10 Jan 2025 / Anecdotal analects

Auntie’s Bequest; And A Lesson

Children can be cruel in a petulant, ignorant, innocent sort of way. Grown-ups can be cruel in an ignorant, prejudiced, and refractory sort of way. Cruelty yields consistent dividend ---- sadness and regret. Reaped as and when one acquires sight and truly sees. Sees for oneself, that is. The gift of sight, alas, develops very late. Acquired at long last, at great expense, in most cases it may never develop. To see fully and clearly is the greatest thing a human being ever or never does. There’s a caveat to this though – cultivating the gift of sight is never-ending exercise. Its practice over time may trigger madness. That’s how acute it is. It is so because the gift of sight lies hidden deep in the mind’s eye. And in listening. Listening with a bent ear. Where does auntie come into this? She contextualizes it. Just as several other individuals who crossed my path do. Only I was bereft of sight. Its germination is now, in the evening of my life. Proof of another terribly expensive wager the gift of sight extracts -- Time. Today, my long estranged, recently re-united, very loved cousin --- my brother --- asked for a scan of the cancelled copy of a leaf from my cheque book. He has made a similar request to my two sisters. My aunt {my father’s elder sister} died in 2020. She has left us a gift of money. Modest by monetary standards, priceless in gesture, inexpressible in import. You see, the point is, we avoided her all her life. In a squabbling, quarrelling home as my parents bickered, my father’s side of the family were coarse brutes, oppressors and an interfering lot. My mother’s side were Janus faced, plotters ----- narratives transduced by me. I cannot speak for my sisters, because quite like Rashomon Gate we each see, interpret, remember and believe differently. Different projections of the same situation. There’s an obvious sort of ‘yes’ to different experiences, as much as an equally obvious sort of ‘yes’ to individuated takes on everything. The mind is a strange processor; similar ingredients, same recipe, markedly different servings and taste. Nothing new in this. Naturally close to my mother, closer than most sons are {and therefore a source of acute disappointment, more than she ever expressed} I bruised her just as much as I bruised my father and almost every other person. It was not by design, I don’t consider myself an evil man. But then, no man is clever enough to know all the evil he does. I cut myself off (egged on by Ma and an innate sense of inferiority which arose from being a poor performer in everything, lacking self-confidence and that great affliction I was born with, one which has stayed with me since I was born ---- an innate, intrinsic sense of being the outsider ---- and being a loner). I cut myself off voluntarily from my paternal family. I too found them insensitive and hard, a more material bunch of people without the intellectual vigor, refinements and urbanity of my mother’s relatives, a certain missing gentility. It must have hurt the man who was my father.

This aunt was a childless widow. Her husband had died in a road accident within a month of her marriage. She was a teacher of English language and lived in a middle-class New Delhi flat. Fond of dressing, travel and parties, she and her writer friend often travelled together and the small flat brimmed with souvenirs. Auntie was generous and affectionate on the exceedingly few occasions we met. A gaggle of disjointed, most commonplace and pedestrian memories, each disconnected from the other in time, space, reference and context: my first pair of sneakers…the storyline of a just released 1973 movie which hinged on the theme of war (among vacillating ambitions, I had wanted to join the army)…a traditional Indian snack, mogra (I don’t know why on earth the mogra reminds me of her. I don’t even like it)…mixed sweetmeats and fruits she would bring on her scarce visits to our house…her sarees…a love for plants which is like a great unnamed, unrecognized commonwealth of my family. An exceedingly frail link which united my parents in aesthetics. And yes, auntie’s few and far between dinners I ate much later in life as I mended bridges with my father. I remember, equally, my avoidance and brusque responses to her occasional phone call…my declarations of feigned and false intent and relief at emergent immateriality in manifestation of my false promises and my irritability. Time passes and I learnt that she had developed Parkinson’s Disease. It is degenerative and it is progressive. It did her in. One day, I went to see her after decades, in what was now a completely dilapidated flat with flaking paint and a nurse in residence. She was aware of my presence and recognized me. Took my name. I held her hand, stroked her head. Her body-frame was too fragile and emaciated to hug as she lay on her back….I remember seeing her cracked heels and thinking of moisturizer…she had travelled too far into herself to bother with it all…my presence mattered, I know. She took my name and thanked me for coming. I felt terrible and hated myself with an intensity I have hated myself with only a few times. Obviously, it served no purpose. Yellow leaves, cankers, and grief serve no purpose. They resonate, reflect and if you care to think, remind. That’s about it.

Auntie died a few weeks after this. No one informed me of the cremation…I had become irrelevant. Auntie, however, never forgot me. Never harboured anything except love in her heart for me…she’d often told me I reminded her of my father, that I and my cousin brother who is now my most cherished link to extinct blood-ties of a once large family, were her favourites. That we should stay connected…I was brusque about this. Everything is relative. Everything is inconsequential and everything is a big zero of sorted sequences. Yet, everything has immediacy, everything has agency. Everything is seductive in appeal and ambition. In the moment, not after…

Auntie’s will has been probated at long last. Her gift, I take as a blessing. I take it as the last hug we could not give each other. I will emulate her in giving more than I receive. In not being small-minded and not expecting anything, but loving still. I will use her gift to serve Nature. That’s what my anchorage is. That’s where everything lies. And that’s what is implacable. Her money is many things; to me it is. This too lies beneath the Rashomon Gate. We make our own truths. We really do. All else is washed away by detergents of time and space. And truth, after all, is relative. To each, their own.