Enough with the eulogising

Can we not pretend that 1992-93 never happened? That we need to, somehow, say something - anything - nice about someone just because they happen to have died?

If you're sick of all the hushed reverence TV news has been showing over the not-yet-finished-tamasha that is Bal Thackeray's death and funeral, please read Rohit Chopra:

The free pass given to Bal Thackeray today also tells us something about the pathologies of Indian life that produced and made Bal Thackeray possible: pathologies shared across those who identify as secular and those who rant against pseudo-secularists; pathologies that unite the South Bombay whisky-drinking, rugby-playing, Bombay-Gym types with Dadar Hindu colony sons-of-the-soil; pathologies that allow diasporic Hindu nationalists in Silicon Valley and Shiv Sena footsoldiers alike to believe that they are the victims of a secret cabal of Muslims, Marxists, and Macaulayites. Thackeray did not, then, come out of nowhere. He was not the creation simply of disaffected subaltern Maharashtrian communities or of middle-class Maharashtrian communities who felt outsiders had snatched what was their due. He represented something central in Indian political society–not an essentialist, ahistorical tendency but a historically produced capacity for using violence as a form of political reason, the absence of a coherent vision of solidarity that could respect similarity and difference, and the many deep failures of the postcolonial Indian state that our exceptionalist pieties about Indian tolerance, coexistence, and secularism often obscure.

And no, we do not need to be silent on any of this just because Bal Thackeray died earlier today. I doubt any Shiv Sainiks or Thackeray himself spent a minute thinking in silence about any Muslim killed in the 1992-1993 riots in which the Shiv Sena played a key role. As Vir Sanghvi’s article on Thackeray, posthumously anointing him the “uncrowned king of Mumbai” reminds us, Thackeray’s chief objection to Mani Ratnam’s representation of him in the film Bombay was that his cinematic alter-ego expressed regret at the riots.

It is a disgrace that Bombay is shut today. It is a disgrace that Thackeray is being wrapped in the national tricolor. It is a disgrace that he is being given state honors in his death. And it is a disgrace that none of our political leaders, celebrities, or media personalities seem to think any of this is a disgrace. And that if they do they are terrified of saying so.

today's light

Lost an earring that belonged to my father.
Dreamt of a creature that vomited pale worms while moaning, "my heart, my heart". The worms are films that the creature distributes on request.
Yelled at the kid for spilling milk all over a new tablecloth.
Discussed Tarr with a friend.*
Read passages from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Scared five lizards off.
Learnt about orthopedic socks.
The rest of the day will go in the study of my now two month old unbitten fingers.
I have so much Potential.

*I find it's enough to state the desire/intention of watching a film to be considered well-informed and/or worth talking to on important matters. Why bother watching any films? Apropos of which, plans to watch Enthiran have been consistently postponed, the latest attempt and its dismissal being right now. Last Tamil show on at 3.10 this afternoon. Alas, Rajni.

Dog days

A few days after my father died, a stray started to visit us. She'd wag her tail, flirt a bit about coming in and behave in the most Rum Tum Tugger-ish way. Never ate anything but bread and turned her nose up at rice or leftovers. If she ate at all, it had to be fresh stuff and something exciting or she wouldn't bother.

What this has to do with my father is this: though he was as sick as a (don't say it. Don't say it. It's rude and inappropriate). Though he was a very sick man, his was an immensely strength-giving presence. So that, even when he needed help to walk, we never felt the need for any additional protection of any kind. Long before we had neighbours, people used to ask if we oughtn't to have guard dogs, and we laughed.

So when he was no longer there but the dog was, it was reassuring, and for some reason, in mind the two events were inextricably linked. No logic there, I admit, but there it was.

On Wednesday, some long pending thing that was knotted and messy since my father's death, was resolved. I couldn't really believe it. In fact, I spent the afternoon looking as if doom had paid a visit.

Yesterday, in the morning, we found a dog curled up in one part of a sari that was hung out to dry in the verandah because it was raining outside. My mum tried to shoo her out and away from the sari but she looked up and put her head back down. I went to see what the matter way, because through the window it looked as if her eyes were cloudy.

They were. Also, a large part of her intestines were hanging out. She had bled all over the verandah and the place was crawling with ants.

We called Blue Cross, which promised to send a rescue van. We fed her some warm milk with bread soaked in it. She got up on shaky and shivering legs to devour the small bowl of food. The air smelled of wet dog and blood.

When the rescue van came, the man said the dogs were in heat and it could be because of that. Raped dog, I thought. But he took one look at her and said, this is something else. He didn't say they'd put her down, but that is what they have done.

I was distraught the rest of the day. It was one real, suffering dog; but in my head, she was also symbolic of another kind of end. I told myself all day that this was wrong, that it was stupid to think of my father in this context, but it was roughly equivalent to telling myself to use a nail-cutter when all my teeth are handy.

I don't really know how to conclude this. There are no homilies to hand. Why a dog that was shortly about to die reminded me of my father is something I'd rather not spell out. I feel embarrassed enough as it is.

Oh, this dog was the first one's progeny from a recent litter. rip, nameless one.

Two Minutes Older: The Dying Tree

In my last column, I wrote about death and it seems I am not done with the subject. Recently, a teacher from my old school mourned the slow death of a banyan tree.

This tree had stories gathered under its aerial roots: in 1926, when J. Krishnamurti was looking for some land near his birthplace, Madanapalle, where he could set up a school, he came across a banyan tree in a valley. He was struck by the beauty of the tree and the silence of the place and over the next few years, the land was acquired and the Rishi Valley School set up.

