7 August 2022
Bedroom, Bengaluru
Dear Baba,
I am reminiscing about our days in Shillong, where you’re holding my little hand as we walk down a hilly road. The weather is crisp, the sky so blue that it’s almost turquoise. Butterflies flutter around the blue hydrangeas. I trip along, jumping over the clear little water puddles.
The Kongs, with their chequered shawls, huddled under a big black umbrella, sell sour berries. As we walk on, we pass the little chapel of your college, St Edmund’s. Your voice comes to me like an echo: “Father Canning told me that I must pursue literature.” You look so satiated with life. I feel happy to be walking with you, hand in hand.
As we, father and his little daughter, walk down, I – as I am now – climb up a hill. My view is different from up there. The climb is arduous, with sharp little rocks jutting out of nowhere, as though they want to cut and bruise my feet. My knees hurt. My heart is shattered. I want to hold on to the younger me, holding your hand. I want to frolic in the soft green bed of grass covered with yellow and white wildflowers. But I can’t reach out.
Here I am, watching us both, but unable to touch them. I watch helplessly at us, walking and looking so free and full of love.
I know I can’t feel those fingers grasping my hand. I remember your wrinkled hands, your last touch, and how your fingers encircled mine, with hope.
I can hear the doctor say, “Call a GP and have him declared dead. Get the death certificate.” I sobbed and said, “He is warm, still warm!”
The little girl traipses by with her father. It is such a picture-perfect image of warm security. But it can’t be touched or experienced – only imagined.
My body heaved with sobs as I slowly felt you going cold. Like ice.
If we could only pass each other again. We would hold hands, laugh out loud and be kind. I know you will hold my hand, the way you did to help me down the steep slopes of rain-drenched Shillong.
Love,
Manu
8 September 2022
Bengaluru
Dear Baba,
Ma walks into your room without acknowledging your bed. She refuses to look at the place where you breathed your last. It pains her.
Ma is a shadow of herself now – frail and resigned. I think she misses being your wife. She feels bereft. I can’t look at her as a widow. Thankfully, she seems distant from the rules that so many women have to follow as widows.
Her cheeks hang, laden with strong sad lines. Her eyes are lowered and in constant thought. She is restless and it feels like she needs to reach a place but can’t just yet.
As I write, I can recall with absolute clarity the way you gasped for breath and then your eyes rolled up, and you stopped breathing. Your body was warm even after your heart stopped beating. Ma was silent. She asked Shimonti quite calmly to bring some Gangajal and to put it in your mouth. I still don’t know how it went down your throat. The water didn’t dribble out. You were silent, just like the way you had become. You had been extremely quiet for days. As the caregiver turned you on your side, I saw your tongue roll out of the side of your mouth. It reminded me of a game you played with me when I was a child.
You would fake death by putting your tongue out, and I used to frantically push you, force you to laugh and call me a fool. The game ended even before it began.
I also saw the large red sores on your back. They had been there for long. You had lost speech and none of us knew.
The room on 1 August was filled with people. But only Ma and I were together in our loss. We looked at each other. She just sat on a chair and said, “He is gone!”
I refused to believe it and, as always, wanted to take you to the hospital, just once. Just once again, to revive you and hold on to the threads of life, maybe jumbled up, but still lit with the warmth of the beating heart.
I had an anchor in you. Or was it the other way around? Whichever way, we were a family. Suddenly I felt cold. Your head and feet were turning cold too. Your face became yellow. The dark pall of grey had lifted, replaced by a jaundiced yellow.
The sanitised room, with Ma sitting on a chair with everyone around her, was like a page out of a story I had read before. Ma resembled a leaf, found fluttering in the desert storm, a leaf trying to hold on to the shifting sands. Desolation enveloped her like a cloak of fatigue.
She held out her palm and watched her lifeline. I knew the question in her heart: for how long was she going to live?
I know for sure that she wishes she were no more. You both were a unit. As the years passed, you both bonded even more in your lonesome life in Bengaluru. This was never home. It didn’t have the fragrance of the shiuli flower blossom during Durga Puja, nor did it have your acceptance or love. You both just followed me to this city. You were so dependent – and so isolated.
Ma wants to charge your mobile phone. It is as if you are going to get calls. She has kept the phone on a shelf. I don’t touch it. It frightens me that if I do, I will break down emotionally, knowing that those fingers won’t ever dial me again.
Like Ma, I too sit, awaiting a final answer from the mountain that I have built with all the sharp little stones of resentment, guilt and anger collected over the years.
Ma wants you to reach out to her and hold her finger. Your Moni, as you lovingly called her, misses you. I couldn’t see this love bond or trauma bond between you and Ma when you were together. There were only a few moments of tenderness. I remember instead the constant conflicts between the two of you.
But you were her purpose. Her undying habit was having you; that was her life.
I wish I could hear from you.
Love,
Manu
Excerpted with permission from Thorns in My Quilt: Letters from a Daughter to Her Father, Mohua Chinappa, Rupa Publications.
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