Following the stars in a cold winter

The winter is here. Well, almost!

But, it has been three long, cold months for us already. My father having passed away first. It was September. A textbook Virgo, he would have turned 77 in another two weeks had it not been for the sugar level that tided in his ageing system, twisting it in unholy proportions and squeezing a little life force out of him every time it returned to the plane of sanity.
Then, landed the second blow. My ailing father-in-law joined him in afterlife.

My father Sukumar Bose after offering puja to Goddess Kali

My father and him were like chalk and cheese. My old man embraced the life of a retired professor, happy with his ruminations on literature of which he was a high priest and condescending of anything that was beyond the 90s and consequently his aesthetic grasp. He was as easily aggravated by the missing vowels in American version of the written English – where colour becomes color and cheque is written as check – firming his belief that world was descending into chaos, as he was by polythene bags that weren't folded into elegant pleats held together by an unyielding rubber band.

My, dad-in-law, however, came of a different stable altogether. At eighty, he was running around in an obsolete moped suing the government and writing to smug officials at the slightest trespassing of rights of the elderly to desirable results and motivation in equal measure. That was two years back. He was diagnosed with an ailment that was consuming his nervous system slowly, like a corrosive eating into a hardy metal. He lost his right leg first; then the remaining one turned limp, the nerves failing to read instructions from his healthy brain. In a little over two years, he turned into a vegetable unable to recognise his own daughters in his final days when he was totally bedridden, his body riddled with unmanageable sores. Like my father, he turned cold before his caretaker could serve him a hot meal. 

In their deaths, I have been left with two studies and a lesson.

My father-in-law left a decent inheritance for his wife, including a house. He was a stickler for financial planning. As a government servant, he had his life planned out early reaping him sizeable dividends to live a content life in retirement. It was only after he failed to recognise his kin, we learnt from rummaging through his cabinet how successfully he had covered ground for his wife. A part of this forbearing came from his knowledge of the stars. He was a firm believer in the science of astrology, the only trait that perhaps brought him on the same page with my dad, who was himself a prolific palmist and an astrologer.

My father-in-law HP majumdar with wife Pratima on his B'Day

 Not many days had passed since we cremated him. My mother-in-law who was gathering her belongings and wits having lived with and lost the man she was married to for four decades and nine years, got hold of an old notebook. She packed the unassuming diary with her thrifty luggage that she brought to our place where she has now moved in after much persuasion. One day, she came out mildly smiling, her voice finding its pitch after a long time. It was a Sunday evening. She was holding the diary in her hands, one of its pages, held together between her fingers, apparently rustling up the excitement in her. "Here, read this. Your baba had written when he was…," she spoke in a quavering voice and thrust the page in front of my wife. We were in the living room seated around the table goading our little girl to go over the math tables once again. She couldn't bring herself to wait for us to read the lines written in Bengali. I am a Bengali illiterate, having failed to read and write the language that is supposed to be my mother tongue. My wife can. But she didn’t get the chance either. Loosely translated, my father-in-law had written this when he could: My wife keeps saying what will happen to me when she passes away. I tell her, but she is hard of hearing. She doesn’t know…  

My old man, however, has been forewarning us for years, how his life in later years would be difficult. In our rare discussions on Cheiro – the cult Irish palmist who found out Napoleon’s grandson from behind a curtain by just reading his hand – and astrology, he would point to a combination of stars and how Rahu as the shadow planet would bring about the discomfort. This, he said once: My old age is bad. If this combination were to happen in youth, it kills the subject or brings disgrace to his social standing. Since it’s in old age, my health will be an issue.

My father was an extremely generous man having gifted away most of his fortune to people who were just passersby in the journey of his life. Though, he had built himself a plush house and never ran short of food, he died almost penniless, in his last days. He had little money in the bank, had sold off his stocks to gift others and had bought no insurance for himself, unwavering in his belief that doctors are mercenaries and he could do without them.   

