Waiting for the 24 roses

 

The only reason for my recrudescence, in the pages of this blog today, is to narrate the memoirs of a man, with whom I had chanced upon to meet early in my life. Weaving a story is not my forte and therefore I will stick to plain facts and will try to account the events properly. I will try not to form an opinion about this person myself, but will leave it to my readers to judge for themselves.


People say, relationships grow stronger with time...but our bond has grown firm along with the distance between us. Now, I feel as if I have reached the top of a hill from where I can see the past lie limpid before me. But as I try picking up events from there, time seems to slip out of the hand and I run back and forth in time, to catch a glimpse of his face in the afterglow of this past.

Delving into the depths of time, the first thing that I recall, is the myriads of bed-time stories he would tell me, putting me to sleep. Even today I can recollect some droll names from those yarns like 'Olin Brenda', 'Satish', 'Roshul' and 'Lalkankra'.

He used to love the moon - crescent, half, full, give him any shape. He didn't have a good camera, not even a mobile phone. He called it the "necessary evil"! I used to watch him, sometimes, make do with my mobile phone camera, capturing flowers - those in his garden and that of his neighbours', of the dawning sun, the moon, of streets, trees, ponds and practically everything under the sun. I knew that he was an average photographer, and his near and dear ones never appreciated the collages he would make out of these photos. But, then, it was definitely not a fad for him and there was no denying his passion for this art and for the rich and vibrant hues! He had joined Flickr and soon made friends out of hundreds of strangers. They gradually began to notice his uniqueness in creating collages, and the subtle touch in their captions. And voila! One day his pictures started 'exploring'. It is a term that the Flickrians use when a photo gets the highest appreciation in the site. Nothing could make him more happy but this appreciation. I sometimes visited his Flickr pages and noticed how his pictures were applauded by brilliant photographers, who themselves have captured some out-of-this-world photos with their expensive digital cameras. It was then that my heart swelled up in pride for him.

He was basically a man of ideas...he loved to dwell in them. By social standards, he would have been categorized as ordinary, but not by the standard of knowledge and 'creative' was the only word that would suffice for him for he always thought ahead of his time.

The two things which I saw him do most, during his lifetime, were read and write. Apart from writing blogs (he had five blogs to his credit, each of which was on a different subject), he loved reading juvenile story books, besides his usual ones. Even at 67, he was never old at heart. He was an adroit letter-writer too. Post-retirement he would go on scribing letters for each and everybody that came with a request. The biggest achievement, that came his way, was when he made a woman get her due share of insurance money by writing for her to the 'unwilling' insurance company.

He used to shower me with surprises every now and then...from small souvenirs to some of the expensive cell phones, when the earlier ones turned dead. The list cannot end without my mentioning the 'red roses' which he used to gift me on my birthdays, the same number of roses equal to my age each year.

Travelling with him was a real treat. Every time I went on a holiday with him, I was an eager concomitant, walking on the streets of a South-Indian city, whenever we visited the place and which was quite frequent. His favourite haunt was a roadside tea-stall, as he had grown a liking for the owner's son Raja. Once he captured a photo of this man and on his next visit, gifted it to him. Raja was so happy! His enthusiasm didn't stop short at that. He even took the photograph of a rickshaw puller called Lawrence with whom he had made an acquaintance a short while ago. But unfortunately, he was not available the next time we went there to gift him the photo. Later we came to know from another rickshaw wallah that this Lawrence had run away, on fearing that probably a policeman in camouflage was asking for his address. We had tired ourselves out that day laughing at this hilarious incident.

He always believed in making friends with the underdogs. His best friends were the van wallahs and the green grocers. There were so many incidents of his helping them out of the way, but that would be another story altogether. He found his contemporaries boring and could chat with the younger generation about any subject...from politics to spirituality, and from films to literature, over his favourite cup of tea any time of the day.

He had a particular liking for perfumes and good cigarettes. He believed that perfumes were made in heaven, though he never bought an expensive one for himself, neither perfumes nor costly cigarettes. I still remember him showing off a foreign-made perfume to everybody, which his son had brought him from abroad. That was his one and only luxury. He never liked shopping for himself but cherished everything his family bought for him.

In his roof-top garden he had a large collection of flowering plants. Though he didn't fancy gardening as a hobby, but he loved, no doubt, each of them as his own children. They loved their share of silent talks with him at dawn, everyday when he went up to water them. He told me how a particular pink rose at the corner of the garden had once greeted him!

However, at times, I couldn't say what turn his humour would take and we often had our share of scraps over the quelque chose. There were these tindery situations when I would think him to be corny and brash. You can well imagine what would happen when two completely different mind-sets collided. He always came around as the winner and I would find myself in one corner, crying and being vindictive. Much later, when I ponder over these heated dissertations, I feel somehow that he was sometimes right and I had failed to understand him then. He had only tried to make me understand how to accept things that may come along the way, and to face life as it is.

He had a queer fascination for trains. He sometimes joked that if he wasn't what he was, he would have been a 'Rajdhani Express' driver. Then he would try to impress upon me the majesty of being one and the adventures that one could have by being such a driver. One of his blogs, about which I had mentioned earlier, was completely devoted to a fictitious station called 'Sitarampur' and to the train 2115 UP which haulted at this station daily.

So long from what I have portrayed here, the readers must not think him to be a very sociable person. He mostly kept to himself, busy with his computer, and lived a kind of inner life which I think is probably a product of his introspection.

All the events subsumed here are a reminiscence of the time I spent with him and got to know him from close quarters. There are so many other bijou moments of his life that if I try to fill in all the minutiae here, it would surely make a novella out of it.

And then came a day, when he vanished from my sight, like a long dream which has given way to a harsh reality. He had always protected me from that reality, taking care to keep me far from the dealings with the outer world, covering me up in a cosy cocoon. The clock hasn't stopped counting the seconds since then, which eventually turned into minutes and finally into many hours, days and months...but I still see him through my mind's eye - a small branch of krishnachuda in hand, eagerly waiting to be photographed, and he smiling at me.

I have tried not to break anything since then, neither promises nor relationships because what once slips out of the hand, goes forever, never to return. And things never seem to be the same again.

He was many things to many people, but for me he was a friend, a philosopher and a guide...but most truly he was my father!

PS: I cannot conclude without acknowledging the inspiration behind my taking up the pen again, my mother.

The photograph of the krishnachuda blossoms above was taken by my father on May 4, 2009.