3rd January 2017

3rd January

The act of typing the date makes you remember, calculate, associate. The third of January is the dread day that the light, as Nehru put it, went out of our lives. Except that I would never say it in such a one-sided way. Sombabu was not a lamp or a light. He rather suddenly left the stage, it is true, but with enough of a script and a set and a beginning in place for us to carry on the performance.

Also, when Jawaharlal Nehru said that, it was 1948. Mohandas Gandhi, for whom he said it, was born in 1869 and almost eighty. True he could have lived longer, but he was an old man. Sombabu was not yet sixty one. My mama or uncle, helping in the cremation, picked up the newly minted death certificate to exclaim, “He was older than me!” Everyone younger and older than him was alive, his mother, my mother and father, his aunts and uncles, all my aunts and uncles. It was a mysterious, regrettable death, the kind that makes you want to know, what is the heart? How can it suddenly fail?

It has been so long since, fourteen years. I can now say, ‘death,’ ‘cremation,’ ‘heart failure’. I can use the past tense, ‘was.’ I never could all these years. I could only think of him as on a glistening icy blue mountain side, doing his scientific things, where I could reach after a panting climb, and from where, enfolding me in his white shawl he would show me the vistas on the ground, bringing them back to perspective.

Or, depending on the weather, I saw him in his shorts, ankle deep in seaside sand on the Hebrides, conducting some other scientific experiments, writing to us that he was delayed and would be back soon.

Now…..Two weeks ago we celebrated his life with children’s songs and dances. We explained what Bengal was and performed the Durga Puja with a dhuni dance. The heart-thumping rhythms, the magic of the scene made me find, as they say, peace. Then we showed Partition. With wrenching cries, the people of India split up into two groups and waved their flags, even while crawling and bleeding. Rabindranath read a sonorous poem. Then we had the young Som play and enjoy music, study and practise mathematics and science, take seriously the body-mind connection. For each the children explained, danced, performed. To everyone it was just a series of performances. To me, it was a story. It was perfect, made further perfect by the interspersing of the items with lovely renditions of different khayals and thumris by Ashish Mishra. Sombabu would have truly enjoyed that. “Would have”—another linguistic formation I could not stomach until now.

Coming back to the light question, Nehru could have said, “The light has gone out of our lives, but instead of darkness the outlines of things remain visible and we can move on to act now.” As he did, and he changed almost everything from the way Gandhi would have done it.

The historical association again: am I changing the way Sombabu would have built up NIRMAN?

He would have planted more trees and somehow guarded them. He would have made them grow. I just shout at the gardeners and guards for not letting almost any of them survive, but I don’t still succeed in making them grow.

Sombabu would, by now, have got the tractor I’ve been talking of getting, done the farming, kept a cow and maybe other animals, started the farm. We have the boundary. We have solar panels and pumps and plenty of water. We have half a dozen staff members. The only thing missing is me, and proper instructions to the next in charge as to how to run it all by themselves. Sombabu would have been personally there.