From my father’s POV, he lost his wife, his eyesight, his bank balance and his overall health in the last three years. I was plagued with morbid fear of my father going on dialysis and went on a saving spree when the doctors told of his failing kidneys. This was last year. He would deteriorate and rebound to full recovery after medication, rushing us in and pulling out of that terrifying curve each time.

In one of our conversations in his last days, he offered to sell off his house – which was not the first time – so he could honour a handsome cheque he had written in my wife’s favour for his granddaughter. She never cashed the cheque, knowing fully well that he would need the money more than us. He passed away on a rainy Sunday morning having asked my sister for breakfast but never getting around to having it. He went away just like that. In a snap. Never needing that medical care, which I feared for him every day.

Both the old men knew in some measure what the future held for them and yet both walked different paths to the prophecy’s fulfillment. Unlike my father-in-law who punctiliously charted his course of actions to tune them to his understanding of the future, my father followed his heart to his death. My father-in-law’s fiscal management came handy for him and his wife when his visits to doctors and hospitals in last few years outnumbered his tour of temples in entire lifetime. My father, on the other hand, never needed the money, which he never bothered saving. He was, though, saving up something else. While cleaning his room after his cremation, we opened his wardrobe, which he never let us arrange in his lifetime. Among the starched shirts he had stopped wearing, phials of his homeopathy medication, which he merrily popped without prescription, and packs of biscuits he would munch on when hungry, were bundles of polythene neatly rolled and held together by unyielding colourful rubber bands.    

To mam, with love...

This past week, a childhood friend crashed into my life, like she would do, when we were school buddies. She would travel every year to Jaipur - her home town - from Jakarta where she has settled down, but our assortment of talks carried a mostly cordial and slightly restrained flavour, in spite of the fact that the two of us share some raging years of hormonal turbulence between us, always in awe of each other and never willing to submit to the other.

Sujitha mam with my kid Araina

Madhu on Ariana's b'day (May 14)

But, this year was different. We went on an exploration trip and discovered ourselves anew, finding in that shared space, some precious moments. One such detour to the school trip that wound down 20 years back had us time-travel to the 1995 class of our English literature teacher Sujitha mam. It popped out of me, quite accidentally, if I may say, while explaining to her how I found her back, this time as a teacher again, but not mine. She teaches senior classes in St Xavier's School, where my six-yr-old daughter has begun her journey into formal education with her nimble steps in class 1.
Now, this woman never ceases to amaze me. Not then, not now twenty years later. And, my obsession with books and literature in high school ensured that I was, at the risk of shameless bragging, one of the few students she lavished with her attention.
Madhu, my friend, couldn't hold her excitement. I was, however, amazed by her sudden urge to meet the woman as I believe she would be last person to come this close to academics and be in adulation of a teacher who was extremely particular of not only how we read and wrote English, but how we spoke the borrowed language. She was perhaps the only English teacher in the Capital of a desert state who would be obsessed with phonetics at a time when wives of army officers posted in our town dabbled in teaching - they would be coming in and going out every odd year - and engagement with books for most of my batch mates was carrying back the mandatory novel from school library every week and handing it over to me and couple of other friends who merrily took the booty home. I remember vividly students being in awe of her. One day she corrected a guy who was impressive with studies in his pronunciation of the word Grand Prix. Yes! That.
What amazed me on that scorching noon when I was seated across Madhu at the center table in her air-cooled home was her lunging at me for "hiding" this fact. Whoa! I seriously didn't know of all things, she would be seeking Sujitha mam in her home town, when her life has been roller-coaster ride across time-zones with books being the last on her to-do list, which she so punctiliously keeps jotting in her sticky-pad till this day. I showed her the photograph that I had embarrassingly requested of Sujitha mam to be clicked with my daughter who completed her first day in school. She had obliged. Then hell broke loose. Madhu wanted to meet her.
I told her, I didn't have her number.
What! She said her eyes rolling over with incredulity!
I said I shall find out as Mahua, my wife, who's heading the Jesuit group's college is in touch with her.
Later that day, over the What'sApp, during a casual conversation about a common friend, she asked, "Why?"
Because I wanted it to be special, I said.
I waited six years to meet Sujitha mam knowing fully well she was in Xavier's (group of institutions) where my wife also works. Every year, they would bump into each other and she would ask of me. My wife would remind me to call her. I wouldn't. I told Mahua, shall meet her, not over the phone. And, I am so glad I did. After six years of knowing where the woman who had in some way mothered me in my school years - she went beyond academics and even took to counselling me on my dates - is, my daughter's first day in Xavier's school was also the day when I went out looking for her and found her. There. Seated among other teachers in the staff room, where I was guided to by a school student, I almost missed her and asked a colleague sitting right next to her. Is Sujitha mam around?
Life had, in those fleeting moments, come a full circle for me. She is no longer Sujitha Chandran, but Sujitha Kumar. I am no longer a school student and didn't walk up to her wearing the striped tie and red school badge. But that moment was special. 
Madhu is flying back tomorrow to the capital of a thousand islands, half of which the locals didn't even bother to name. She didn't get to meet Sujitha mam. She was leaving for vacations, the day Madhu made that call, and would return only after her departure. Will definitely catch up with her next year! She giggled. And reminded me of my offer, 'We can go together. No?'
"Of course." And, I thought to myself, I still haven't saved her number. 

