Geeta's Stories
Papa's Last Summer
The telegram read: “Come at once. Father serious. Rahul.”
It brought up all my unconscious fears of ever having to lose my father. I felt numb with cold despair and a sense of finality about things in general. Amma had died six years ago, but I had accepted her death more or less with equanimity. But Papa! I could never imagine him dying suddenly (for what else could the telegram mean?). Perhaps I thought he would go on forever and ever, or at least as long as I lived. Sublimated Electra, my brother-in-law would call it.
I thought of all the things that could possibly have happened. He could have fallen down the stairs while rushing up and down with Arun, my nephew, in one of their kite-flying sessions. Rama and Rahul would have found him there in the evening, lying concussed and beyond hope. Serious, as my brother had so ambiguously telegraphed. Somehow, though, the picture was incongruous. A rather dumb way of dying for an energetic man, 58 years young.
He might have had an accident while taking an early lonely morning walk. Everybody except my father knew that morning walks that early were dangerous in Delhi. Practically inviting disaster.
Urged by my morbid imagery, I conjured up details of the accident. Papa was walking down a deserted road, whistling tunelessly to himself as usual. A stray car came veering round the bend he had just crossed, the driver either drunk or a maniac. Papa jumped aside and stood near a tree to let the car pass. It, however, swerved sharply, almost bumped into a lamp post and hit Papa on the rebound, just managing to avoid crashing into the tree. Then the car raced ahead and sped away, disappearing from view in a matter of seconds. Papa lay their very still, a crimson blot rapidly spreading on his white shirt. It would be four or five hours before anyone discovered the accident and decided to help.
I thought about him lying there on the road helplessly, and wept silently and bitterly. He was my father, lying there on the road, and I couldn’t even touch him. I was in Jabalpur and he in Delhi.
I tried to think of something else till Prashant returned from his office. I remembered my long walks with Papa, which were more or less wordless. Somehow we never needed to vocalize our thoughts and feelings when we were together. I remembered the month long vacation we had in Kashmir when I was eighteen. Papa and I used to go rowing in the lake, morning, evening, late at night. We could have lived in a boat all our lives, so overcome were we with the beauty of it all. Amma and Rahul came along a couple of times, and decided against it. Amma was scared of deep waters, and Rahul was fond of company in which he could air his views and be boisterous at times. We were not quite humans , as far as he was concerned. It was unhealthy not to talk to each other, he told Amma very often. So while they went to movies and clubs, and sought out other people from Delhi, we went to our wordless sojourns with nature. Papa told me that, for all that they were in Kashmir, they had actually never left Delhi. I enjoyed myself immensely with him. Instead of shrieking appreciation at the ethereal beauty of nature’s treasure, he would point a quiet finger at something now and then, or I would say, “Look!.” And that was all. I never felt that my privacy was being intruded upon through the well known generation-gap, out of which anxious parents peep. Tears came again into my eyes now. Many years later, my brother-in-law sent me a huge birthday card, inscribed, “A Friend Is One With Whom You Can Be Silent Together.” I realized the truth of the matter then. Papa was not merely a biological parent to me. He and I were good friends, and Electra could go and eat cakes.
Prashant came at 6 pm and allowed me to weep briefly while he packed my things. Then he became extremely practical, telling me to start worrying only when I reached Delhi and found out what the situation really was. He fixed dinner for both of us, and forced me to eat between continuous admonishments regarding controlling myself and behaving like my age of thirty, and not like a mentally retarded kid of three, and about being in shape to do something for my family when I reached Delhi.
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