if
i had
A Memoir
to tell it
gayatri prabhu
again
Contents
Dedication
If I Had to Tell It Again
Leap
One More Reason Why
The Long Dying
After, then Before
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
In memoriam
S.G.M. Prabhu
(1948–2014)
and
Chinna
(2002–2015)
If I Had to Tell It Again
That night my phone battery dies. Its charger has been forgotten in the office, so the phone remains dead. I sleep deeply. The other phone in the house rings. It is my sister. Dense sleep, garbled speech and something about our ill father. I wake slowly. I have spoken to him two hours ago – not spoken, argued as always. For he never listens to us, or to reason. He is ill, scheduled to travel to Manipal in the morning, to get admitted to the hospital here. This call is about him. I hear voices in the background. My brother-in-law speaking on another phone. ‘Akka, I think he is dead,’ she says. I’ll never forget her voice, the muffled shock, the tremors of pain. Inside me, something is released. Finally.
An hour later, at 2 a.m., I am in a taxi, just me and the driver, someone I have never met before. A few polite words have to be exchanged as I settle down in the front seat. We are headed for Mysore. My phone is still dead, no voices can reach me, and my voice speaks only to me. I have been preparing myself for this day since I was barely a teenager, when my father had started to speak out his death wish, and he had wished for death repeatedly since then. He had been so deeply unhappy with his life, so given to substance abuse to numb out his inability to cope, and I had probably made up my mind to let him go, a million times in the passing years, I had imagined his death till it had come to mean just something to get over with.
Die, why don’t you just die? Why threaten, why not do something about it? I would say this to my father, part exasperation, part dark humour, and he would laugh aloud at my impudence. It was all a joke.
Not night, not morning, not even dawn, but some indeterminate grey hour. The car slowly makes its way up the steep, bumpy curves of a dark hillside. Just silence and moonlight and the headlights of our car for a while, till our solitude is interrupted by the lights of a passing vehicle, and then, silence and moonlight restored, we sit beside each other, the driver and I, quiet strangers. The stately silhouettes of the Western Ghats in the moonlight, moving around us, round and round. I indicate that we need to stop. My feet touch earth. My stomach overturns. The driver hands me some water, I mumble thanks. We get back in the car, hurrying to Mysore. But why hurry, he is already dead, he would stay dead.
Few dawns would compare to the sheer beauty of this one. The silhouettes are now fleshed. The greens stirring to life on the mountains. A mauve sheen across the skies. A shy infant sun.
That moment stays with me, not the sight of the dead father, or the tears in the eyes of my mother and sister when I finally reach Mysore in the morning. I have no tears to offer him – they had all dried up long ago. I had just wanted him gone, hadn’t I? And he did keep his word, even if it took him two decades to drink his liver to death. I had sworn in his hearing that I would not cry when he died, not a drop, for I was sick of bearing the weight of such a father.
That moment in the car, a shaking, moving moment, stays with me. More real, stronger somehow, than the four decades of knowing this father.
My father fantasized constantly about death. It was his lover, his great affair, and not so secret either. It should be quick, he would say, I believe in Lord Ganesha and he will not let me suffer. I will not be a burden on any of you. I will go quickly. All this he would say again and again. I just want to die, I just want to die, oh when will I die …
That bottle of Rum, always Old Monk, all through my teenage years it was a bottle every night. The last few years, he was drinking in the afternoons too. Two bottles now. I could not bear to be around him. I felt repulsion, anger, frustration.
It was impossible to convince him to turn his face to life instead of craving death, so one agreed with him, to fortify and manifest his desire. Go when you must.
It was only months after his death that I understood his fantasy about death had no room for thoughts about dying. I had not thought about it either. Death, he wanted, but dying had terrified him, and neither of us had been prepared for that.
Sixteen weeks before he died, he had been diagnosed with liver cirrhosis. How bad is it, we all wanted to know from the doctor. Hard to say, but no more drinking, and get treatment for the symptoms. He may have days or he may have a decade, the doctor had said, as I hurried to match pace through the hospital corridor, it depends on his luck, entirely his luck.
Luck.
The one thing my father mourned he never had. Unlucky in everything, he had said. For many years. He believed it deeply too. Unlucky. Unlucky. And a failure, he constantly labelled himself. Finally something was happening just the way he had hoped.
Luck.
What are you going to do about it, my sister and I had asked him after he had come back from the hospital.
He knew what we meant. Was he going to be sensible? Was he finally going to listen to us? Was he going to get expert opinion, the best treatment?
I’ll do it my way, he snapped. As always.
And as always we were resigned. My sister, good soldier, tried to argue. But I had taught myself to see it like he did. We had had years, him and me, to sort this out, hadn’t we? This death craving of his, which he had bequeathed to me, turning me into its custodian while I was still a child, was how I had survived this father. Barely.
In the days that had followed, as we went through the initial treatment, as he gave up drinking, something unexpected surfaced. First hesitant, then audacious, then plaintive: a desire to live. I was shocked, betrayed. How could he go back on the great dramatic moment he had orchestrated for years? How could he?
