...About Geeta
Remembering Geeta...
Therefore when I heard a few days ago, from one of my relatives studying in your institution, that Geeta has left, I felt very much distressed. I never knew she was harbouring an almost fatal disease. Had I known before, I could have arranged her treatment... I am an old student of PGI Chandigarh... My eldest daughtor is a medical oncologist, practising in USA. But this sister of mine did not give me any opportunity to help her. I feel very much disappointed...
Though Geeta has gone, her memory will remain always with us all, who had come in contact with her...”
It took quite some time for the message to sink in...
...Aren’t we all, in some way or the other, merely fellow travellers in a compartment - each on his or her own solitary journey, each moving to one’s individual destiny, colliding with each other in a Brownian movement...? ... and that ultimately, the meaning of one’s life is as much in the journey, as in those chance collisions.. in the “confluence”, as Geeta put it....
It was also messages such as these, which made me realise that there were so many of us who - each in his or her own way - had stakes in Geeta's life... who will, for times to come, keep on remembering Geeta.
A month after Geeta died, I received a letter from an almost unknown person. He had travelled with Geeta for barely 24 hours on a train journey some 5-6 years before she died. He wrote:
I was touched by his gesture - by the fact that he reached out, that he converted chance encounter into a meaningful memory, and that he remembered and took the effort of sharing its significance. But I was also puzzled as to why such a random contact with Geeta would remain etched in someone’s mind? how did a purely chance meeting with Geeta became a somewhat consequential event of his life?...
“You might have forgotten me, but I still remember you standing on the railway platform at Jamshedpur with Manasi in November 92. You had come to receive your wife, who was coming from Delhi by Neelanchal Express. I was also travelling from Delhi to Bhubaneswar by the same train and was in the same coach... My association with her was very brief but very pleasant. She treated me with love and respect as my own sister...
