discoverer mine

My grandfather is was now.

He passed away on the last season that was purple. When the moon looked like a million dollar note. I did not feel a thing except for my phone vibrating in my hip pocket as I missed call after call. I was in the middle of my vernacular architecture class. And body level breeze production through modification of fenestrations in Kerala’s villages was of course more important.

He came to me before the alphabets. He is closer to me than my father. Dearer to me than my mother. The only person whose hopes I was always afraid of dashing. The only opinion that stood vivid in the misty perplexity of public sanction.
Every time I hum a note of rabindrasangeet. Every time I control the urge to correct somebody’s grammar. Every tree I mentally whisper the scientific name of. Every time I see an underfed dog. Every time I scribble a frog, a fox or an owl in my notebook. Every time. Everywhere.

After all the evening that we spent churning through pages of Wren and Martin, I cannot bring myself to decide on a tense. I wonder if he is proud of me or disappointed. But then again he is nothing. Loving is so short, and forgetting so long, I tell myself.

From the lush greens of the Bengal-Arunachal borders, through the fires and famines of the partition, he came a long way to the sophisticated urbanity that we dwell now in. Dragging nothing but a trunk of books and a burden of homelessness that would haunt him forever.

You pushed us ahead, made us modern to the degree of social unacceptability, where we sob to be more average, make more friends. Every time I think of you, I end up thinking of what you have done for us. And never who you have been.

Also, I have survived the biggest loss I could have suffered. I tick off one item from my short list of trepidations. I don’t have to be alarmed by emergency calls ever again. Quantum of escape. And I pat myself on the back for the defense mechanism that I have developed.

You look at me indulgently and forgive me for not having cried once since I was told that you are dead.