(B.P Sinha (12/9/1937 – 12/01/2005)
Remembering him with love and gratitude
(February 18, 2005)
It has been a month and six days when you took your last breath as I sat there counting the spaces between your feeble breaths. For the first time in a long time, your whole immediate family was around you – my mother, her only sister, my two brothers, and our spouses. I was counting the seconds between your breaths since that morning. At 4 PM I was still counting, but the breath did not return. And that was that – the body lived no more.
Your passing had a strange impact on me – I was relieved.
It felt like the end of a nightmare where a proud, loving, idealistic man was reduced to a shriveled, helpless, zombie-like existence. You were losing your motor functions rapidly. You kept your eyes closed all the time, shutting out the world forcibly. Your only live connection was my mother, the only one who could look after you without you getting agitated, confused, or violent. So she kept at it. Feeding, cleaning, washing you, and forgetting her own pain – the emotional pain of the loss of her soul mate, the excruciating physical pain of second stage colon cancer.
I lived a vast ocean away from my childhood home, only able to make heart wrenching annual visits. I had wished every night in the last few visits to wake up in my real home the next morning. For me, my father had died a long time ago – a slow-motion death of a man, losing parts of himself, mis-remembering his world. Every time I returned in the past few years, more bits were missing. On this last visit, I knew that you were not there at all. You – the person, the emotion, the father, the idea – were long gone. What remained behind was a ghostly reminder of you. And pain and suffering, both your own and of those who loved you. I wished you were not there at all.
My father was kind, devoted, noble, generous, caring, and outgoing. He used to remember his kid’s exam timetables better than they did. My fondest memory of you was the pride you took in the small things that I was learning to do. “She writes…”, “Have you seen her sketches”, “She sings….”. You used to tell visitors, much to my embarrassment.
You were not one for scolding or shouting, but you took the silent treatment to new heights. I never understood that part of you. It was most incongruous with the rest of your personality. Although periodic, it used to border on the extreme, extending alike to everyone in the family, including the dog. Sometimes it would be days before we would figure out what had ticked you off and which one of us was the culprit. I remember being scared and irritated with you during those times.
But today as I think back about you, what shines in my memory is your smile. You belonged to the old school of manners and did not laugh easily or enough. So my brother and I would have a competition of sorts to make you laugh. It was easy to make you smile. But you would actually resist an onslaught of a guffaw by pretending to be chewing, or by wearing an unconvincing scowl.
Most of all, I loved your simplicity. It was both your strength and your weakness. You lived for your family, with loving generosity. Without any regret, you gave up your cushy career to be with your family in Jaipur. You gave up your son to your wife’s sister and did not flinch.
Perhaps it was because you had an amazing capacity to detach yourself from any situation when you needed to. At age twenty two, when I was leaving home for the first time, I did not detect any emotion on your face. You were not being brave. You had just accepted that I was leaving home, maybe for ever. My mother’s strength was visible in the effort she made. Your strength was like that of a towering mountain surrounded by turgid waters – effortless, unwavering, reliable, and immense.
Most of my early life was ruled by one objective – I cannot let my parents down. From an early age I was aware of my parents being different in a deeply paternalistic society. I can never thank you enough for raising me to be a self-respecting individual, and not a compliant female. You never told me what to do but wore every little achievement of mine like a precious feather in your cap. Sometimes I think that it was a well thought psychological ploy by you and my mother to keep me on the straight and narrow.
When Sanjiv came into my life, you remained supportive, and detached. My new life was filled with the unwavering, unconditional love of Sanjiv – husband, friend, lover, ally, rock, and much more. You knew it and were happy for me.
But none of your goodness could ward off the downward spiral which ultimately consumed you. Aided by diabetes and Alzheimer, your health started to deteriorate. Suddenly, you were profoundly lonely. Alzheimer was erasing parts of you, bit by small precious bit. It took the rest of us a long time to understand and acknowledge what was happening to you.
In 1999, on one of my rushed annual visits home, I remember trying to teach you to use the newly bought computer. I realised to my horror that you could not recognise the letters on the keyboard. Then what were you doing with the newspapers for so many hours every morning? No wonder you started to hide them under the mattress, behind bushes, and even up in the loft. You were only sixty-two years old.
Each year it got worse. I could no longer recognize my father in this blabbering, insane person, vacillating between bouts of aggression and total passivity.
But there were moments. Fleeting and far between, but there were moments of recognition. Those were terrifying moments. It was easier for me to accept that `that sick body’ was no longer my father. When `Papa’ did momentarily surface it used to frighten me, shattering my equilibrium.
In the last month of your bodily life, when you were completely bed-ridden, my mother and I cleaned you, changed you, and fed you. We did everything silently, mechanically, wiping our tears, hiding them from each other. And I wished that you would die now.
You, who only gave in your life, gave in death too. Your eyes were successfully transplanted and your body donated to the Medical Hospital for trainee doctors and research.
You will laugh at me if I told you that I was haunted by the image of your hollowed out body, eyes stitched shut. To be scared of the ghost of one who taught me not to believe in ghosts or fairies!
It has taken only a little while for the pain to ease enough to find the strength to thank you in this letter. After all, I have had a few years to deal with the absence of my father from my life. What remained behind was barely a shadow, a flickering reminder of my father, which finally breathed its last a month and six days ago.
In some ways, this is the start of another chapter of my relationship with you. I have a photo of you in my office. I light a candle in front of it every day. I find myself looking at that picture so many times a day. It is a picture of you at your youthful best and that is how I want to remember you.
You taught me to accept life with equanimity. I am learning to accept death similarly. I still hope not to let you down in learning the lessons of life.
So goodbye, Papa! You will remain my ideal of a noble life lived with conviction and generosity. You were never a conventional father who tried to control or direct. You were always a watchful guardian and once again that is what you are to me.
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