so not much sense was made.
I guess what got your goat all along, as frequently as elitist disdain for poor, was elitist cancelling of Communists and Communism, the original sin of liberal illiberalism. If I have to list my regrets, and there are too many of them, at too many different levels, the most crucial one involving the fact that I did not take care of you when you became too ill to work and I rejected the chance given to me by Siddhartha to have you live by my side, I will remember the small gifts that I did not think to give you.
You liked the sitar and had an ear for classical music. While in Rourkela, you trained under “Mastermashai” who himself was a student of Nikhil Banerjee.
We subscribed to the Statesman and Desh magazine. And three years of Readers Digest. Our house was a publishers’ archive of 10 years of Desh. Sometimes I would reread old issues and sort them by date. I would hide tamarind stolen from the cellar which mother bought to wash the deity’s utensils with in the stacks of old newspapers and magazines on the bookrack refashioned from bedposts. One night during my gap year after 12th, the wall racks gave out, unable to bear the weight of all that paper. You were sleeping on the camp cot just beside it. You were saved by a whisker.
The topmost rack bore your elegant black sitar. It shattered on impact. You stood looking at it for a long time. Then you went away. I had secretly resolved to replace the instrument. The year I came to Delhi, 12 years back, Siddhartha and I saw a small, brown sitar in a shop at Connaught Place. A blind sitarist was the shopkeeper. He was playing when we walked in. He kept playing. The sitar cost 25,000 rupees, the shop attendant said. Due to job insecurity I delayed the buy and I never went to that shop again.
Then there are the musandas. You were a rose gardener. And a musanda gardener. I did not search for blue-ink musanda and bear home a pot on the train to you. While flower show winners failed to make the cuttings survive, you reared them masterfully. You grew 69 rose species/varieties. My fingers are long but I could not wrap them around some of the blooms, wrists touched at maximum stretch. We collected their names. Even when 100 blooms were picked from the garden one night, the next morning, we found the garden laughing as sparkingly.
You created a new hybrid and named if after my sister. Unfortunately, before it could bloom, the garden help, thinking it was weed, uprooted it.
You never took part in the annual flower show, which we found less impressive, by the way, but people came to our garden to look at the flowers.
You wanted a red musanda cutting, but it was a rare possession. You were unable to find it in the nursery. Then you came to know that a blue musanda, too, had been cultivated.
When you moved to your flat in Bidisha, I still held onto plans to bring home pots of all five known colours of musanda, white, pink, light pink, blue, red.
But I never made that journey.
When I went to Mughal Gardens in the spring of 2016, I did not mention it to you. But it did not have as many roses.
I did not buy you those Reebok floaters I spied in 2014 while running shoe shopping that you would have rocked with your surprisingly cute feet. You had commented mine weren’t as cute though my hands are and it is true.
Siddhartha and I, we kept planning to meet Mohinder Amarnath one day, touch his feet and come back to tell the tale. No reason now to make that happen.
Except three of them, I never showed you any of my stories.
I never took care of you, nor did I give you any emotional comfort or even intellectual relief from the mundane
We never did journalism together. I did not share my journalism with you except one abortive attempt in 2017 even though I got most of my leads from what I learned from you and no one else.
Ah well. There is perhaps one thing I did do for you.
Though I did not know it then, it possibly led to you partaking of one of the most delicious pleasures that an adult can beget.
I was nine years old then, and Diwali, after Holi, was then my favourite festival. I was fond of loud crackers and you did not hold back in supplying them.
Two years back from then, you had moved quarters next to your boss to our Gurunanak Avenue residence. Your boss was mean to you. But he was polite to you on your face and invited you to his house Diwali party. I had already celebrated Diwali, or rather Kalipuja, with you and ma but my stock of chocolate bombs and dodoma (double boom) was not finished yet. So I continued bursting crackers next door, here, there, all over the place, up and down the driveway, unsupervised because you were confident.