In the years that I was there, our annual dance dramas took place under the tree. We persuaded our teachers to take a class outdoors and took them by the long way to the banyan. Everyone I know from school has at least one annual photo that was taken with the tree as shelter and background.

There was a stage made of cement, and stone benches had been placed at some distance, in a semi-circle. Beyond the stage, some roots had become secondary trees, but most always dangled and never reached the ground – I am not sure if it was because they weren’t allowed to, or because the madly-swinging children put paid to the ambitions of the parent tree.

The big banyan, as it was known – there was another one elsewhere in the school – was as much a landmark of the school as Asthachal (when we watched the sunset from half-way up a small hill) or the distinctive rock formations that surrounded us to which we gave absurd but oddly fitting names.

Such permanence do landmarks have in the minds of people that we forget that even trees must die.

For years there have been rumours of the slow death of the banyan tree. Friends who visited shook their heads in sorrow. They said the cement stage had been removed, that there were supports for the tree, but still it was dying.

I visited the school a few years ago, and I thought the rumours of its death were exaggerated: it seemed to be doing well – maybe it wasn’t as healthy as it was when I had been there, but so many things had changed so why not the tree? Besides, it could have been a matter of perception – the way childhood places often appear smaller and shabbier than one remembers.

Recently, concern for the big banyan has once again erupted. It appears that something – it is not clear what – is eating away at the tree from the inside. The main trunk is dead, so it is unable to support the branches connecting it to the surrounding prop roots. Some friends have been trying to find ways to conserve the main trunk. I’m not sure if it’s an effort worth making.

Of all the trees favoured in mythology and philosophy, it is the banyan which represents immortality, and the enlightenment that comes with the understanding of the nature of death. Its continuing existence is a fact, plain and visible: if another part of it survives, it is still the same tree, no matter how many leaves it sheds or how many roots it puts down. It demands no metaphysical leaps of the human mind – as other trees and plants do – in seeing in a seed the ghost of its parent and the promise of progeny.

In the eighty years since J. Krishnamurti first saw the tree, the big banyan has maybe three of four big prop roots in addition to the main trunk. Understandably enough, the school may not have wanted the tree to spread over a large area, and so it has always stayed in the shape most of us remember it. A banyan that cannot spread probably cannot perpetuate itself in the way it is supposed to.

For this tree to survive, it must be allowed to spread, to change its point of view, to see the world from a slightly different place. Some day, the school children will remember some secondary tree as ‘the’ big banyan, and have stories to tell about it that will also be stories about themselves. There are, after all, many ways for trees to live.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Two Minutes Older: Making the Circle Just

There are days when remembering is not a choice one can make. On such days, memories are crazy flies, their flight unpredictable and unstoppable. As I write this, it is two years since my father died.

For the first year, I counted every day, every event and every festival as a first. In this, I was like a new parent counting in weeks rather than months, recording firsts and hoarding grief as I had once hoarded delight, against the day when my father’s absence would no longer be new.

In the second year, I allowed myself to forget. I gave myself the choice to remember what I wanted to and refuse to rise to the baits that offered themselves every day: notes or phone numbers written in my father’s hand; an old pair of shoes or spectacles still lying around; a piece of paper I’d pasted on a cupboard door at his height and not mine.

Other things I thought I would never, ever forget, whose edge I kept next to me on difficult nights, have become blunted. I no longer remember each separate detail of his last two months. I can’t remember the order of events, the names of medicines or even the terminology used in diagnoses. I’ve forgotten the names and faces of the supporting cast – doctors on rounds, nurses, ward boys, parking lot attendants. I’ve forgotten the smell of hospitals. These losses are not ones I regret.

My mother and I refused the prescribed forms of mourning. We claimed that my father had wished for no ritual conducted in his name. This was true, but only partially; we refused tradition on our own accounts, but counted on the respect given to the wishes of the recently dead. In the absence of ritual and its attendant filling up of time with activities, we were left to cope with the inevitable questions about death and impermanence, but with no ready, scriptural or metaphysical answers to hand.

These days, I don’t think about death all the time, as I used to in the first year. These days I feel more immortal than I used to a year ago. At least, that is what I tell myself.

My body has other ideas. It keeps its eyes on dates and gears itself in preparation. It is a spring being wound up tight. For the last week, though we don’t discuss the reasons for it, we have all been sleeping badly. We wake up once in the night – as we used to in the days immediately following my father’s death – and cannot fall back asleep. It is a watchfulness that comes two years too late. If we stayed awake now, we could not prevent that death that came unannounced and was a deepening of his sleep. We know this, but there is no way of communicating this knowledge to our bodies.

This last week, once I am awake, I have nightmares: what if he was only asleep? What if the doctor was wrong? What if we had made a mistake?

For a brief while, my body is filled with a physiological fear that I recognise. Because this happens in the middle of a wakeful night, it is possible to watch its passage through and out of my body. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain, I say to myself. I can’t remember the rest of that litany but it doesn’t matter. I feel my body calming down.

My father died the day before his 71^st birthday. When we remember his death, we will always, simultaneously, remember his birth. Of the second we know very little and of the first we know everything. But neither our knowledge nor the lack of it matters. Death is not a lesson to be learnt.

What still strikes me about the coincidence is less the bitter irony of it that I used to feel most keenly, and more the symbolic charge it carries. It seems like the perfect end to a life: to take it to the point where it began and then leave it; and to leave in sleep, where the borders with death are most blurred. We should all be so lucky.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)