How Plants beat the Zombies… And my pain

It’s been two long weeks since my ailing back is compulsively obsessed with living-in with me forcing me to –  as I jovially tell my friends – admire the ceiling from end to end, drinking in all things that aren’t at the eye level and escape our everyday scrutiny. Docs had diagnosed me with a slipped disc 5-6 years back. “Lumbar 4-5,” an ageing neurosurgeon, who I was introduced to “as the best in Asia”, had then spoken over my MRI reports referring to my lower back with a frown burrowing into the bridge of the nose. I remember him because he had then prescribed me painkillers that my family doctor took time to assure were not just meant to sedate the mentally ill.

Education makes us skeptical and Google fires it up to a whole new level of insanity. The feeling is something I can nail with the example of driving. You drive around with any Tom, Dick and Harry without batting an eyelid, until you learn to drive. And, then you trust no more. My wife and I had checked up the salts to understand the horrific import of the “strong dose” before our doctor calmed us. I never took those pain killers then. I didn't take them now. Irrespective of who the doctor is, I try as much to absorb pain even if it means a prolonged recovery curve for me. So, now I am horizontally confined for most part of the day, painfully reminded of Bryan Adams’ Here I am, this is me… as a far cry upon my own predicament.

The beginning...

An extended healing phase robs you of involvement in the smallest of indulgences, prying open a can of disappointments in turn. As I am limping back to normal, literally, the thing I miss the most is lifting my daughter in air in an instinctive response to her elfish presence. Oh! How terribly I miss holding her in my arms when I ask her to get up on the glass table or a dining chair for a jadu ki jhappi (a magical, healing embrace made popular by a cult of a movie Munnabhai MBBS in India). 

The other is gardening: The latest infatuation that has grown on her.

Now, gardening has always come packaged with family. My ageing dad has been doing this all his life I can remember. As kids, every summer we would be in New Delhi for vacations, we would return to find the brahma sthal (open porch in the centre of a house) on the first floor covered under a canopy of creepers and lettuce while a beard grew unattended on his sun-tanned face; and my mother-in-law who’s his age, has the only space of green in entire colony lost in an abominable admiration for concrete. Her house, a small dwelling with two bedrooms neatly tucked on the ground floor is just half a mile from ours. It has this huge spread of lawn, which has inevitably become the landmark for strangers who ask for one before arriving at her place. “Number 17; the house with a lawn,” is how we guide them. And, no. Not all people are Google-friendly to map their path to precision in this part of the world. 

