The following is an excerpt from an unpublished novel by the author.
Prologue
Legend has it that Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, chose Ganesha
as his amanuensis to put down his epic in a written form. Ganesha agreed
but laid down the condition that Vyasa would not pause in the course of
his dictation. Vyasa, in turn, demanded that Ganesha grasp the meaning
of each stanza before writing it down. It is through this collaboration that
the text of the epic came to be.
Tradition also holds that the Mahabharata, when completed was orally
transmitted down the generations: from Vyasa through Vaisampayana to
Suta. It was apparently Suta's public recital of the epic that made it known
to a larger number of sages. If the epic was transmitted orally, then what
does one make of the legend of Ganesha as the amanuensis of the epic?
As an allegory, the transcription of the spoken word of Vyasa, the Wise
One, as the written word is mediated by Ganesha, the Lord of Categories.
It is through the active agency of categories of reason that the oral appears
as textual. It appears that speech stakes its claim over truth by its proximity
to truth whereas writing lacks that immediacy and can, at best, be
only a derivative representation of truth. While the categories of reason
seek continuity in their representation of truth, speech suspects writing
of non-comprehension of truth. Yet, paradoxically, it is through writing
that the text of the epic is created. The epic does not exist before the Lord
of Categories has put it down in written form which contains the edifice
of the typographical layout in terms of words, sentences and paragraphs,
the silences of the punctuation, the nuances of the diacritical marks and
the whispers of the marginal notes. Writing cannot be wished away; it
becomes a necessity. The Mahabharata is as much Ganesha's as Vyasa's.
1
Prahlad was lost to the world around him engrossed as he was in his
thoughts. `Is there a truth that is independent of the way we write about
it? Or talk about it? Would we have an idea of truth if there were no language?'
The only space available in Bus No. 84 every morning was for
such meditations. This morning was no different from any other in the
last few months. Prahlad had to squeeze himself in, contorting his lean
frame in a dozen different directions, before he could actually satisfy himself
that he inhabited the bus' interior. In Bombay buses, it was a thin line
that divided people who were in and who were out. The few lucky ones
who managed seats usually slept all the way to work. For Prahlad, the
time in the bus could hardly be wasted in sleep. He had to read and think
and create and he had to make time for it outside work. And home was
not the place for it because, in a strict sense, the 10 ft. X 8 ft. room that he
inhabited inside Johnson House could hardly be called a home.
Johnson House was a dilapidated structure which had clearly seen better
times. Mr. Johnson, who lived there with his niece, had to make ends
meet with the rent that he got from his three paying guests. The house
was not on the upmarket end of the locality: not on the sea-facing Cadell
Road side but on the Agar Bazar side. Even then the three rents fetched
Mr. Johnson quite a bit. But after one's hunger was taken care of a man
needed something to quench his thirst with. Mr. Johnson took good care
of that need of his, consequently paying very little attention to anything
else. Prahlad did not mind that; in fact, he liked the fact that Mr. Johnson
left him alone. He did not even mind the fact that his room was so small.
What made him uneasy in Johnson House was a deep sense of defeat and
gloom that seemed to permeate it.
Prahlad had discovered this to be true of all houses he had visited
when he had gone around in search of paying guest accommodation. The
Kantharias of Kemp's Corner would remain vivid in his memory even
though his visit to their house had lasted hardly ten minutes. He would
not forget the dirty cup they had served him tea in. tea made with a
bag dipped in lukewarm water. The two Kantharia daughters, about
five and three years old, looked frail and unhealthy. The son cried incessantly
through those ten minutes craving for his mother's breast. The poor
woman, mother of the three, looked exhausted even at that early hour and
went through the motions of showing Prahlad his room in a remarkably
listless manner. The room was, in fact, much cleaner than the rest of the
house. Yet Prahlad came out of the Kantharia home gasping for fresh air.
Even Rakesh Damecha could see that it had not worked.