He had prepared me for his death, but not for this turn to life.
I had developed no intuition for this new terrain, nor did I have the time. There was work, household, the routine of getting through the weeks. Sixteen weeks later he was dead.
Sixty-six years of a lifetime gone.
There would be no funeral. He had donated his body to the local medical college. It was part of his script, his fantasy about death. He would show his hospital donation certificate to anyone who came to our house. No rituals for me, he would announce. To his mind there was some justice in being cut up by medical students. He had wanted to be a doctor. We had heard that story many times – the dream that had to be sacrificed for his family responsibilities – but of course he had been unlucky.
There is his corpse, lying on the floor, people constantly milling around, talking about his untimely, unfortunate death, while I stare at everyone in dry-eyed annoyance. He had always been a popular man, much loved, generous to a fault to his neighbours, even if angry towards his own family. I just want him gone from the house. When the van from the morgue comes to pick him up, everyone urges us to touch his feet, to ask for his blessings. It is expected from children of dead parents. Everyone watches us.
You first, an old man points to me, my father’s first-born.
I bend down, my fingers touch his feet.
In my mind the words form, loud and distinct – I forgive you.
When a child grows up with an angry, frustrated, depressive parent, there is only a shadow of the human-parent, the rest is just dark unfathomable weight. And then one gets used to it.
The dead man’s bed has to be burnt, the pillow too, someone says, and we mutely nod. Sure, take it out, burn it.
He vomited so much blood, my mother said later, the night he died. I know how much he loved the dramatic, the melodramatic, and this would have been a story he would have narrated with much relish. Every little bloody detail.
There is blood splattered here and there. In the bathroom, a bloodied bed sheet soaks in a bucket of red water.
Sure, take that bed, burn it down.
On the bare cot, bereft of the mattress, is a diary, a dark green diary. It had been tucked under his pillow.
Can I take it?
Yes, take it.
How could I not want it? I am the writer in the family, the inheritor of my father’s storytelling compulsion.
What’s in the diary?
Nobody has the energy to find out. But I give it a quick glance. Writing in those bold rounded letters that are so familiar, though they had turned shaky, often illegible. Fragmented writings, poems and inspirational quotes, some by famous thinkers, some anonymous. He had made such jottings for decades. Nearly all in the Kannada script, a collection of inspiring or interesting proverbs and quotes. It is not new information and nothing more is asked or said about the diary.
This is what he wrote and read when he was ill, when he tried hard not to think about dying, when even the death he wanted was no longer spoken of. He had courted life – I can see it in the sporadic writing in that green diary, most of the pages still blank. Not only did he not want to die, he wanted to get better, he believed there was a better self, a better world. Who is this man? A stranger to me, my very own dusty mirror.
This green diary will accuse me forever. I had had absolutely no compassion for a dying father. And I had felt reluctant to be drawn into his new script, his shirking away from that promised exit.
The diary comes home with me, tightly shut, awaiting its reader, another day, another year, another life perhaps.
I forgive you.
But how?
The story of depression is hard to tell, always in fragments, hard to cast in words, hard to tell when it seeped out of him, into and through me. Like that legacy of storytelling.
He was always telling stories, embellishing every narrative, introducing dramatic interludes, enacting scenes, inviting laughter and comments, as if on a stage, as if in a spotlight. My father, the showman, revelled in repetition, in amplifying details to the elastic limits of credibility. Some of these stories I had heard more times than I can count. No two tellings were alike, and yet every telling felt like the most plausible, most immediate, such was his gift.
An artist. An aesthete.
To a child, to me, he seemed infallible and his talents inexhaustible. He sang, he danced, he drummed, he could draw and craft beautiful objects, he created gardens from weeds, and he was the raconteur of the human race. There was nothing he could not fix – broken chairs, fused circuits, clogged pipes, cranky machines – and his children were the keepers of an elaborate box of tools, his handy assistants.
Our mother, gentle and hesitant, paled into the landscape of my childhood. She was the alcove to our father’s durbar.
He was everything I thought I aspired to be, before we grappled with teenage, before he concluded that the curve of his life would only dip, never rise. And because he had declared himself a failure, there was no room for me to be anything but a success. His performing monkey, I would say bitterly as an adult. But then, at ten, it was simply what one did. Please a father. He loved to see his child perform, he ached for others to praise the child, he waited eagerly for every prize the child could bring home and then show it around to everyone.
So intense was the love, bordering on obsession, for this first-born who had to undo the failings of his life, that its other side had to be rage. Invariably.
Surely there must have been demons in his head. He had twenty-six years before I was born, years that must have been steeped in humiliations, disappointments, heartbreak. Hadn’t he been raw and sensitive? Hadn’t he been naïve and trusting? Always the most entertaining in a gathering, hadn’t his loneliness over the unsharable, his agony over lost dreams been crushing?
