She once had me

I get a message suddenly one day! It read ‘They have a 40 day old baby at their home’. The message was from Aruna and the ‘they’ were my cousin’s family. I was shocked for a minute. I haven’t heard of someone making babies in such short span as I have met these guys a month back and if she was pregnant, that would have been the most secretive pregnancy ever. And I started thinking whether they have adopted a kid. Anyway the suspense was short lived as I could not hold back for long and I enquired.

It was a pup. I kinda knew that my cousin had shifted to an individual house from his apartment as his daughter wanted a pup, but could not make the connect when I got the message. Then he called. The call lasted for about 20 minutes and we were two dads talking about child rearing. And while I was talking I realized how much I was an instinctive parent, albeit for dogs.

I had one! Or like the Beatles sang "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me". Gabriela was my life. She was at home even before our first daughter was born and did we dote on her? Gaby was a selectively intelligent girl. Unlike others of its ilk, it never used to display wanton behavior, rudeness or courage even. She was the most scared dog in the Universe after Scooby Doo. She will run behind me if there was a noise in home. But she was so doting on us too. She treated my first daughter as if she was her own and she dutifully traveled to all places my work took me, without whining one bit. After a terrible first experience of a break van travel when an infested tick bit her and we almost lost her, it was always a first class coupe or by road in the car. She was so very fond of car travel, that when it is time for bath and she instinctively realizes and crawls under the bed the only thing that can bring her out was the sound of the car keys dangling.

She never learnt to eat rice all her life, so she was on a diet of Nestum the baby rice food. She started off on Farex and graduated to Nestum. It was always first on the provision list we drew up every month. Maybe the shop keeper was wondering whether we had a baby factory. She had a peculiar mannerism of lifting both her front legs and jump with her head rotating. Used to very funny sight! Never once she will walk into the kitchen and if she was hungry, she will promptly stand outside the door salivating. She loved us more than her own kids. In the 4th day of delivery, she dumped all the pups and crawled under our bed ignoring the pleading sounds of her kids. Got into anxiety when my second daughter was born, because by then she was old! Would never eat for a couple of days if we went out of town!

I told my cousin life will never be the same after a dog. And it is absolutely true. Maybe I should have added ‘Life will never be the same after the first dog’. Because when Gaby died, it was huge blow for me. I was traveling and came all the way back home for her burial and returned. My sister, who had one with her, suddenly stopped talking with people when hers died. We tried having dogs again, but they were dogs, cute on their own right, but never Gaby. After 5 years of her death, words about her flow without difficulty whenever I think about her.

Felt like posting the blog below as an eulogy to her again

http://tsganth.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/09/gabriela.htm

Death be Damned

It has been a season of deaths. Sometimes it happens that way. 4 years back, I had to contend with deaths of close ones back to back. As if it happened by clockwork precision. It was my closest friend & colleague in January and my ex boss the next month and my dog ( which I hate to call so, but calling it first daughter in this context is so very painful ) in March.

Now it kind of repeats! It started off with Sujatha. And now on a single day Raghuvaran and Arthur C Clarke! The first one was apparently 60. Who knew that? For me when I was 22, he appeared as if he was my contemporary. Much like Shah Rukh ( with whom he even shared a resemblance & of course with Benecio Del Toro ) he started in an amazing TV serial and all of us went around shaving our moustache trying to look like him and ended looking like monkeys. Later he understood Tamizh cinema so very well that he gave necessary doses of overacting in popular movies and went along silently with awesome performances in real good movies. He was in constant search of something starting from liquor, drugs, great love, guitar, divorce and at last spirituality. Just as I was thinking he made it somehow, he just walked off into death.

Arthur C Clarke was another guy! He created that interest in me for sci-fi unlike the others in the world who swore by Asimov. And later moved over to explore the sea, when he candidly realized that there is 3/4th of earth that is still unexplored and he had no business imagining about space. But his story about the notice to destroy Earth by superior aliens to build an inter-galactic highway smartly juxtaposed with our officials doing the same thing for constructing a flyover lives in my heart.

Certain guys really don’t die. They just cease to exist for you to believe that they did.

My homage to these two great entertainers is an ode that follows.


It has this uncanny knack
Of hitting you with shock

Long hands that can reach anywhere
Pauper or king you go nowhere

Makes you think how much you miss
Just when you are sunk in bliss

You dismiss it as no big deal
But bites you with astonishing zeal

You never sit and think about it
But it’s never far, this exit

You think you are racing ahead
Isn’t it always to meet it head to head?