Prahlad had approached Damecha when his attempts at finding accommodation
through newspaper advertisements had failed. Damecha
was representative of a significant slice of Bombay in the eighties: streetsmart,
capable of delivering but often promising more than what he could
deliver. He fancied that he was gauging his customer by showing him flats
like that of the Kantharias. He assured Prahlad that he now knew what
Prahlad was looking for and when he called up the next morning with a
new offer, Prahlad was surprised. This was a room on Colaba Causeway:
an independent room with an attached shower and toilet and even a seaview.
Prahlad couldn't believe his luck. He was too excited to wait for
Damecha so he took a break from work as soon as he could and set off on
his own to see the room. The owner was a tall Pathan who owned a shop
in the same building. The room, he told Prahlad, was on the fifth floor and
the lift in the building never worked. It turned out that the Pathan did not
have the key to the room but he agreed to show Prahlad the neighbouring
room which was identical. The room was small with only enough place
for a bed and a shelf. The toilet was not exactly `independent' but had
to be shared by the three paying-guests who lived on the fifth floor. This
room had a tiny window opening on to Colaba Causeway, so there was no
sea-view. But the Pathan assured him that the other room was similar but
opened out on the sea-facing side. Prahlad felt that the rent was very reasonable, especially for Colaba Causeway. He paid the Pathan a month's rent in advance and planned to move in later that day.
When he climbed up the narrow staircase with the Pathan that evening,
Prahlad had his first doubts about the place. By the time they were on the
second landing, more doubts crept into his mind not a little due to the sight
of a woman on the landing wearing gaudy lipstick and a vulgar smile on
her lips. The room was similar to what Prahlad had seen earlier in the
day. It was bare except for a bed and a shelf. But the sea-view was something
Prahlad was not prepared for. Here it was: the view of this tip of
south Bombay in all its glory. The red dome of the magnificent Taj Mahal
Hotel was on the left corner of this picture and over the roofs of the other
buildings was a spectacular view of the sea. But the room provided such
a dramatic view because it had no wall on the sea-facing side! It was as if
the room had started growing out into space and suddenly decided to stop
growing. Prahlad could barely manage to find the words to ask the Pathan
about the wall. The Pathan launched into a dry, technical discussion about
the repair work being carried out in the building. It was only when he realised
that someone could be so perturbed by a room with only three walls
as to decline renting it, that he tried to convince Prahlad. He argued that
the bed and the shelf were, at least, five feet away from the edge so Prahlad
did not have to worry about the repair work. He conceded that it would
be somewhat difficult to live there when the monsoons arrived but he was
confident that the repairs in the building would be completed much before that. Even in his perturbed state, Prahlad could not help noticing the
Pathan's positivistic penchant refusing to be dragged into metaphysical
discussions about non-existent objects like the wall. He kept talking about
the repair work and refused to mention the non-existent wall even once
which was remarkable for someone who had probably never heard of the
Vienna Circle.
A captivating drama ensued and if a proper system for sound amplification and image magnification had been set in place, it would have been possible to have an audience sitting along the sea-front near the Gateway to watch the performance. Damecha arrived on the stage very soon and tried to handle the situation. Finally, it was agreed that Prahlad would not be obliged to rent the place for a month. The Pathan agreed to a week's rent and Prahlad would live there for a week. In the meantime, Damecha would find Prahlad another place to move into.
