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.