deferred live

Two days back I was in the washroom and somehow felt obliged to read all the fine prints that accompany all the toiletries. I thought someone took the trouble to jot down the “how to use”, “ingredients”, etcetera and it seemed only fair that I should read them once. I mean read them properly, starting from the first sentence and crawling my way down. It did seem like crawling, you know how scarce is the real estate of back-space. There was another reason for doing this, apart from the benign writer-reader relationship. Immediately after the bath, I was to sit with the priest for the ceremony which would put my father’s soul to eternal peace. I was not feeling too enthusiastic about the prospect of muttering incomprehensible Sanskrit for two hours, under the public gaze. And so I was trying to procrastinate. And what better way to do that than to read the fine print at the back of the hand-wash soap!

Purified water, Sodium Laureth Sulphate, Cocoamidopropyl Betaine, Cocamide DEA, Glycerin, Sodium Chloride, Glycol Stearate, Fragrance, Triclosan, PVP/Dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate copolymer, Citric Acid, Methyl-chloroisothiazolinone and Methylisothiazolinone, Melaleuca Alternifolia (Tea Tree) Leaf Oil.

It should not take much to visualize the predicament I led myself into. This is the same person who till the other day pronounced Thames with an extra t and a thud! Thhaemes. The same person who has his tongue knotted in twists and turns trying to pronounce the new wave of cinema, bout de souffle ! Who takes Louis Malle literally and says Mal-le. So what began as a mean to procrastinate, started taking the shape of an embarrassment. And midway through Cocoamidopropyl Betaine I remembered you.

And I am certain I blushed a little, since you were constantly at it, without really being audible. So I tried more and hence I fumbled more. And I was smiling and I looked up to meet your eyes and say, “Ok then! Let me hear You try!”. And at that point I met my eyes and remembered the priest, the caterer, the huge garlands and everything else. I stopped procrastinating.

12^th June came and went away, not much unlike any other day. It is now one year without my father. And five months without you. Every now and then I think of you both and an inexplicable sadness and sense of guilt come upon me. The guilt is more associated with the memories of my father and the sadness is of you. At night, at around 3, or in mid noon at around 3; if I happen to remember my father I inevitably feel a sense of guilt. Because if it is at night then I am awake and if it is the mid noon then I am prostrate on the floor of my room with cigarettes and ash tray unhidden beside me. So the guilt. It would not have been so if he was alive.

I am missing you terribly now. Don’t know how else to write it, or if at all I should write it. But you don’t believe in “moner jor” et all [ and rightly so, at times it does reek of the amateur ]. The greatest irony of my life will be this. Just when I started to feel the redundancy of the words, I need them the most. The other day I was thinking about the day when I wrote 26 scenarios for you, right from the letter A to the last Z, one idea per greetings card!

For all it is worth, I love you.

post scriptum, 23^rd June 2010

I was using “a sense of guilt”. I don’t think I chose the right expression. It is not guilt, when I think of my father. It is like a sense of letting him down, from his perspective. I am sure he deserved better, specially so when his son had all the promise and flair of a successful citizen. This is no sarcasm that I am employing, I am being my objective best.

Thinking in the shoes of my father, his expectations were really very reasonable and justified. I have never seen a more honest man than him. He was tossed and thrown from posting to posting by the Indian Railways, because he refused to sway to the tune of corruption. Once when I was a kid of 4 years, he was even beaten up and held at a gun point. But never ever did I see him being bitter about the organization, he was so proud to be a part of it. I am citing this part of him to elucidate his mind, his thought process. His expectations were not typical Bengali.

A man as he was, he still could not let go the ego of ownership, as far as his son is concerned. I am sure he never had the remotest inkling about this thing, about this inherent “ego of ownership”. And I must also accept that he tried his best to fight this ego, without really knowing that he is at war with himself. He did great when I did not want to walk the corporate path. But even he was unable to accept the imminent end of his progeny.

I could sense the time of final confrontation. It was on the cards. For he had started to mention the “marriage” thing, and the frequency of these mentions was increasing. His frustration was also starting to show, he could rationalize all my subversive ways and even could bring himself to support me; but the death of his blood line was too much, even for him. Here the ego refused to go away.

It will be wise to review the dictionary meaning of the word ego, to ward off any trivialization.

Ego is that one of the three parts of a person’s psychic apparatus that mediates consciously between the drives of the id and the realities of the external physical and social environment, by integrating perceptions of the external world and organizing the reactions to it. Id is that part of a person’s psyche which is the unconscious source of impulses seeking gratification or pleasure; the impulses are usually modified by the ego.