That week Prahlad experienced high-rise living as he had never done
before. It was a surreal sense of being suspended in space which one never
experiences when one is protected by a wall. When it was dark, fears of
going over the edge terrorized Prahlad and when the room was flooded
with light he felt totally helpless because of the manner in which he was
exposed to the world. He would return to his room late at night and crawl
into bed without as much as switching the lights on. In the morning, he
would be up early and out before 7 a.m. One night, he was woken up
from deep slumber by some noise from the floor below. When he was
fully awake, the night was silent again. He sat on his bed and looked
at the city that was spread out in front of him. How composed the city
looked at that time of the night! It was probably the only time Bombay
had to sit back and look at herself. If, like in so many other cities, there
were a river running through Bombay she would probably have, following
Heraclitus and the Mahayana Buddhists, used the river as a metaphor
for time. Bombay had only the sea. The picture of time she had was Nietzschean:
chaotic, Dionysian and eternally recurrent like the waves of
the sea which kept lashing her. The sea of time brought with it festivities
and mournings, arrivals and departures, births and deaths, successes
and failures and Bombay was there in all of it . celebrating, bemoaning,
crying, singing, humming, howling or silently accepting . and she was at
it all day and all night. But it was this time between 3:55 a.m. and 4:10 a.m. that she had to herself when she could look back at the experiences
of the day from a different perspective . not from the perspective of the
actress, the director, the producer or the critic or even of the viewer but
from that of one who sees these experiences as fleeting, transient images
on the screen. But she had the luxury of that point of view for just fifteen
minutes. Just fifteen minutes before the city started moving again: someone
pushed a hand-cart, another started the engine of a car and Bombay
prepared herself for another long day.
The week was drawing to an end and Damecha had not done anything
to find Prahlad a new place. On the last morning of the week, Prahlad had
tried desperately to get in touch with Damecha but he was not successful.
When he finally got through to him, it was well past noon. Prahlad
was furious with Damecha's casual attitude but Damecha was a Bombay
broker: cool and unruffled. He assured Prahlad that he would find him
something by the evening. That night Prahlad slept in his small room in
Johnson House.
Prahlad's mornings, like those of Bombay's millions, were characterised
by a sameness. The bus ride to Fountain, the brisk walk from Fountain to
Kala Ghoda, the detour down Ropewalk lane to Madras Cafe and even
the wada sambar-sada dosa-coffee breakfast that would add up to Rs. 2.60/-
were all essential and invariable elements of his morning. He was the
cafe's first customer most often, early enough that the waiters would still
be setting the tables in place and mopping them. The kitchen would be at
it busiest and would fill the entire cafe with the aromas generated by its
activity. The owner would be concentrating on performing his worship of
the photograph of Lakshmi behind his cash desk and then of the cash box.
Having pleased the goddess and the cash box, he would pick up a glass
of freshly-made coffee and throw it out of the restaurant onto Ropewalk
Lane as a sacrificial offering to nature. Having thus established the equation
of his enterprise with the forces of the cosmos, he would return to the
mundane with a smile on his face.
Often, at that early hour, the only other customer in the restaurant was
Ashok Bhende, the well-known poet. Prahlad would watch Bhende eat his sada dosa, slicing the dosa carefully, balancing it on the fork and dousing
it with sambar. Prahlad noticed how Bhende's stick-like hands jutted out
awkwardly as he ate. After watching Bhende over many days, Prahlad
knew every detail of the way he ate. He once wrote down a description of
Bhende eating his dosa, mocking the poet's style when he wrote his piece.
He knew Bhende's work well enough for him to parody it. In truth, he admired
Bhende's poetry and secretly wished that Bhende would acknowledge
his presence in the cafe. He had met Bhende, had been introduced to
him and Bhende had on a few occasions used Prahlad's office to work in.
But Bhende had not acknowledged Prahlad's existence either in his office
or in the restaurant.
Over breakfast, Prahlad would go over the newspaper. By the time he
had made it to his coffee, he would be staring intently at the crossword.
He would not leave the cafe till he had worked out at least a few clues but
he would try to remember them all so that even later in the day a part of
his mind would be working on some of them. Prahlad's passion for crosswords
and his love for theoretical physics were not unrelated. To Prahlad,
problem-solving in theoretical physics appeared to be much like solving a
cryptic crossword. As in solving a crossword, quite a few of these problems
can be tackled by applying known techniques though some require
ingenuity. Also, as in a crossword, a solution to a clue does not make
sense if it does not fit in with existing solutions to other clues: one has to
get the acrosses and the downs to all fit in. There seems to be another remarkable similarity between the to. This is the belief that the complete
solution exists. In a sense, the characters are already inscribed in the grid
with an invisible ink. The process of solving the crossword is aimed at
making these visible. However, physics is like a whole (possibly infinite?)
