I have been home for more than a week now. On my way beck, I made many plans for many trips with many people. I told them I would work out the details once I got home, and then let them know. I was going to go to Goa, and Bombay, and Ladakh, and Pin Valley, and Nepal, all in the course of the next few months. I flew into Delhi from Chennai in the evening, and was planning to stay the night and take a bus home in the morning. As I landed, Gautam called and said he had two tickets to Paris Je T’aime, and was I interested.
!!!
It was in a couple of hours in Saket, leaving me no time to go deposit my bags at the flat. A fact that my slow brain (I had a fever, gimme a break) only registered when I was already on the metro in CP, halfway home. So I turned around and dashed like hell, and made it to saket – nearly, almost, not-quite-in-time, toting bag and baggage. (You shoulda seen the look the autowallah gave me when I said PVR). I was carrying three bags, and snorkeling flippers, and attached to one of the bags were various random dangly items of the shoes and sleeping-bag variety. And yes, I did bear a certain resemblance to, and feel quite a lot like, mowgli coming out of the jungle into civilization. Anyways, the movie was fun. Go see it, it’s a little gimmicky in parts, but three or four of the shorts are brilliant enough to make the whole thing worth it.

Oh, and I almost missed my plane in Chennai, and after all the misadventures I’d been having there this last time I was really desperate to leave Tamland.

Anyways, Delhi was just such a nice, comfortable zone, and then it was so damn hot in the day, I ended up staying there for three nights. I realised that since I was up every night till four, the only way I was getting out was to take a bus at five in the morning and travel before it got too hot. So that’s what I did, left the house at four-thirty and was on a bus at five. Since the whole Dera problem in Punjab was brewing up, I decided not to tell dad in advance of my plan, since he would worry or discourage me.

At around nine, my father called and asked me where I was. I very proudly told him I was already halfway home, chuckling to myself, thrilled to bits at exceeding expectations. In a very subdued tone he said, ‘Oh, ok. Tell me when you get here.’ And then proceeded to inform me that my cousin had just died in a car accident. This cousin was not someone I was close to; we hadn’t spoken in like fifteen years, but he was my age, a few months older, and I still have the videotape of my first birthday when I pushed him and made him cry.

So I arrived home to a funeral, to the sudden, unexpected death of a young person, like you or me. A person who was leaving in a few days for Symbiosis, Pune, and wanted to hang out with his friends these last few days. A person whose grandmother, and father, and mother, and aunts and uncles would now have to see through the rituals that he was expected to see them through. They had to bathe his young, battered body, and give him a shoulder, and light his pyre and watch him burn. His name was Sartaj.

His bhog was yesterday, but I did not go. The funeral itself had been all I could take. The whole place was full of the usual drama, and the old people – almost business-like about it – were reducing it to the usual ritualistic farce, saying just the craziest, most absurd things (I don’t know why it makes me so angry every time, but I feel outraged at how, after stripping life of all its dignity, they are not content, but must rape death too, disrobing it of it’s solemnity). And when I came face-to-face with his parents, there wasn’t a single thing I could think of to say or do.

This morning I woke up to hear that my Nana-Ji has passed away. We are now trying to book flights and somehow get to Bhopal, and my Nani, as soon as humanly possible. My mind is numb, and all I can think of is my poor mother, alone in Africa with her sorrow and remorse and guilt and regret. They weren’t speaking to each other – more out of habit than anything else. They were both equally proud and stubborn people, and though they would both keep checking on the other and passing messages obliquely through all of us, they would never talk directly. And now he’s gone, and the game can’t ever end.