Goodbye, Apu Mama

 

Apu Mama, my mom’s younger brother, left us on 11 July. He was as fortunate in his death as he was in life (ultimately, after long struggles). He died at home, peacefully, with his wife Jana and daughter Monica by his side. His long guerrilla war against dementia ended when he was 88.

It’s difficult to write about people who are close to you because it is a bit like writing about yourself. I wish instead of writing this I was with Jana and Monica today.

I have been thinking of you, Apu Mama, over the last five days. We miss you. We will miss you. Pranam.

*

I shall try to use as few adjectives as I can because of what I have just said, but I can say this without hesitation: if one word could describe Apurba Ranjan Pal, Apu to his family and Ron to his friends, it would be “affectionate”. He was genuinely affectionate, despite being an angry young man all his life.

As he left India for Denmark when I was little, I have almost no childhood memories of him except that mother used to be deeply saddened by the absence of a darling younger brother who was struggling to make a living in a faraway land. (Their mother had died when they were kids; so my mother was a bit like a mom to Apu.) A few years later, Apu Mama crossed the North Sea to move to England, where over time, he would settle down in a quiet neighbourhood not far from the airport at Heathrow.

Moving back in time and towards East Europe, in the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968, Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Russian army, as many as 650,000 of them. The people of Czechoslovakia put up an unarmed resistance for eight months, says Wikipedia. The forces on either side would have been as asymmetric as in Vietnam, but for some reason, we didn’t get to hear much about this struggle. Wikipedia also says, a “massive wave of emigration swept the nation.”

Among the émigrés was Jana, a maths teacher and a stunningly beautiful Czech woman, who came to London. Apurba Ranjan met her and after some struggle with the Communist bureaucracy, they managed to get married in Prague. I have always thought my uncle (and our family) was among the biggest beneficiaries of the failed rebellion against Russian Communism. Czechoslovakia would become free much later, in 1989.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Apu Mama managed to visit home for the first time, maybe after a gap of 10 or 15 years. I was in college then. He travelled with me to my hostel, and together, we explored the campus and beyond. We went around in overcrowded public buses to the Masanjore Dam and maybe to a few other places too. In those few days, an unknown uncle became lifelong friend.

Thereafter, from time to time, I would receive a warm letter from Apu Mama with an international payment order for a few pounds. The amount, a minor treasure for me, was “biri khabar poisa,” that is, cigarette allowance.

Thereafter, he and Jana would visit us infrequently and we always looked forward to the visits. Meanwhile, I got married. My wife, Arundhati and Apu Mama had deep reciprocal admirations. Arundhati for the uncomplicated handsome man with salt-and-pepper hair who always spoke his mind, and he, for the shingaras and koi macher jhol that she would always prepare for him. Apu Mama obviously missed shingaras, which he called the national food of Bengal.

Much later, when my wife and I visited him in London a couple of times, Mamu was in the autumn of his life. He used to be quiet. I would still go out to a pub with him, but I missed the raucous arguments with him over many topics ranging from Satyajit Ray to the state of the nation, which had been the usual interaction pattern between uncle and nephew. (He was a rare Bong who was not a Satyajit Ray fan.) When we visited him, he would insist on his copy of the Guardian every morning, but wouldn’t be able to read much. He would sit quietly or sleep.

My wife and I stayed at their home. We would usually go out in the morning and go around. Jana would pack our lunch, complete with two soft-drink cans. What she gave would be more than what we could eat. But when we took leave, Apu Mama would invariably pick up two apples or oranges from the dining table and give us. I will remember my uncle by these small acts of kindness: IPOs for a few pounds and a few oranges or apples.

Over the last few years, uncle’s condition deteriorated. He might forget if he had had breakfast. More worryingly, when he went somewhere with family, he might suddenly start walking aimlessly, or try to get off the train at a wrong tube station. Jana and Monica took tremendous care of him. I haven’t seen anyone taking better care of their ailing husband / father.

16 July / 29 July 2021

Just One Circle >>>

In Bangla, dash (it rhymes with bosh) stands for ten and chakra, for wheel or circle. (Remember the Sudarshan Chakra, the spinning-disc missile in the hand of the Hindu god Vishnu aka Krishna? Or its modern version in the hand of Vijay Amritraj in the James Bond film Octopussy?) Chakra also means conspiracy. Together, dashachakra means a conspiracy hatched by a number of people, that is, an intrigue, machination. However, the Dashachakra Hostel, where I moved in in my second year of stay in Santiniketan had nothing to do with intrigues, neither did it have 10 circles. 

It had just one circular courtyard at the centre shaded by two old mango trees, around which were 10 double rooms and a bathroom block. The rooms opened into the central courtyard. Between the door and the courtyard, each room had a tiny attached veranda too. The oblong rooms had two beds and three windows each. One of the windows was in the far wall, directly opposite the door; the other two were on either side. 

The wheel-shaped building stood as a beautiful work of architecture about 50 feet off a straight road on which only cycles and cycle-rickshaws plied. The foreground was barren. A slightly raised path of red gravel connected the hostel to the road.

On the other side of the road was the main playground of the campus. So, from the entrance of the hostel, we would see an enormous open space which merged into the greenery on the far side. 

Behind Dashachakra, there was another small boys’ hostel called the Punjabi House – a reminder of a time when Santiniketan was a cosmopolitan place – and a few staff quarters, where university teachers lived with families. Behind them were paddy fields. The proximate presence of profs was a nuisance; we, the inmates of the hostel, couldn’t make as much noise as we would have liked to. 