series of interconnected crosswords and the clues could make the physicist
transit from one grid to another larger grid. A profound difference is
in the way that physics addresses the issue of the existence of the `crossword
compiler'. By and large, physics is agnostic about the question of the
compiler's existence. The existence of the clues, it argues, in no way guarantees
the existence of the compiler. At times, this agnosticism borders on an atheism and, interestingly, this happens when physics is dazzled by the
brilliance of its own success. It is like being so inspired by the success at
cracking a few truly difficult crossword clues to claim that the solutions
imply, or at least suggest, that there is no compiler.
From Madras Cafe it was hardly a minute's walk to the place Prahlad
worked in . Omega Phototypesetters. He had started work at Omega a
few months earlier. It was a fortuitous co-incidence that Omega had been
set up just when Prahlad, fresh out of college, was looking for a job. He
wasn't formally trained to work in a typesetting unit, but most people
working in the printing industry weren't. Prahlad, in fact, had an advantage
over his colleagues because he was a graduate in science with physics
as his subject of specialisation. How this could help him in typesetting
was not clear but he liked others at work to believe it did. His colleagues
were also impressed with Prahlad because he could speak with authority
about typography and impress even the art directors of advertising agencies
which, certainly by the city's standards, was a mark of intellectual
prowess.
The secret of Prahlad's knowledge of printing and typography lay
elsewhere. His grandfather, his father, his uncle and several cousins were
all printers. Prahlad's associations with the world of printing were as complex
as they were ancient. The first time he visited a press was roughly
twenty years ago. His mother had gone looking for his father at his press
with Prahlad in her womb and a worried look on her face. Prahlad's sister,
Prabha, had come back home from school with tears running down
her cheeks and a note from the principal. Fr. Diaz was not pleased that
Prabha's parents had not sent in the examination fees even a week after
the last date for payment. `Please make sure that the payment is made at
the school office by noon tomorrow', he had written, saying that Prabha
would otherwise not be able to appear for her exams. This was Prabha's final year at school and Kamala did not want anything to come in the way
of her daughter's education. She had herself not been able to complete
school . another minor casualty of the Second World War. But there was
no money at home and Krishnan hadn't come back home for three days.
He was very busy with the printing of a bank's annual report or so he told
her. Kamala tried to call him a few times from the telephone at the grocer's
shop down the road but did not find him in the office. Giridharji, the
grocer, did not make any attempt to hide his displeasure when she turned
up at his shop for the fourth time asking to make a call. That was when
Kamala decided to go to the press looking for Krishnan.
The press was a long way off in Mahalakshmi and the bus ride not exactly
pleasant. By the time she reached the press, she was exhausted. As
she entered, she could feel Prahlad stirring inside her. She was in the final stages of her pregnancy and the baby was communicating with her all
the time: turning around and kicking about inside her. And, now again,
as she stepped into the press she could feel Prahlad moving inside her .
twisting, turning and dancing to the rhythmic beat of the Heidelberg machines.
Meheru, who worked in Krishnan's press as a telephone operator,
came rushing when she saw Kamala. She had not met Kamala in ages
and was thrilled to see her so obviously pregnant. In her joy at meeting
Kamala, she did not notice the anxiety on Kamala's face. Kamala wanted
to waste no time and was keen to meet Krishnan right away. When she
was told that Krishnan was not in office, she simply collapsed into a chair
that stood behind her. Meheru's shrill voice receded into a distance and so
did the sound of the Heidelbergs. A hundred confusing thoughts rushed
through Kamala's mind. What if she does not meet Krishnan in time?