Your boss was afraid of crackers and you saw him jump in fear when I burst one too close as he was walking some guests to the gate. But he could not say anything to me, as that would have crossed the bounds of politeness.
You and ma restrained me thereafter for the rest of the evening, promising me that I could finish the rest of my stock the following day.
You kept your promise.
But later that evening I heard you mention the incident to mother not without a hint of pleasure. It was sweetest revenge.
That incident, now come to think of it, remains to you my best gift.
One of the few of the ones I gave.
Things about you that I never knew and that I learned only about three years before your death. Even later.
Your shirt size was 42. You preferred meat to fish, and mutton to chicken. Because of your heart condition, you could not eat mutton.
Things I learnt after your death.
You liked samosas and all deep-fried foods. Mango, not litchi, was your best-loved fruit.
Because of your poor emotional intelligence and mine, and because of our feud which you had ended but which ma had continued, and because of my then-unfinished spiritual quest, I never understood you emotionally until you were on your deathbed. Even then, the understanding was not a full one.
I could not show my love to you. Love that is not spoken, not shown, not claimed, not answered, is no love at all, Shakespeare says. If that is true, then I could not love you. I tried but I could not. I failed.
Ma said in 2017 that I trusted you and not her and she was bitter about the fact. She also mentioned then that you had begun to lose your faith in me. I remember that I did not comment.
I was hoping to rebuild the trust at a later date.
The truth is that you rallied for me and you never stopped trusting me till the very end.
What can I say?
Here is a poem I wrote for you, though I am not really a poet.
I titled this lying, prevarication.
Even if you will not read it, let me share it all the same.
Lying, prevarication
(1)
Friendship is as much about respect as altruism, attraction.
Respect is about power play.
(2)
Instead of challenging a friend
To change her politics,
To give up the game,
It is sometimes better to lie to them,
though only from a position of power
After you have indeed defeated them.
In deed, defeated them.
For arguing about politics only estranges them.
Challenging them to examine their views annoys both parties,
puts you off one another,
and you lose them.
But lying comes like a final grace.
After the defeat,
it sets the pace.
Lying is a final grace.
It sets the emotional world to rights, renews the bonding.
You begin again, from a clearer place.
(3)
Gmail is 15 today.
In all these 21 years, did never get Baba an account,
Never kept in touch over email.
Tried so very sporadically
From afar
Which was too far,
Far from enough…
Not enough tries.
Baba’s Yahoo account is the orphan now.
(4)
No one can lie successfully;
their memory is simply not good enough,
someone famous once said.
Yet a lie is often more successful than one million facts.
A lie is a secret pact
Between the liar and the liee who decides to accept the lie.
No one can lie successfully
But together we can,
create not alternate truths, but post-truth
new realities, delude the world.
Together we can.
What one man cannot.
Together we can change the world.
(5)
Will there be still those that hold
when push comes to shove
that one (wo)man can change the world?
(6)
This age of email, e-texts and messengers
Has made it possible to deconstruct lying
To tell the truth
that one is indeed lying
By disregarding
grammar and spelling,
sentence capitalising,
English-bullying,
disrespecting,
appalling,
introducing the prevarication
before the lie;
the reader is powerless to protest
in the face of your litost,
You have your excuse
of a slip of the finger,
nothing major
a typo, cataract
(7)
Disrespect your friend and keep him
the new age mantra.
Father and I,
we hurt each other,
we never lied.
Father and I
we never knew
that it could be so simple.
(8)
Father and I,
we never thought:
It would (one day) be so easy
to lie.
*
Goodbye, Baba. At Mission Hospital two Marches back, you left after the evening I said goodbye to you for the first and only time in all those 17 visits to the ICU that I’d made.
It is the last thing I ever said to you.
As long as I live I will return again and again to you to say goodbye on this date.
I am so proud of you, Baba.
Yours, and never yours,
Jh.
onebongmadwoman 