It’s all pervading and powerful
But haven’t it always been sleightful?

Death let it be damned to hell
You just want to yell

When it takes away loved ones
Letting you grieve in tons

Homage to Sujatha

How do you pay homage for a prolific writer who fashioned your thoughts and life in more ways than one? Maybe just attempt writing something yourself, hoping that atleast in such taxing situations, your thoughts and words would not fail you and you can manage to transfer the heaviness in the heart into words! That’s the way I feel now. When I woke up at the news of Sujatha passing away!

Generally news of death doesn’t disturb me much. I religiously read obituaries everyday as if it is an attempt to reassure that anyway people should die. When my father died, though there was a sense of loss, I didn’t manage to cry till I went back to see the empty bed. His physical absence had to be harshly reminded for understanding the loss which is hardly physical. But, now the feeling is strange. Here is a man who has lived for 73 years, and in my life I once managed a glimpse of him in a meeting and later by the good grace of my friend, had a private audience for almost an hour and came out as if I have achieved immortality status myself. The interactions have been just this. But I feel so very heavy and the loss seems to be personal. Truth is that I have interacted with him almost all my adolescent and adult life so far, maybe even more than what I did with my father.

Studying in an Anglo-Indian school where the Tamizh standards are appalling with the liberty of answering in English for Tamizh exam, my initiation to the language which is my mother tongue was pathetic. Didn’t have the current awareness that Tamizh was a great language and I would lose plenty if I didn’t know how to read and write was not much of a scary thought then. Till Sujatha happened!

From the moment I picked my first book of him and till now, the journey of amazement hasn’t stopped. Lately started collecting all his works and he had to confess to me that if I knew one of his works was not available, maybe it never was there. The obsession knew no bounds. Every single work would have been read a minimum of twice, if not more. Even if it was a half page snippet in a weekly which even he cannot remember! So much was his impact.

At this moment I pause to think what made him so special for me. Why do I feel a personal loss now, when I make light of deaths? Why this should haunt me no end and break my inertia to pick up the laptop and start typing first thing in the morning? How well do I know him? Why is it that whatever he wrote was like Veda to me? And why is that I feel that he can never be replaced, though I am certain that anyone who writes Tamizh, even just plain alphabets cannot do without his impact?

I understand that he just didn’t write. He had been a teacher all though my life. It is strange that how much you can learn by reading even plain fiction. His was always intelligent. And if distance education needed a mascot, it was him. Maybe the IGNOU’s of the world should have contracted him to write lessons. The content I have picked from him into making myself had been enormous. About 10 years back when I didn’t know the difference between a TV monitor and a Computer monitor I managed to get myself employed with an ISP. And as it is my wont, I assumed that I am a master of basic Internet in just about 3 months and lectured a couple of colleges. Well, all I had to do was pick his book on Internet and talk what he has written. Started feeling proud of being a Vaishnavite after his books on the subject! So much so that I feel that I know Mahavishnu personally now. Anything he wrote I felt there was something to be learnt in that.

His life was a lesson in terms of time management when I read about his scoffing at folks who ask him how he finds time to write. His life was a lesson in telling you how versatile one can become. His life was a lesson that constantly reminded you that whatever you maybe, you still have scope to learn. His life was a lesson that despite being a hardcore science believer, you can never speak with a certainty of an atheist. His life was a lesson in telling you that you grow young as long as you think young. In more ways than one he has been my guru. I find it strange myself to give so much credit to someone else, but I know inside that it is not a eulogy that comes in the wake of a fresh death. I am certain that I would acknowledge all of this anytime again tomorrow and in the future.

Talking of death, his best was about his own father’s death. I am sure he died a contented man in all respects, but for the yearning to read and write more. Reality sometimes makes you so cruel that you start thinking that why there are so many people who we can afford to let go live and the ones you want to live, go. There ought to be some reason! He wrote that he would want to go to hell when he dies, because he hopes to meet interesting personalities only there and he can’t stand the peace of harmony of heaven for more than an hour. But I know one thing for sure; wherever he choses to stay, that will be heaven for the rest of the folks there.

A stanza from Wordsworth's 'Intimations of Immortality' can very much sum up my thoughts

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a newborn Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I feel kinda strange and queasy when I dwell more into this. Maybe I just drop the thoughts and pick a couple of his books and read again today.

He will continue to live.