Is there anything at home she could pawn? The regularity with which
her jewellery had made it to the pawnbroker's made her wonder whether
the jewellery she had got as dowry at the time of her marriage was for
Krishnan or for Chelliah, the pawnbroker. Her gold chain, the last ornament
which she had set aside for Prabha, had been pawned last month
and she had only managed to save the pendant of Tirupati from being
pawned. For those caught in this trap, redemption is a distant dream:
there is no real hope of redeeming the objects they pawn nor their own
lives. Kamala's mind was in a whirl; she tried to calm herself down. But
just then, the baby's desire for self-hood overwhelmed the moment. He
demanded that he be delivered into the world then and there, little realizing
that his enthusiasm was misplaced because he would eventually seek
deliverance from this very world. But, not having experienced the world,
the baby desired it single-mindedly. There was no confusion in his mind:
he was pushing with all his might to leave the dark, solipsistic space of his
mother's womb and inhabit the world of light and beings.
Meheru's voice got shriller and she was in a panic. The men gathered
around and, as men do on such occasions, stood around helplessly.
One of them (after all, his wife had delivered seven children) volunteered
a helpful suggestion, `Let's call a doctor'. Savitribai, who worked in the
binding section, pushed him aside and took charge of the proceedings.
Her experience told her that the baby was coming any moment and it was
time for action and not for idle suggestions. She sent for Rukmini, bidding
her to get a pan of warm water and napkins. For Rukmini, who had
spent twenty years or more cleaning, sweeping and mopping the press,
this was the work of a moment. Behind the guillotine in the binding section
was the only empty space in the press: empty except for the reams of
paper that were stored there. The men were finally made to feel useful.
The reams were moved out in no time. Sheets of paper were laid out on
the floor. Savitribai and Rukmini helped Kamala onto the floor. A ream
of paper was tucked beneath her neck for support. Sweat mingled with
tears and flowed freely over the ream as Kamala supported her head on
it. A linotype machine, a Heidelberg printing machine and the guillotine
shielded the west, east and south-east respectively. The northern borders
were taken care of by a wall and Meheru moved her corpulent self to defend
the south. In this sacred space and at the auspicious hour of 6:35 pm,
Thursday, 25th January 1962 was born to Krishnan and Kamala, a male
child weighing all of 6.8 lbs.
Though it was not appreciated by anyone present at that time, Prahlad's
birth in the printing press was a symbol of an ideational synthesis of sexual
and textual reproduction. The seeds for such a synthesis were sown
exactly ten years before Prahlad's birth, when Alfred Hershey and Martha
Chase traced the magic of heredity to the DNA molecule. When, two
years later, Francis Crick and James Watson unravelled the structure of
the DNA molecule the dramatic similarity between a printed book and
life became apparent: the assembly of the four nitrogenous bases along
the DNA molecule represented by various combinations of the alphabets
A, G, C, T (typesetting), the replication of the DNA (page printing) and
the synthesizing of the DNA in the new cellular organism (binding). This
new understanding of life and heredity was to be celebrated later in the
year of Prahlad's birth when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and
Crick but in Prahlad's birth this new knowledge was already celebrated,
albeit in a small and unwitting manner.
The produce of a printing press inevitably makes it to a bookshop and
Prahlad's life bore no exception to this rule. Except that this journey took
him twenty years. It was inside Thacker's bookshop that Omega Phototypesetters was located. Thacker's was a comfortable, old-fashioned bookshop and was one of the important landmarks in Kala Ghoda. One part of the mezzanine floor of the bookshop had been used as a dumping ground for old, unwanted files and papers. This was where Omega was now,
with an office on one side of a long corridor and the work-area on the
other. Visitors and clients would meet Prahlad in the office with their layouts
and text while he patiently made them understand the impossibility
of their demands which centred around delivery schedules. He would be
less patient if he had to argue with a customer about the aesthetics of page design: he had trained himself reading old books on typography from his
grandfather's library and these books demanded a rigorous adherence
to principles in design. When it came to discussing rates, Prahlad would
let his boss, Nadkarni, take over. Nadkarni had made his fortune in the
packaging industry and was beginning to make inroads into the printing
industry. He had to spend the better part of his time setting up the printing
press (co-incidentally in Mahalakshmi) and at his packaging firm. He
would come down to Kala Ghoda only late in the evening to take stock of
the day's accomplishments. He considered himself fortunate that he had
a technically competent person like Prahlad taking care of his typesetting
business by the day.