This is where irony sets about to kill itself in a fit of murderous rage. In spite, of such a legacy, I owe the germ of gardening sprouting in my kid to – let me take deep breath – the smart phone. Yes. Of all things! There’s this addictive game, Plant vs Zombies, shipped by Hewlett-Packard with their all-in-one desktop, which essentially is like a flat TV minus the boxy CPU. The game itself is built around this bunch of “cutie plants”, a garden and a house. Then, there are zombies that leap towards the plants to enter your home beyond, which you must prevent because they would eat your brains. It’s devoid of any cutting edge graphics and is actually an arcade tower game that tells a story in simple detail. One of the film critics I read on the IMDb hailed the original Paranormal Activity as a basement film that went on to shame the Hollywood biggies at the box office. Plants vs Zombies is essentially the basement game that has gone viral and has since reproduced more successful, but inconsolably tiring versions. Pretty soon it leaped from our desktop to the Google Playstore from where it made its way into our smart phones and infected our minds. 

3 weeks later. The Colin bottle is on the extreme left!

I don’t recollect when it caught my daughter by her imagination, but she is now adept enough to beat me in the initial levels of this strategy game.  In one of our many playtimes, she was a little perturbed to see the zombies chipping away at human brains without remorse. These were hard times, when we lost the war; our plants failing to defend their territory leading to an abysmal fate. In one of these somber moments, my daughter asked if zombies were for real. “Will they eat us too?” she asked. I wasn’t stumped at all, as I had been waiting for some time to find this query lobbed my way. “Never,” I calmed her, “Remember? Zombies aren’t for real.” The six-yr-old wasn’t convinced yet. I could make it out from her big eyes trained on me, looking for more. “Like your Winx Club girls and their monsters, and Doraemon. Are they around?” Her head went sideways in a calibrated motion and then those lips stretched up to the cheeks in the wondrous realization.  

She still fears the zombies and kills me with that Eh-Tu-Brutus look every time one of these brain-eating dead-heads wins the round. But the “cutie plants”, she carried them from the digital world to ours, in her head without notifying us. Somewhere, she realized that plants are friends to grow as she did in the game: Planting them, caring for them, giving enough suns for them to grow their special powers and fight those lousy meat-bags. But her actual rendezvous with a plant in real would have to wait. 

A week before I hit the bed, my friend from Delhi visited me with his parents. It was an overnight stay when his mother – a gregarious woman with an appetite for caring at the risk of self-neglect – was in a chance banter introduced to my kid’s fancy for plants. We didn’t have any in our apartment. She did. Before leaving the next day, she lavished her with a generous parting gift – some green, to buy some greenery. 

It’s been close to a month now. Every noon, after her school, I would find my beavering girl besides the seven trophies baked out of mud. Two of the pots have a bushy growth of tomato plants, two others have the orca sprouting, one of them has onions teasing us with their green antenna, while two others have the roses. I remember overcoming my anxiety at the complete soiling of my car’s boot with the mud from the pots the day they were brought home. I had arranged them and seeded them, watered and shaded them. Not anymore. I can’t bend over to feel the pots, nor can I water them. Ah! The casualty of little indulgences. But, when I see my daughter taking a used-up Colin bottle to water the plants and asking me if it’s enough, my pain is far better reasoned into submission than any of the pain killers would ever manage to.     

When Barbie died at our home

First, there were those spam mails. Then, came the calls. Became a part of our everyday chore as we learnt to live with them. Evolution, I guess. We adapt. Since the past two days, however, my satellite TV execs have displayed a terrifying over-zealousness in pushing me to renew my subscription, which, incidentally, expires today. They littered my inbox, spammed my television with alerts and then tested my patience with calls from multiple landlines, which of course my phone identified as spam for me to block them in time. Bloody smart phones, these! 

