Passage

It must have been when I was about fourteen or fifteen, home in Calcutta during one of the vacations from boarding school in Dehra Dun. One night, when I too was sleeping in my parents' bedroom, my father, Appa, awoke around midnight, and made his way, in the darkness, out of the room and into the small passage outside.

The passage was of about the width of the bedroom door. There were the doors to the 'dry’ bathroom on the left side, with the light switches for both the passage and the bathroom being on the narrow strip of wall between the bedroom and bathroom door frames. The rest of the house lay beyond another set of doors at the far end of the passage, a few feet ahead. On the right, again behind doors was the other bedroom, usually used by me but now empty as I was sleeping on the spare cot in my parents' bedroom. Thus a box-like passage space, with doors on all the four sides leading into different rooms. Each of these sets of doors was made up of two half doors. The doors from the two bedrooms and the bathroom opening into the rooms, the door sto the other part of the house opening into the passage.

All these doors had the long vertical latch, the kind with an aluminium rod that was fitted onto one of the doors and which upon locking had a section of about an inch inserted into another socket piece fitted onto the door frame above. The latches were fitted onto the right hand side half door, at whose inner vertical edge was the groove, cut so as to place the notch of this door ahead of that on the left hand side door when latched. As one stood just outside the bedroom doorway, only the door at the far end, leading to the rest of the house, had a latch, the latches on the remaining three sets of doors being only on the side of the rooms they opened into.

I was in bed and more or less awake when Appa had woken up. Even though his getting up had not missed my attention, I wasn't paying attention to what he was doing; after all this was nothing unusual. But it quickly became evident that something odd was going on. Given the configuration of things in the passage, when one went out of the bedroom there was a known sequence of actions, and movements, with attendant sounds, of doors being opened and shut, creaks from noisy door hinges, footsteps, filtering in of light, the click of a light switch being turned on, the metallic sound of a door being latched or unlatched, and variations on these depending upon what one was going to do, and allowing for the time of the day, so that late at night perhaps the bathroom door would not be shut, or maybe only loosely shut, without being latched. But none of this seemed to be happening. He had gone out of the room, and there was only silence.

Just as my curiosity was aroused, I heard him call out from somewhere outside the room, "Come here Babloo." Not very loud, but clear and matter-of-fact, the way he would call someone for, say, bringing him the newspaper or something like that. I jumped out of bed and as I entered the passage through the now open doorway, there was Appa's voice again, "I am disoriented. I can't figure out where I am. Come and catch me."

I knew about ’disorientation' alright. I had first heard that word from Appa himself a few years ago, when he was talking about the experiment of taking cockroaches into space on one of the rocket expeditions. I was also familiar with the occasional feeling of ’disorientation' while lying in bed in the dark, and quite savoured this actually, trying to make the feeling last even when the mind had started getting its bearings.

It was really dark everywhere. But from the sound of his voice I had got an idea of where he was. I moved quickly, stealthily, so as not to bump into anything. I found him in a few seconds. I can't now recall where exactly he was, or where he had been wanting to go, but that was that and we soon went back to bed.

I remember this as clearly as if it had just happened.

I live with my wife, Rajashi, and three-year old son, Rituraj, on the upper floor of our family house, which is virtually identical in terms of plan to the ground floor unit where I grew up, and where my parents continued to live after I, and then my two sisters, moved on. Then my mother got a job in Bombay and went there, leaving my father here, by which time my wife and I had returned to the house after having lived in rented premises for some years. We moved into the first floor, where my grandparents had lived and which had become vacant after my grandmother passed away.

Virtually every night nowadays, I have to do some walking in the dark at home. Say, from my study at the far end of the house to my bedroom, with the lights being turned off behind me and the front portion, where Rajashi and Rituraj would be sleeping, being in darkness. Recently, during one such occasion, I remembered the incident involving my father, and suddenly recalled what he had said : "I am disoriented ..."

Appa is now no more. For much of the time since I finished school, ours had been an intense, turbulent, mostly violent relationship, in the course of which each had effectively fed and brought out the worst in the other. This was, tragically, an unavoidable reality. I had also eventually become aware that the force of the violence I hurled at him came from seeing mirrored in him what I perceived as the most unpleasant facets of myself. Seeing them in him heightened my awareness of such ugliness, and these were so hateful that I would lose control over myself. Because this was being seen in another person, one immediately fell into seeking to smash, annihilate that person, as if by so doing, one's own flaws would be vanquished. Violence was in fact born of self-loathing, rage at one's hypocrisy and impotence in the face of one's weaknesses; an act of flaying out to avenge the recognition that the self was utterly depraved. This puncture of one's sense of self is capable of unleashing one's most malevolent, destructive instincts. Such violence is an act of desperation in the absence of any other route to self-worth, since one had implicitly foreclosed the other option, of looking into oneself and dissolving there the seed of violence.

After his going, Appa has helped me travel further along that path of self-recognition. I can see that sorrow, grief, love, all involve the complete effacement of one's self.

I am aware of the absence and vacuum of my primary source of affirmation, the immediate sounding board, a role he had continued to play even through the peaks of our hostility. Both of us were also aware, finally, of how deeply we were attached to one another. The father, to his gifted son, who had in their modest little world given him several occasions to be proud of him; the son, to his father, whom he had looked up to, and viewed as the champion of champions in every possible arena, and in whose very violence was embedded the pain at the other's fall from grace, his having been only human.

Ultimately, a peace of sorts had fortunately been achieved. However, our specific circumstances were such that under normal conditions, peace or no peace, awareness or no awareness, if we lived together we could not have avoided inflicting violence upon one another. So fate seems to have intervened and engineered circumstances so that very shortly after the last peace pact I had to be away from home, out of town, for a fortnight. When I returned, I reached home around mid-day and got down from the taxi to find a small crowd of friends and neighbours gathered in front of the house. My father had been asleep in his bedroom, and the entrance door was latched from within. He was not responding to the knocks and subsequent banging on the door and shouting by the cleaning lady who had come a couple of hours ago.

So I had my brother-in-law break into the ground floor with a shove to the entrance door, and we entered to find my father lying in his bed, dead, cold. It is a year now since he's gone.

Now that he is dead, he has liberated himself, me and our relationship from the clutch of violence. Now, I only remember him fondly, so that the very thought or recollection of him is sufficient to suffuse me with sorrow and humility. His departure has left in me a deep wound that contains his memory, which is like an invisible saturated sponge of compassion and love, an endlessly refillable store and instrument of collection, of everything in the environment that resonates with and is chemically allied to such feelings. Some of what I earlier perceived as frail and pathetic in my father, I can now see as having been signs of his remarkable sentience, and these now endear him to me. Through his death my father has given me the gift of his memory, which is something very precious for me.

When I recalled recently, while groping in the dark, that my father had become disoriented and I had helped him find his way, for the first time I reflected on this incident. And I was thankful that I had been of some use to my father, and that I had now realised this.