by Manil Suri
For quite some time now, the only interaction remaining between Biji and him had, quite literally, been a battle to the death. A staring contest to see who would outlive the other—nobody expected Paji to be the first to blink. Certainly nobody expected him to be a victim of divine retribution, as everyone now said.
But Paji proved to be iron-willed even in death. After the Emergency was rescinded and Indira Gandhi defeated, it had been Biji’s political connections that protected them from reprisals by the new government. Paji never lived down the humiliation, never forgave her for this. He was foresighted enough to plan for the eventuality of his dying first, organized enough to arrange his revenge against Biji in advance. I got off the train in Delhi to find my mother beside herself—the funeral had not taken place as yet. Paji had stipulated something he knew would be a slap across her face—something to repudiate not only Biji, but the religion they both had been born into as well. He left written instructions specifying that there was to be no funeral pyre, not even an electric cremation—he wanted to be placed in a plain wooden box like a Muslim or a Christian and be buried instead.
It took a while to find a graveyard willing to accept a coffin with a Hindu body in it. Sharmila’s husband Munshi, the only Muslim in the family, led us in throwing handfuls of dirt into the grave. A reporter from the Times of India attended, and wrote an article playing up the unusualness of the funeral arrangement the next day. “In death as in life, even in these days of communal strife, Rajinder Sawhney has shown the country that the secular ideals of Jawaharlal Nehru have not been forgotten yet.” The Congress Party then felt shamed into issuing a statement, lauding Paji as someone who single-handedly built the entire Indian publishing industry from scratch. (The statement was later retracted when other publishers, who were bigger donors to the party coffers, objected.)
Biji boycotted the ceremony, which she regarded as blasphemous. Upon hearing that the news of this ignominy, which she had hoped would pass unnoticed, was now in the newspaper for everyone to see, she became somewhat unhinged. She stormed through the house, collecting all of Paji’s paraphernalia—his souvenirs, his clothes, his books, even the ancient pair of his slippers she used to secretly touch long ago to start her day. “If he wants his body eaten by worms, that’s fine with me. Since he refused to be cremated, the least I can do is give a proper end to his things.” Sharmila made a plea to have at least the books spared, but Biji seemed particularly determined to ensure that none of them escaped the “purification,” as she put it. “All those years he flaunted his learning in my face—look, how foolish of him to have forgotten his library behind.” She tore down the plaque with Nehru’s disavowal of religion from the wall and added it to her pile.
She had the ceremony performed with real sandalwood, even paying for a Brahmin priest to recite the prayers at the cremation ghats at Nigam Bodh. Roopa’s son Dilip, as the eldest male heir, was taken along to light the pyre. Afterwards, Biji insisted that we all sort through the ashes, collecting bits of charred knickknacks and the spines of books that had not burnt. She had them placed in a traditional earthenware pot covered with a red cloth—we drove to Hardwar that very afternoon to deposit them in the Ganges.
Biji hired a boat to take us to the middle of the river, guarding the pot zealously in her lap as the boatman rowed us over. She didn’t offer to share the task with any of us, but shook out all the contents herself—reaching in to scour out the last stubborn bits with her bare hands before consigning the pot as well. Unlike the box with Dev’s remains, the mix contained little actual ash—mostly heavier remnants that plopped into the water, plus a few unburned leathery bits that floated for a while. I imagined the spines of books from Paji’s entire library released into the river, from Shakespeare to Austen, Kipling to Tagore. A giant school of fish liberated from their confines, streaming through the water to turn the Ganges green and gold and red.
Perhaps I could swim away as unfettered as well, now that Paji no longer had his hold on me. I looked at Sharmila weeping as she murmured her farewells—why couldn’t I share her grief? Roopa, beside her, was alternating between heartrending wails and long, luxurious sobs—she threw out a hand towards the water now as if trying to latch onto Paji before he swirled away in the Ganges. I tried once more to ignite regret in my heart, but all I could summon was relief.
Then I thought of the red and green and gold fish again. I imagined them swimming through valleys and gorges, past towns and villages, across the vast Gangetic plains. Spreading their knowledge through the water, the learning so consistently championed by Paji over the years, until they reached the open sea.
