Ten years to this day, Chacha fell prey to the greatest depravity human villainy is capable of. The murder, blind as they call it, devastated the family, powerless rage and agony manifest in the heartrending wails of the women and the deathly silence of the men. For me, it provoked some sort of a revolution within the self. It caused me to begin questioning many givens, both in life and beyond, and to unconsciously start forming my own, independent frames of thought. I got my first actual taste of depression as bitterness crept in, and I shunned company for the solitude of my own imaginary world, which increasingly resembled some bizarre Stanley Kubrick direction. Much of what I am today, greatly different from what I was all those years ago, owes to that single soul-crushing tragedy. But what was once raging, all-consuming pain is now just a dull pang in some corner of the heart. Some solace comes from the strapping young men both his sons have grown into; upbeat, eager for life, independent to the extent that even us older ones often find ourselves looking up to them in life’s tougher situations. They are those unyielding saplings that have weathered nature’s every caprice to become tall, sturdy trees. That, however, is a bigger reflection on the character of the gardener, their caretaker, that blind old man, bent with age, grief and worries, tenaciously protecting them from the scorching sun of the summers and the icy gale of the winters. It is his courage from which they have partaken, and it is his spirit which makes them reach for the sky.
And ten years on, grief, valid as it still is, gives in to awe, to sheer wonderment at the immense reserves of courage and forbearance my grandfather has, to be able not only to deal with the unnatural loss of a son, but to be able to pick up the pieces and give some measure of a new life to his orphaned grandsons, even as their mother left them to find herself a ‘mard’. Dada Jan was 76 in 2002. He is 86 now. This is no age for responsibility. And yet, he somehow managed. If his isn’t a tale of overcoming immeasurable suffering in a mammoth effort to reclaim life, whose could ever be? Fatima, cousin, childhood friend, miscarried in the seventh month of pregnancy last year. One can’t even begin to fathom what a blow that would have been to a mother’s heart. And yet, she defeated the pain to give life another chance. Take a look around. You will see that as Michael Stipe proclaims in his rather doleful monotone, “Everybody Hurts”, even the ones who are ostensibly happy, or in the perpetual pursuit of happiness. Everybody suffers. Real suffering! Not the shallow id and libido related melodrama that I have so shamelessly reeked of till quite recently. Since a spoilt brat like myself, born with a silver spoon up his arse, has never really known actual, personal suffering, he creates a web of lies around himself just so to pretend to be cool in his own head. And here, I must apologize to this blog as well. What started seven years ago purely as a medium for conversations with the self, was whored out as a petty means for pandering to false egos and miserably projecting self-delusions and half-truths. No more.
This blinking cursor, it still dares me, challenges me, to write like the olden days, in flowery metaphor and euphemism, to create images through words in attempts to blow my wife’s very-visual mind away. And I think to myself, later perhaps. Right now, she must be content with the sonorous melodies of my all-too-frequent burping. As it is, this blinker is a lot like the current state of my memory: there one moment, gone the next. Even as my air-headedness constantly amuses my wife, one thing I have learned of late is never to trust fleeting things again.
In 2007, I put up a blog-post on the anniversary of Chacha’s passing, and it has become something of an annual tradition since. This year, however, a very unusual feeling pervades me; as though everything in the world is at peace, that it is time to erase the soreness of gloom and regret with hope and determination. I realize this must sound a tad out-of-tune with the times since 2011 was supposedly one of the most turbulent years ever in human history, and a whole lot corny. But what is a conversation with the self if it can’t get just a little corny and selfish? So, I can’t really say if I will be blogging this time 2013. Let 2012 set the mood for 2013. And what with that Mayan Apocalypse hanging over our heads in the last week of ’12, who is to say that this time next year, we won’t all be ingloriously deceased? Or, better still, suffering a fate worse than death?