Remains of the day: Barbie dinner plate

As in most homes with kids my daughter’s age – couple of more months and she would be six – television has mostly been a highly solicited, but equally muted alibi to quick-fix parenthood. The TV comes alive every morning when she is getting ready for school. It counsels her into having her lunch on return, and is a merry accompaniment while she is at her schoolwork towards the evenings. This is where it gets interesting. Her engagement with the TV is close to being a nil. It’s like her granny who she loves unequivocally, but chooses to ignore her high-decibel references to mannerisms every time she flirts with uncouthness.  

Today, first thing in the morning, she asked if the TV would be available? “Available? No my child”, I chided and reminded her of the Doraemon pulling off his antics to an uninterested audience or Winx Club girls fighting their own epic battles as the beholder lay busy with the mundane outside of the 30-inch glass panel.  The decision was deliberate. No one was watching TV at home, just switching it on only for its sake. Occasionally, I would pamper my appetite for movies in the late night shows, when cable guys would mischievously slot the junk or the reruns to exact revenge on the hopeless viewer. Worst (Or the best) my daughter, too, had outgrown the stupid box. So, I decided to not have TV for sometime. Let’s find out, I told myself.  

“But why?” she asked her eyebrows losing their linear position to arch into a bushy angry-bird frown. “Winx girls have received new powers. They will use it against the monsters,” she persuaded her case. The effect wasn’t obligatory. “But didn’t you say they were replaying old episodes, my dear?” I reminded her gently wishing she would continue to engage with her sparring partner. She didn’t. Yet, she didn’t seem disappointed. She immediately guided me to fighting the next wave of zombies in the Plant vs Zombies game. “Let’s play the endless game. Ok?” she asked. I declined. The mobile battery had discharged substantially and needed an electrical boost. So, she understood. She was convinced without much persuasion or connivance. I was convinced she had grown up.

Not long back, she wouldn’t leave her bevy of Barbie dolls for anything. The TV was still there, playing out her favourite toons. I have even written a blog on how she identified her mom with Doraemon as Dorae-mom – the giver of all things good. But her eyes were only for these unreal, mannequin-ish blondes that are packaged as a girl’s best friend. She is still left with more than a dozen, I believe, of these dolls. Some of them continue to remain in a single piece. The unfortunate others, were mutilated, de-robed and left to sulk in isolation. She would bathe them, take them out for shopping and recreate her own Winx Club stories to snuggle in the Barbies into different roles of her pick.  She brought every version of the doll. A solitary Barbie did not suffice the span of her imagination at play. So, she had me invest in her wardrobe, bathroom, mall and kitchen. She even got me to colour her doll’s hair. Then, she had Barbie bag, bottle, stationery and even her dinner plate; all of course in Pink.

The first signs of Barbie fatigue started setting in when she was around 5. She started to venture into puzzles and board games. Mind you, they were still Barbie puzzles and Barbie games, but she was merrily distracted. Slowly, my wife and I veered her more towards the games and crafts in a deliberate attempt to rid her of the obsessive fetish for the lifeless doll. We didn’t have to push hard. Just a gentle nudge was enough to reason her into seeing a whole new world of toys that were equally, if not more, engaging and rewarding.   

That fascination is now all gone. Poof! I remember having dad-daughter fights on those rare occasions when she would insist on taking more barbies off the shelf than she could handle and I could pay for without flinching. The dolls, now, lie in an old school bag in a far corner of the lowest shelf of her wardrobe. Buried! When I look at the money spent – Oh! These dolls have a price tag, trust me – I vacillate between the failing thought of what a waste and the genial nag of worth the investment.

My daughter doesn’t ask for Barbie any more. In fact, every time she drags me into a toy store she makes it a point to tell me, “Baba, I don’t need a Barbie,” and furthers her argument with a definitive, “Trust me.”  

I can hear the “Trust me” echo in our TV talk aleady. The distraction has already set in. TV is the mute spectator. Laptop is her new cake and Frozen (the Disney film) is its icing. I can’t even come to imagine giving away those dolls to some child when we have given away so much of her childhood to others. Too many memories, I guess. I didn’t have a colour television till I was in college. She’s already lived that experience and moved on!