At home, we opened the letters Paji had left with his lawyer for each of his three daughters. Although he had willed me a generous sum of money for your education, he put the flat in Bombay in your name, Ace, not mine. Rather than being stung by this omission, the idea struck me as almost quaint—Paji worrying about the danger I might pose to the property’s ownership by remarrying. To be a parent is to be guilty, he wrote. Remember that, if you feel tempted to judge me. Perhaps you’ll understand one day, and forgive me if you think I played too strong a role in shaping your destiny.
His writing had lost none of its beauty with age. I remembered his hand enfolding mine as he helped me practice my penmanship. “You have to think of the pen as part of yourself—only then will the ink flow smoothly through the nib.” I folded Paji’s letter back into its envelope and tucked it into my suitcase.
“Would it have killed you to cry a little?” Roopa demanded at dinner. “Even if you didn’t love Paji as much, did you forget you were still his daughter?”
I looked at her face. Her eyes were ferociously red—on her cheeks, she proudly wore a palimpsest of grief where streams of tears had dried successively.
“Or do you still hold Paji to blame?—poor Meera, always going around complaining he never loved her enough, that she was never his favorite. I suppose you must feel better now, with all the evidence he’s given you today.”
She was referring to Paji’s will. Roopa’s face had crumpled upon learning that the amount mentioned in her letter was only a little more than what Paji had left to Sharmila or myself. She rose out of her chair, visibly agitated, when the lawyer announced that the bulk had gone to an obscure scientific organization based in Madras, whose purpose was to debunk claims of religious miracles. “They’re the ones who capture sleight of hand on film, who arrange for a swimming pool when some holy man declares he can walk on water. Your father wants them to use his money to go after the Satya Sai Baba himself.”
To her credit, Roopa quickly regained her composure, even managing to hide her disappointment when the lawyer, in response to her delicate questioning, said it would be pointless to contest the will. “It just shows you what a great man he was,” she forced herself to say.
Now, however, she had freed herself from any restraints. The desire to draw blood was radiant on her face. “It must be tempting to count what Paji left and be comforted by it. But I know you’re not that foolish, Meera, to mistake fairness for love. We all know whom he really cared for inside—it would be difficult, even for you, to delude yourself on that count. As for the money, what choice did you leave him with, anyway? All those years of guilt that you piled up on him, all those times you shamed him into believing he didn’t love you enough. I can only imagine how beleaguered he must have felt, how tortured you must have left him. It’s a wonder he wasn’t driven to leave you his entire estate.”
Sharmila, sitting white-faced at the table, began to say something, but I put my hand over hers. “This might come as a shock to you, Roopa, but not all of us have had designs on Paji’s money. That’s what all these nasty words are about, isn’t it? Perhaps we should leave this talk till tomorrow, before you say something you’ll regret.”
But Roopa was too enkindled to stop midway. “It wasn’t just him, Meera, was it? You’ve forged an entire career of making people feel guilty for not loving you enough.
Even I haven’t been immune from it. When I think back to the days we first met Dev—how, after all, did you maneuver him into marrying you in the first place? He certainly paid for it, the sweet man—and not just him—we’re all paying the price, with Paji’s will. I just shudder to think what havoc you must be wreaking now on poor Ashvin.”
Hearing your name made me rise to Roopa’s bait again. “You know Ashvin has nothing to do with this, so don’t bring his name to your lips. As for the will, I’ve already told you I don’t care about it. If anyone’s the greedy one, it’s you, Roopa—greedy about Paji, greedy about Biji, greedy about Dev. Whenever you’ve seen me get the slightest bit of love or attention or happiness, you’ve always tried to snatch it away. I used to wonder how anyone could be so jealous, what I could have possibly done to deserve such treatment, whether you were just insecure. But now I realize that you can’t really help your meanness, you were just born filled with it.”