Prahlad liked to spend time in the work area which was partitioned
into three spaces: a small ante-room, a machine room and a dark-room.
The dark room opened into a corridor through a back door and a visitor
who saw it had asked, `Is it an entrance to the outside?'. `No, it's an
exit', Prahlad had said exasperatedly. Prahlad had not forgotten the excitement
of the early weeks when he experimented with the machine: creating
pages with complex typesetting formats as exercises, printing these pages
on photo-sensitive paper and then developing the paper in the dark room.
He could feel his blood surging when he saw the patterns of typeset material
appear faintly at first and then getting bolder as he gently rubbed
the paper with his rubber-gloved hands. In the dim red light of the dark
room, it was fascinating to see the creations of master designers like Hermann
Zapf and Eric Gill appearing magically on, what was to begin with,
a blank sheet of paper. Prahlad spent hours in the intimate company of
typefaces: the Bembo and the Garamond being amongst his favourites because
their elegance, in his subjective appreciation, found no equal. Eric
Gill's Perpetua with its synthesis of neo-classical and modern sensibilities
was another of Prahlad's favourite. Zapf's masterly twin creations, Aldus
and Palatino, he genuinely admired and Baskerville's italics were, in
Prahlad's opinion, the creation of genius.
This morning Prahlad was in the dark room when he was told by
Chetan, his colleague, that there was a Mr. Borges waiting for him in
the office. Borges was the publicity director of a pharmaceutical company
and he had come in with an art director of a small advertising firm.
`We are bringing out a supplement about our company in Thursday's papers.
We need some urgent typesetting work done', said Borges. `It's one
of those I-want-it-yesterday jobs', thought Prahlad to himself. `There is
quite a lot of material to be typeset,' said Borges, `but do you think you
will be able to give it to me early tomorrow?' He had come to Omega
on a friend's recommendation and he was not impressed to see that the
work here was handled by a twenty-year old. Prahlad liked these challenges.
`You can even come tonight if you like', he said in a somewhat conceited
tone. It was plain text with no fancy formatting so Prahlad knew it
wouldn't take much time. He got the two data-entry operators to work on
Borges' job right away and felt content that everything was under control.
That sense of control lasted only a moment for when he came out of the
machine-room he could see pandemonium in the book-shop below. Realizing
something was wrong, he rushed to Melissa in the book-shop to find
out what happened. `There's a fire in the auditorium upstairs', Melissa's
voice was quaking. Prahlad ran back to the machine-room. `Quick, we
have to switch off the machines', he shouted. The auditorium which was
on the top floor of the building was not used much. Prahlad realised it
would be empty but he had no idea how big the fire was. Was it descending
to the lower floors?
An hour later, they still did not have an answer. Nadkarni had rushed
to Kala Ghoda and they were now standing on the road outside the building,
seeing the fire rage wildly engulfing the top floor. The fire engines
had arrived but they had not managed to control the fire yet. Nadkarni
was shaken. A drunk, who slept on the pavement opposite Omega, was
amused with all the goings-on. People had invaded the privacy of his
residence—they were all standing where he slept every night—but he
did not mind. This morning's entertainment was worth it all—paisa vasool.
With everyone getting more worried about the fire descending to the
lower floors, the drunk also decided that it was time to speculate about
this issue. `In another half an hour, it will come down to the third floor',
he said little realizing that he was saying this to a man who owned the
typesetting unit on the first floor. `Go away! You filthy drunk', shouted
Nadkarni. And for good measure he added, `Bastard!'. Prahlad walked
up to Nadkarni in an effort to comfort him. Nadkarni tried to calm himself
but his voice was trembling `I have not insured the machines. Damn!
