Remembering People and Places, Seen and Unseen -- A POST BY LADI DIDI

Its been seven weeks now, and less than 11 weeks since I last saw Uncle Kulwant, and it still feels unreal. This post is a bit of a recap, for a lot of things come to one’s mind, and get put on the back burner, because as Holly said, writing it all down takes the mickey out of you, and life does get in the way.

Holly mentioned in one of the earliest posts that he, and some cousins too would like to visit Muzaffarabad/ Naluchi. I do not know if that is possible even for those of us who hold non-Indian passports. The reason being that while Muzaffarabad/ Azad Kashmir may still be accessible, Naluchi is not, as it is the site for a very sensitive Pakistani military installation (would be too, if it was not as strategically located, it would not have been in the frontline of the attack that killed our families in the aftermath of the partition!). My parents and Jappi visited Pakistan 21 years ago, and while there was no question of Daddy ever visiting Naluchi, being a visibly turbaned sikh, his Chachaji (yes, he lives there, the convert brother of my Gyani grandfather!) offered to take Mummy to Naluchi so long as she wore a burqa, and so long as my parents got an extended visa! The latter did not happen, so neither did the former!!!

Anyway, I am digressing, getting back to Muzaffarabad, here are the following links:

http://www.muzaffarabadak.com/

http://www.pbase.com/hgharib/muzaffarabad

http://www.muzaffarabad.com/

All of the above lead to other links and it is easy to get lost in the beautiful scenery.

All the places ever mentioned by our parents and grandparents (Kotli, Bhattika, Mirpur, Chakothi, and Domel, where the Jhelum joined the Kishan Ganga, known now as

Neelum ) are all there, heartbreakingly beautiful, but there is just one shot of Naluchi, and not very clear either, somewhere in the third link above. I have saved it on my desktop, and if anyone finds better and more, do please let me know.

In the same post where Naluchi was mentioned, Holly was in doubt about Uncle’s age. Well, we all were, since our grandmas remembered the date, but not the year! Holly, I am sure Pappa remembers ! I remember we went a very circuitous route to find out Daddy’s date of birth from the desi one, but the year could never be determined in his lifetime, as Grandma insisted that Daddy was sawa saal da when the earthquake in Quetta happened, whereas his Basant Bua ( the very Basant Mami who rescued Uncle Kulwant from Pakistan!) insisted he was younger!! Well, Grandma was proved right (after all, Mother does know best) only two years ago! In the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami, I was doing a search on last century’s killer earthquakes, and the Quetta one came up as having taken place on 30^th May 1935. Daddy survived that; to be administered last rites exactly 58 years later, to the date!!!

Holly, thanks too, for distilling the essence of Kubler-Ross’ seminal work; while all of us may not have access to it, nor feel up to reading about loss and grief, having been through it, I am sure we all found echoes of our own experiences on some level or the other. For those who feel up to it, an equally engrossing work from a personal perspective with medical and psychological insight on illness and grief is Joan Didion’s award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking where she has recounted the year following the death of her husband, writer John Dunne, and described the process of loss and grief in a magnificiently detached manner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Magical_Thinking

This detachment is perhaps a necessary pre-requisite of going on. And yes, while we are all mourning Uncle for himself, there is no denying that the need to talk and touch others with our words is a result of trying to find a way to reconcile with other deaths in our families in the past. We have all lost loved ones, OK let us face it, most of us have lost a parent and lost them in their prime. I remember Sept 11 for an entirely different reason: it was 12^th September here, we being 14 hours ahead of USA, and I had left home as usual, dropping in at the service station to get the paper before I walked to work. Well, the papers were all sold out, and in this country, that happens only for a horserace in November, or when someone like Don Bradman dies! I got to work and it was chaos, no one was in the labs, everyone had collected in the auditorium and was watching replays of an America under attack! Obviously very little work got done that day, and I raced home to call my cousin in New York. I could only get through after two days, and while it was a relief to find that all was well with him, I could tell from his voice that he was holding something back, that there was something he was not telling me. And then, repeatedly, he asked me if I was well; that was when the penny dropped!!! Once again the families were at work to protect us and our happiness. We had not told Holly of Daddy’s death because he had only just got married. And now they were not telling me because here I was, having only learnt two weeks before of my long-awaited pregnancy. I did not need to be told that Grandpa was gone. What I was not prepared for was the next part of the news, that Gurcharan Uncle was gone too, gone in his sleep, he whom we all knew as Pilot Uncle, one more father gone before his time. My apologies, Baba and Bunny, you are both pilot uncles in your own time and your own right ( though I am sure not many kids address you that way!), but your Dad was The Original, and I say that also from a scientist’s perspective: a pilot is a study that tests the waters, breaks the ground, and in your father’s instance, first takes to the air!!

Which brings me to Pappa, who has worn the mantle for so many kids beside his own. I remember a time after Daddy’s death, when I was in Delhi and since all Masi’s kids addressed Pappa as Pappa, I got in the habit too, and happened to do just that while talking with Binny once. I immediately asked her if she minded that, and she replied that Pappa had by now become such a universal Pappa that none of his children minded who called him Pappa, for everyone was welcome to do that.

And now, while I am sure that Pappa’s generous umbrella ever expands beyond his own nephews and nieces to even accommodate distant relations like my siblings and me, the underlying losses must be a huge burden to carry. Even for someone like you, Pappa. Pappa, there is one simple reason why I have not spoken to you following Kulwant Uncle’s death: my voice can not reach you. And the disability is mine: this post, whatever its worth, is a very inadequate apology for all the words I can neither muster, nor give voice to, that they may offer you solace at this time.

I sign off with a slightly emended version of my eulogy. May be I am being pedantic; but I like to think that Uncle Kulwant would have insisted on the few corrections, meticulous person that he was:

To Uncle Kulwant

You had at least a dozen years

A full fourscore,

If not more.

Who took those years away?

Of all the battles that you fought

Was any more intense

Than the one you fought alone?

While we could only pray.

Your leaving makes more big the void

That happened all those years ago.

A blood-stained memory that one though

And here you softly slipped away.

It is almost as though you took care

To cause no pain to us who cared

And chose to join your brothers

In the most dignified of ways.

And while we learn to face the truth

That we shall see no more of you

That you are now beyond our ken

You surely know it well yourself

That you were, to your dying breath,

More than just an officer,

A Gentleman.