Roopa made a sound in her throat between a laugh and a growl. “See? This is just what I was talking about. I’m mean, I’m against Meera, I’ve wronged her, like everyone else has. Go ahead, fault me, tell me all your problems are because of my hate. You’ve killed Dev and banished poor Ashvin to a hostel—with Paji gone too, whom else can you blame? I don’t mind—from now on, I can be your whipping boy. Every time something goes wrong in your life, I’ll be standing by to accept the blame. The truth is that there’s only one person who’s responsible, and that’s you, Meera. It’s been you all along, nobody else. All the times you’ve blundered, all the people you’ve driven away.”
“Yes, say what you like, Roopa—I know you too well to care. You’re mean, and you’re selfish since birth, and there’s no deeper reason for it—what’s more, you’ll never be able to change. Paji must have seen this ugliness too—did you think you could keep it hidden from him? Perhaps that’s what made him stop loving you as much as before—why else would he write the will the way he did?”
Roopa gave a cry and stood up. This time, the tears in her eyes were from fury, not sorrow. “My Paji is dead. You’ve got your freedom from him. Go now, and don’t repeat his name. Don’t pretend to speak for him ever again. Go and make some brilliant changes in your life. The money you’ve managed to squeeze out—spend it as you wish. And once you’ve transformed yourself, once you’ve emerged as carefree as a butterfly, be sure to write us about your wonderful happiness.”
chapter thirty-six
ALTHOUGH I HAD NEVER CONSCIOUSLY FANTASIZED ABOUT PAJI DYING, I always harbored a feeling in the back of my mind that it would be a deliverance of sorts when it happened, an escape from his control, a liberation from the existence he had constrained me to live. Now that I was back in Bombay, it was not clear to me how my life was going to change. How would I enjoy my freedom? What brilliant steps would I take, as Roopa had challenged, to make myself happy again?
Could she have been correct about Paji just being an excuse? Someone convenient to fault for all the things that didn’t go right in my life? Was I, as she had contended, the only one really to blame? I tried to comfort myself with a list of all the times Paji had subverted the course of my life, but Roopa’s troubling accusation remained.
What disoriented me more was the wrenching loss I already felt from your absence. Paji’s passing made me feel doubly unmoored, as if my last remaining anchor had been hoisted away. I had never thought of him in this way before, never imagined that his could have been a stabilizing presence over the years, a dependable force to react against. The realization that I now had to navigate life truly alone made me sink into a despondent state.
I began roaming the city streets aimlessly. Sometimes, as I wandered, I tried to imagine Paji following me. Glancing at his watch from time to time to add up the minutes and the hours I wasted. Perhaps he would shake his head, remind me of the books I could have read instead, the goals I could have accomplished, the degrees I could have earned. Meera, Meera, Meera. Have you ever thought of how much of your life you’ve frittered away?
But nobody followed me—Paji was gone, I reminded myself. It had a strange effect on me, this double bereavement—I felt more widowed than when Dev had passed away. Sometimes I imagined myself to be an ant in a cosmic experiment, designed to test my ability to make sense of things.
It was on one of my rambling walks that I first started thinking of the idea of completion. I had just crossed over the bridge from Chowpatty to take a look at the small garden behind the tracks at Charni Road station. It was never crowded, since it lay hidden from the main path and people hurrying to and from the station barely noticed its existence. A grove of palm trees of a frizzy kind I had not seen elsewhere stood in the center, surrounded by several plantings of hibiscus and mogra which seemed to be in bloom year-round. I especially liked the corner with the ferns—the way the babies nestled amidst their parents, their heads curled in close to their stems like sleeping birds.
Today, though, my attention was drawn to the edge of the garden, where the ornamental banana tree stood. Instead of the healthy specimen so flamboyantly in bloom the last time, I was surprised to now see something barely alive—yellowing fronds blowing weakly around the shriveling trunk. It seemed impossible that such a change could have taken place over the course of a few weeks—had the tree just decided to die, once the show for which it had been planted was done?