The insurance agent didn't come when I called him and I did not find the
time later'.
It took two more hours to completely douse the fire much before it
could reach the lower floors. Prahlad had stood there with Nadkarni
and fifty others watching the fire. When the fire and the excitement was
doused, Prahlad felt his throat completely parched. He had watched a fire
for two hours but, funnily enough, it was the dry sensation in his throat
that brought back memories of another fire which he lit a few months earlier.
He had experienced a similar sensation in his throat when he stood
next to his mother's pyre. Kamala had died three months ago, hardly a
couple of months after Prahlad had joined Omega. The immediate cause
of death was a massive heart attack. But she had been dying a slow death
for years. By the time of her death at fifty-three, there was not much Kamala
looked forward to. Years of grinding uncertainty, poverty and humiliation
had left her battered. If she willed life to a small extent, it was to
see her children settle down to an existence which was not as wretched as
her own.
Prabha had called Prahlad that evening. `Amma is in hospital', she
said. It was the time of the evening when most people were leaving work
to go back home. Making his way through the mindless traffic of the city,
he reached Sion hospital only at around 8:00 p.m. All through the journey,
he was full of remorse at not having spent time with her on Sunday when
he had gone home to see her. She had asked him to stay longer saying she
had not talked to him in a long time. She wanted to spend the afternoon
talking to him. She was not happy that Prahlad had given up his education.
She had seen how passionate he was about physics and mathematics
and she dreamt that he would study and get a Ph.D. in physics some day.
She realised, of course, that Prahlad had taken up the typesetting job because
of the circumstances that the family was in. He was living on his
own because he did not get along with his father but he was contributing
out of his salary to the family. Kamala knew that Prahlad had no option
but to work but she wanted him to not give up on the possibility of doing
physics either. She wanted him to dare to dream no matter how brutally
life was bringing him back to reality. Kamala wanted to continue talking
about all this but she did not plead with Prahlad neither did she pressurize
him to stay. Prahlad just wanted to get out of home before Krishnan arrived:
he had no desire to meet his father. `Why was it more important for
me not to meet him than to spend time with her?', Prahlad chided himself.
Prabha was waiting for him outside the Intensive Care Unit. She looked
exhausted. Prahlad suggested she go back home and come after dinner.
Prabha agreed unwillingly and got ready to leave. Prahlad went to Kamala's
bed and stood watching her frail body stretched across the white
sheet. After what seemed an eternity she opened her eyes and asked
for a drink of water. `Is the movie over?' she asked. Prahlad looked at
her puzzled, at first, and then came the clarity that always accompanies
helplessness. He could feel the tears flowing down his cheeks as she collapsed
back into the bed and slumped. The form disappeared and what
remained was only the whiteness of the sheet. It was as though the prismatic
colours of the experience of the physical had merged into that one
whiteness. When he looked again, even the sheet had disappeared: there
was nothing. In those few moments, Prahlad experienced not only the
death of his mother but death itself. Death as void. Death as nothingness.
Those were the only few moments that Prahlad had to himself. The
next twelve hours were a blur. Family and friends took over. The funeral
was scheduled for the morning. There were documents to be signed and
hospital staff to be bribed before the body (`No, that's no body. That's my
mother!') could be put in the morgue. Back at home, the night seemed
to stand still. Prahlad would have gone back to Johnson House but his
uncle insisted that that would not be the right thing to do. A sleepless
night gave way to a dreary, grey morning. The priest, a small man with a
high-pitched voice, came in with two of his assistants to start the funeral
ceremony. There were rituals to be completed at home before going to
the morgue. The next few hours were a confusion of fire and smoke, rice
and sesame seeds, the chanting of the mantras and the cacophony of the
relatives. As the pyre was lit and the flames leapt up high, Prahlad broke
down and cried. He could no longer hear anything around him and he felt
a sensation of thirst in his throat which he had never experienced before.
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Copyright © K. Sridhar, 2007
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