Why else would he explode into that white, frothy fury? Why else would his hand rise to strike at the smallest provocation? Why else would the leather belt around his waist end up in his hands, then fall on our backs? Why else would there be brutal thrashings inside locked, lightless rooms while our mother banged pitifully on the door from outside? Beatings, not till lessons were learnt but till his arms tired. More punishment followed every tear shed, for tears were unbearable to him, never mind our pain.
So blinding was that fury, so close to the surface, blinding him and us. Intense anger.
And then intense love. Soon after the beatings, the rage also beaten out of him, he would return to the room to cuddle and fuss over our little bodies.
Love and anger. Perhaps the difference was not evident to him till the end. An hour before he died, he was on the phone fighting with both his children.
Forgiveness is a complicated affair.
There was that time when I was thirty years old, working on my second novel, when the fiction beneath my typing fingers mined deeper sorrows. I wrote about my protagonist who had a physically abusive mother, I wrote about how that pain spawns more pain endlessly, how it can never heal, I wrote till rivulets of tears ran dry. Then I picked up the phone, called my father, heard him talk about neighbourhood intrigues, said nothing till the final bye, my silence going unnoticed, then put my head on the computer keyboard and cried as though it was my first cry. Until then I had not seen the big knot of wrath and sorrow inside me for what had been endured. How come it had taken me so long to know that anger was not just his domain, it had been strapped to my back too? Love did not absolve violence – about that I was a late learner.
Dead people need to tell their stories. And he has spun so many, that some can be recreated here, ever so briefly, without the daughter’s lens.
The world according to SGM:
He has had the worst luck, no two ways about it, and everybody he loves deeply has eventually failed him …
He can barely tolerate his wife, the most selfish person he knows, and the reason he has to escape, but not through the cowardice of suicide, just heroic, silent submersion in alcohol …
Nobody understands him, and even though there is nothing he believes in more than the innate goodness of the world, good people are scarce in the world and everything in a state of irrevocable decline …
He is an unlucky man, a failure, and all he wants is a swift death …
But wait.
Long before this narrative of drink and desperation, there was another father.
Take Two. The world according to a youthful SGM:
He was born in a coastal village, one among many siblings, witness to a stormy equation between his parents, for which he always held his mother responsible, almost with hostility. He would have been lost in the sea of children of that household, were it not for his grandfather who saw his own chutzpah replicated in the little boy and doted on him. But when the old man died, he had to learn to love himself, and this was very difficult to do in a place where people spoke bluntly, where expressions of affections were infrequent and considered unnecessary.
He was marked to be that strange creature: a gregarious loner. He wanted to be wanted, stand out in every gathering, but only to make sure everyone noticed his profound loneliness. That trait would stay with him till the end.
He wanted to be a doctor but family responsibilities held him back in the village. And when he did end up in college, it was to study accounts and commerce. But never mind, he surely thought, he would find his own way in the world, he would fill it with his own vitality, his faith in friendship, his laughter and chatter. He saw the world as a place milling with bright people who deserved unconditional trust. When he could, he acted in plays, sang songs, and always, always made
friends.
Surrounded by clansmen whose trading ancestry had turned ‘practical’ into a haloed word, where youngsters walked away from family shops to get into steady jobs in medicine, engineering, banking or chartered accountancy, his secret was his untapped artistry.
He would find a job in a bank, even if it was that of a clerk, and he would make his way up. Somewhere in those eventful early twenties, there came romance, a matching of hearts, but it would end prematurely. After that came a marriage, arranged by the will of elders and the matching of horoscopes, but it was not a marriage of temperaments.
Much hinges on the story of this marriage, hard for a child to narrate, a flawed witness by every count. If the wife were to tell this story, she might be able to talk about the strain of being married to a man who lived by his passion and not by his prudence, about the flares of physical and verbal violence, the dominating presence that brooded, the money troubles, the drinking, the drinking …
But this story has to be his, and he would not see it his wife’s way. Never.
And this has long ceased to be the account of a youthful, non-depressive SGM, so I can try again.
Take Three. If SGM’s life had to be put into a colourful brochure, full of golden light and cherubic smiles:
It would be a story of triumph, of a boy born just a year after Indian independence, a first-generation college graduate, making the move from a remote village in coastal Karnataka to a bustling town. There wasn’t much money or support from the family, but nor was there any expectation that he would return to live with them. An untethered flight. As the seventies arrived, the circumstances were right for him to turn away from the family trade. Some of the top banks in the country, all owned by private individuals, had been nationalized in one swift move by Indira Gandhi, and the little clerical job he had was open to many possibilities. He got to travel, see different parts of the country, his responsibilities to his parental hearth were taken care of early, even as his own family grew. He had found just the sort of wife he wanted, the docile kind who would stay at home and take care of his needs, and his children were daughters, just as he wanted, and they learnt their lessons from him quickly enough. There was also a white furry dog that was with the family for nearly two decades, that he loved to distraction. He had a regular source of income, a house that he owned, innumerable friends who adored him – everything seemed in place for a peaceful, happy retirement.
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