By itself, perhaps I would not have made too much of it. But then I started noticing other things. The spent orange flowers from the gulmohar tree strewn all across the path. The outer layer of fern stalks, all droopy and brown, in contrast with the sprightly inner stalks, preparing to unfurl into the air. Drifting leaves and fallen fruits and seeds, all slowly turning into dust. Most poignant of all, a small white bird—not a dove or a sparrow, but a species I didn’t remember having ever seen, resting in a bed of canna lilies. At first I thought it was asleep, but then I noticed an ant crawling over its tiny yellow beak. The feathers were plush and unsoiled, their sheen intact—the bird, I could see, was neither aged nor decrepit. I turned it over with the stem of a leaf—there was no indication to show what had felled it, no mark or injury. It was as if it had alighted from the sky one final time and decided there was no reason to fly again.
I thought about the bird all the way home—imagined how it could have orchestrated such a perfect death. Had it spent the summer tending to a nest full of speckled eggs, and once they were hatched, to the fledgling chicks that needed its help? Is this where it had come after seeing them fly away all grown—had it felt so fulfilled that it seemed like a natural time to end its earthly sojourn? Wasn’t that what animals did in the forest—find a quiet corner to curl up and die in once they had come to the end of their usefulness? And the fish that I had once read to you about—salmon, were they?—that came back to spawn and expire where they were born?
For the next few days, I was enthralled by this idea of completion. Every time I saw a flower that had drooped in its vase or spotted a beetle lying curled up on the windowsill, I was reminded of it. Shouldn’t I be as smart as these organisms? Know not to challenge the order of the universe? Wouldn’t it be foolish to persist once my work on this planet was done?
And what could have been that work, Ashvin, but to bring you forth, to nurture you until grown? You were what had given sense to my life, what had made its pieces fit together. The reason I had met Dev and come to Bombay, the years I had lived to bring you up after he was gone. Perhaps everything that had transpired had a purpose behind it—even what happened to tear us apart. Weren’t you settling in well enough now in your boarding school—away from me, away from Arya, out of the reach of harm? And now that Paji had left more than enough money to see you through, weren’t you assured a smooth passage into life as an adult?
The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that your need for me was done. The evidence was apparent every time I looked at your photographs. Here you were as a toddler between Dev and myself, holding on to each of our hand
s as you tried to remain standing. There you sat in your navy blue long pants the year after Dev passed away, with a pale smile coaxed out only for Mummy. Even in the photo that Zaida took of the two of us the April before last, there was a vulnerability in your look, a tenderness in the way your head turned towards me. But then came the two pictures sent from Sanawar. In the first you posed with three other boys—what drew my attention most was that your smile was as carefree as theirs. The other, an identity card portrait, startled me even more—dressed in your new school blazer with the fiery pocket emblem, I could see, for the first time, the defiant confidence in your face.
Could there be something else awaiting me in this life beside you, another purpose I had not explored as yet? Paji, of course, would have exploded at such a question—he would have raged about a long list of goals I still had left. But he was gone now, his letters no longer arriving to exhort me on—what was the significance of the timing of his death? Wasn’t this the final validation that I needed, the ultimate reminder that my task was complete? The image of his library ashes came to my mind—I pictured myself floating together with them down the Ganges.
The morning after the immersion trip to Hardwar, I had gone to stand in Paji’s library one last time. It was disorienting to see the emptiness gaping from the bookshelves all around, the walls denuded of plaques, the desk swept clean. I rummaged around in the drawers, but they had been emptied as well. Then, against the back of the lowermost drawer, I found something missed by Biji—a small volume of the Urdu poetry Paji loved so much. I quickly hid it in my purse—it would be my last souvenir from my father, not to be shared with my siblings.
Now, I pulled out this volume, to see if in it I could find some guidance from Paji. The way I had discovered the book, the verses Paji had underlined, convinced me some communication lay hidden inside. Most of the poems were about ardor and longing, by poets like Ghalib and Dard and Mir. Roses bloomed, then turned to dust, nightingales wept tears of blood, rivers of wine were poured to wash away the violence of love. I paused over each of the marked couplets, studying some for a very long time, wondering if I had discovered what Paji had selected to speak to me. But I found them all inscrutable. I was about to give up on the book, when my gaze fell on a poem in the last section, by Sauda.