Get me more Choglet

I am coughing from nail polish fumes.

I don’t know why I remember baba so strongly now, meaning since yesterday. Is it because I am stressed with the new pup, stressed by the uncertainty of keeping it alive, like the uncertainty of baba living then? Or is it the anger and resentment about boyfriend? Or is it the drawn-out death of Jyoti Basu being played out by so many people: you see the markers and remember? (Forcing a city’s people to live the death of someone who brought so much misery on them?)

I’ll say again what I was remembering: baba after the fall, the hemorrhage, when one of his pupils was off-centre, inward, while the other was in the centre, when I saw him like that the first time after he recovered consciousness after the fall, his moaning when they took him to the scanning machine: I was allowed to enter the room wearing a special coat thing to calm him, stop him moving, the many walks to and fro on the bridge thing connecting two departments, walking in giant sneakers without socks and blue pajamas: food tasted like food, meant for nourishment, to keep one going. And then, how, slowly, he died. Like a long long fall in slow motion where he would fall into my arms: it seems one way of looking at it now. I let him fall, that day, when he fell, it was on me.

How I told Amlan da how scared I was I’d forget it and he said he knew: how incredible it was: his understanding: how incredible that another human being should understand and give credence to something you are afraid is an indulgence.

And the memories do fade, they seem to float away sometimes, and you look, almost not caring.

Yesterday night, I said, I thought, I told God, after he had kept the pup alive and found it a kind person who’d taken it in: that it was wrong that baba had gone when he was 56. Basu is 95. Baba had a lot more to do, to see, to give. This is so a very bare fact, so not an indulgence: there are more to some people, there isn’t as much for others, perhaps. I am not singing a paean to a parent. It was a smart, agile and confident mind that was taken away, that went away, and I daresay, a heart that would have learnt a lot about affection in the years to come if he had lived. It is not fair. And yes, the same God kept that pup alive, quite defying all possibility: a very very little animal that can’t even walk properly, so small that it wouldn’t be seen by drivers of vehicles, it walked a very long distance to the istiriwala who turned out to be a kind person and didn’t think that he didn’t want to take on a responsibility, when I had left it on the footpath in God’s name and left.

So yes, I miss baba: how much I don’t know myself. It’s one of those things you don’t realize because you are still living it.