As the three windows in each room opened outside, our hostel was airy and light. In fact, wind swept through it all the time. Thanks to the mango trees in the courtyard and super air circulation, the summer afternoons were quite bearable there, but the winter nights were c-o-l-d, when the temperature often dipped below 10° Centigrade (plus the windchill factor!).

I was in a different hostel when I first went to Dashachakra in a frigid night to meet someone. Shivering in the cold draught despite two layers of woollens, as I walked towards the hostel, I saw a hairy man standing outside, looking into the distance, with nothing on his upper torso, and a printed red lungi below. I thought he was a madman. But he was not. He was Dilip Paul from East Pakistan, a few years my senior. 

Dilip’s roommate was Anuttam, who was a normal person, meaning he could feel hot and cold. But to share a room with Dilip, he could close only one and a half windows on his side of the room whatever might the temperature be and however piercing be the wind outside. I do not know why Anuttam accepted the deal. Maybe, it was his Buddha-like tolerance or maybe, Dilip Paul had some special charm? The answer would be bits of both, I guess.

In the two years I lived there, I would have shared the hostel with about 25 boys. I can recall most of their names and faces. The circular architecture of the building meant there was certain openness amongst its inmates; we would interact with each other closely. Did it contribute to making the place a more friendly one? I think yes. I do not recall an instance of discord in the two years I was there. 

As I look back, I find it surprising that the hostel had such a motley crowd. Let me begin with my roommate, Gautam. He was the badminton champion of the university and played football brilliantly despite smoking like a chimney and doing no physical training. Generous to a fault, Gautam would shower gifts on people whenever he could. If he was sharing food with a friend, say a cup of tea or a cutlet, he would surely part with the bigger “half”. On the other hand, if a girl was hosting us for tea and snacks at our self-service canteen – which wasn’t rare – Gautam would volunteer to get the food and afterwards, he would tell the host in a serious voice, ‘I’m keeping the change.’\

Gautam also had a fine sense of humour, to which I will come back in a moment. Turning back to the hostel with 20 boys, two most disciplined and likable guys were Shil Chand and Nikhil, who were roommates. Besides participating in the National Cadet Corps drills diligently, they studied. They would study till late into the nights, they would be the last to go to bed; next morning, they would be at their desks before anybody else got up. Maybe, Shil and Nikhil considered it a moral obligation to make up for the lack of efforts by some of their friends. Soumitra and Tapan were two of the gentlest souls I have come across. Soumitra’s handwriting was printed cursive writing and Tapan was the default tabla player at musical functions at our department. Dilip Paul, who studied chemistry, used to read widely, including impenetrable essays on philosophy and religion. He was much older than his age and we would refer to him as Sri Paul, which would have been quite a weighty name for a twenty-something. Kaushik and Siddharta were two adorable younger students. Kaushik had a whacky sense of humour and Siddhartha, who studied English, was an excellent a tenor. Both of them would migrate to the US.  From there, Siddhartha has gone to a place much farther-away. Bishu was a sad fellow, with a melancholy look pasted on him at all times. We used to say that whenever some sadness flew by, Bishu would shoot it down to have it with him. Badru didn’t have to live with the mystery that we all were condemned to suffer from. He had been married. 

Above all, there was Anuttam, an unusual person and a brilliant singer and poet, who I will come back to.

Gopalda, a very old man, was one of the 464 (?) casual labourers who had been given permanent job by the university. He looked very old and it seemed he was way beyond the age of superannuation. We often quizzed him about his age. And he would put on a serious face, ‘My dad had written down my date of birth on a chit of paper, but I’ve lost it.’

Anuttam’s younger bro, Gautam Biswas, who we called Bulti, moved into the hostel a year later. He initiated a process to beautify the barren patch in front of our hostel. He didn’t actually plant any trees. Instead, he wrote long letters to the university gardening department, containing detailed wish lists in convoluted officialese. He said there had to be at least one hereby or thereby, or preferably both in an official letter if it was to be taken seriously. And to add more weight, Bulti actually got a peon book, numbered the letters, and sent them across through Gopalda. And he insisted on a stamped acknowledgement for his missives.

The gardening department didn’t bother initially, but Bulti would send reminders regularly: “It has been noted with serious disfavour that your goodselves do not consider it necessary to look into the pressing aesthetic obligations to beautify the ugly barren patch in front of Dashachakra Hostel, and thereby betraying a lackadaisical attitude …” Etc. etc.

After some time, either because of Bulti’s nerve-racking letters or because of the peon book, the gardening department sent a cartload of manured soil and about 20 saplings and got them planted on either side of the path in front of our hostel.

Missioned accomplished, we soon forgot about them and one day I saw Biren holding an uprooted plant upside down and observing it closely. I asked him what he was doing and he answered, in all seriousness, ‘Checking how well the roots are growing.’

The playground in front of our hostel would have a lot of activities in the afternoon, but would fall asleep after dusk. On certain nights, it would become a sea of moonlight. In such nights, a girl sometimes pushed a wheel chair with her boyfriend, a paraplegic singer and a senior student in Sangeet Bhavan, to the edge of the playground. M, who is a well-known singer now, would sing khayals or thumris that would submerge area of our hostel in soulful music. We would speak in whispers in those times. 

Postscript: When I visited Santiniketan recently, I didn’t find Dashachakra. It seems the building was first allowed to go to seeds. Banyan trees grew from its unattended crevices as plaster and cornices fell off. Then the university authorities decided to demolish the structure. Fortunately, no authorities can ever demolish memories. 

Bengaluru / 12 July 2021