My friend Randeep

 

Randeep Wadehra, his youngest sister Seema, Sangita, and my significant other, Arundhati Sinha

In my previous birth, I worked for a bank. One evening when I was leaving office at about 7, there was nobody on the ground floor except a young officer who was working with a pile of registers on something called “balancing fixed deposit accounts”. I am not explaining the term “balancing … accounts” because the information is useless for the rest of humanity. You can be successful, have a happy married life, and create healthy children even if you don’t know what it means.

I didn’t know Randeep Wadehra well because he had just joined our office. As I sat down to assist him with the work, aided by mud cups of sugary tea brought in by our Gurkha watchmen, I got to know a pleasant, shy young man with solid Punjabi muscles and a beautiful smile. By the time we finished, it was an hour when even the pimps in the nearby redlight area in Free School Street had finished their day’s work and retired to bed. (What a contrast between the name of a street and the activity which makes it famous!) I took Randeep home, where we had a late supper followed by a few drinks. And we talked till the small hours.

Thus began a friendship that has remained as fresh, as warm, and as reciprocal as it was 45 years ago despite long periods of disengagement in between. During this time, Fate dealt Randeep a cruel hand. When he was a in his late twenties, when everybody around him adored him for his work and endearing personality, when he was looking at a bright future ahead, he was afflicted by a rheumatic disease. He was at home in Panchkula on sick leave, but the disease continued for far beyond the maximum period of leave which was normally granted. When he lost his job, Randeep couldn’t sit up on his bed. Our bank, sadly, treated him as an employee number, not a human being.

Randeep Wadehra has regained his mobility only very partially, but he has overcome his problems. He remained intellectually active and reengineered his career to become a column writer for the Chandigarh based newspaper Tribune. His wide reading, knowledge of the world, hard work, and incisive analytical mind made it possible. Parallelly, he has had terrible mishaps in his personal life too. But Randeep Wadehra marched on, writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He also runs a video blog.

If I may digress a little, the word “batchmates” is easily understood by anyone who has been in a job where an organisation selects officials in a particular cadre through a national-level selection process. The young men and women who join a particular cadre of a company (or government) in the same year are from different parts of the country who are close to a median age, and who have comparable intellectual levels. Usually, they also participate in introductory trainings together. They speak different languages and would go on to work in different parts of the country, but the “batch”, which is an Indianism in this sense, maintains a strong fraternal bond. A few years ago when Randeep’s batchmates had retired, over thirty of them along with their spouses went from different part of the country to Panchkula to be with Randeep. Such was Randeep Wadehra’s magnetic pull!

Randeep lived with his father in Panchkula in their own house with a garden. The son would have got his writer’s genes from his father who too was a writer, although I must admit I know very little about him. Father passed away in March this year and then Randeep and his two younger sisters did a wonderful thing. Instead of fighting over their father’s properties, they decided to dispose of their Panchkula bungalow and move to Bengaluru to stay near the only child of the older among the two sisters. Randeep and his two sisters now live in a beautifully appointed flat in Bengaluru. His niece’s family lives in the same condo, in another flat.

Last Sunday, my wife and I met the siblings in their new home. What a happy threesome! They not only extended the famous Punjabi hospitality and offered a lovely lunch to us, a little of their joie de vivre rubbed on to us. When we returned, we were a little younger than what we had been when we went to their home!

Age is not determined by the calendar alone!

Dehradun / 13 Nov. 24