9 July 1981.
The morning my father breathed his last. Seems like ages ago.
I remember of him less and less.
Too few photographs to recall how he looked, felt, spoke… So unlike today, with framed and candid ones, with videos that uncomplainingly capture the inane and the momentous.
I don’t remember his voice anymore. Just his smile. And his long strides that carried his bulk effortlessly.
Some things I remember though…
- As a nine- or ten-year-old, when we would compete for the newspaper first thing in the morning.
- As a ten-year-old, when I surreptitiously went to play basketball, took a tumble on the court, and came home bleeding profusely from the face only to have my father yell at me non-stop (in shock? anger? helplessness?) and do little else till my mother intervened and prompted him to take me to the hospital.
- When he barely concealed his embarrassment when the school principal, at the time of my admission, said something to the effect that, ‘The boy knows little and has flunked in all subjects. He knows Hindi rather well though,’ and admitted me to the school with a warning that I would be asked to leave at the end of the year if I showed no improvement. I was in 8th grade.
- The year he took my three sisters and me to listen to Chinmayananda lecture on Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gita for ten consecutive evenings in Chennai.
- The time he picked up a broomstick and chased me around the house because I flunked maths in 8th grade. I had brought much shame to him (an ace in maths), his brother (a maths professor) and my eldest sister (a maths-mad genius).
- The times when he was bed-ridden and listening to the radio, he would ask me to identify the ragam of a particular kirtanai (in Carnatic music) blaring away, or guess who the artiste was.
- The time when I got home very late after a badminton match in a faraway place in Chennai, and he was sick with worry, sitting on his bed with his head buried between his knees (during my early teens).
- When he dropped in on me in hospital during my stormy post-op convalescence after an appendectomy. He was visiting the hospital for his routine thrice-a-week dialysis (in the summer after 12th grade).
My sisters remember much more of him, and quite vividly. And my mother, of course.
I often wonder: Where was I? Perhaps, even then, I wasn’t ‘present’, and was too self-absorbed or distracted.
How much do we really remember of what whizzes past us when we travel in a super-fast train?
It is well over 40 years now. Time for vignettes to acquire a new frame, a refreshed storytelling.
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