So I do not suffer from a sense of guilt when I think about my father. I just become sad realizing that I was not the one who resonated and “cooperated” with his ego. This is the price of being an individual. And I think I am also sad because I could not tell him my mind. Maybe he deserved to know more than my cursory retreat every time he broached the topic of marriage. I lacked the courage for my conviction and was always happy to push the “revealing” to another day. So it is not guilt, it is the feeling that I could not tell the truth to the man whom I admired most in my life.

We were talking about mental age.

How very commonly we hear it remarked, that such and such thoughts are beyond the compass of words! I do not believe that any thought, properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather, that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of method.

For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it :: as I have before observed, the thought is logicalized by the effort at (written) expression.

There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language. I use the word fancies at random, and merely because I must use some word; but the idea commonly attached to the term is not even remotely applicable to the shadows of shadows in question. They seem to me rather psychal than intellectual. They arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at its epochs of most intense tranquillity–when the bodily and mental health are in perfection– and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I am aware of these “fancies” only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that this condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time–yet it is crowded with these “shadows of shadows;” and for absolute thought there is demanded time’s endurance. ^{[ Edgar Allan Poe, "Marginalia - Part V" ]}

I always loved the album “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson. But when I was reading the orginal Poe (whose snippets from above is uttered in Orson Welles deep resonating voice in the album) I was transfixed by a sense of incredulity. Who was this man Poe? It came to me that he is my mirror image. Only the mirror is the nth one in the progression of images produced by two parallel mirrors.

Hunter S. Thompson was speaking about the Hippies. In those lines above. He is the same person who is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism.

gon·zo | gnz

Perhaps Italian, simpleton (perhaps short for Borgonzone, Burgundian) or Spanish ganso, dullard, goose (of Germanic origin; see ghans- in Indo-European roots)The Free Dictionary

1971, Amer.Eng., in Hunter S. Thompson's phrase gonzo journalism, from It. gonzo "simpleton, blockhead." Thompson in 1972 said he got it from editor Bill Cardosa, and explained it as "some Boston word for weird, bizarre."Online Etymology Dictionary


The supposed etymology of the word gonzo is quite contradictory to its modern usage. Which makes me suspect that there is no etymology at all. Here is a word which is as it is. Gonzo.

All these urban history is very reassuring for me. The void of a “unique” is a terrible one. The novelty of that uniqueness soon can give way to the vacuity of uniqueness. And it does, more often than not. Not all abstract is good abstract. So it is really very assuring, this modern history. I always held to the belief that man can feel no emotion which has not been felt ever before. This can make the every succeeding moment mundane. What precludes this from happening is the fact that the “man” is a “new man”. So even if the emotions are not unique, the combination of that “old emotion” with this “new man” makes it a unique entity. And so I again drive to the edge and hold back. And so I again do not take the plunge. So I linger still.

I was thinking about a cuppa joe between Ayn Rand and Hunter S. Thompson. She the champion of Objectivity. He is the living practitioner of Subjectivity. She says, “2 + 2 = 4 is not an objective observation. In the base 10, 2 + 2 = 4 is the correct objective reporting”. He says, “2 + 2 indeed is not always equal to 4; sometimes it does fall short by a cent or two”. I kind of agree with Thompson. I believe in the subjective objectivity of this business [ in this journey ] of life.

Today is Friday the 19^th and my father is now gone for a week and some hours more. He is dead. I was told of the inevitable on Thursday, 11^th June 2009, the doctor called and summed up his existence in one single sentence. Your father is going to die, he said. And I waited for the moments yonder. Stretched from hour to hours, from evening to night to dawn to pre-noon and then I fell asleep. The telephone rang at some hours past noon. He was then really dead. The day was then 12^th June, Friday, 2:30 pm. I was not even wide awake. I still had the advantage of negation that is borne by extreme tiredness. I still waited, waited; oblivion was sought desperately. And the clock skipped minutes. The quasi slumber peeled off slowly. And I had to get up and pee.

The willful procrastination had ended. But it was not over yet. My mother still did not know. She still knew he was on “life support” and she still knew that she was going to “see” him.

The car reached the hospital at around 4:55 pm. I stood in queue, for I had to get the multiple “passes” that the hospital authorities issued to the relatives of the patient. Multiple passes, because this was an exception to the rule. The rule was to allow only two relatives. I even said, “shut the fuck up bitch and give me the passes now” to the girl at the other end of the glass barrier. My mother was the first one to go up. My father was at last dead to all and sundry.

That was a week and some hours back. The man who admitted me to a “English medium” school is no more. The man who got me out of IIT KGP is gone. He will never come back again to embarrass me with his direct talk. He is my father and always will be.

This magazine is for you.

I read and saw about euthanasia all the more in the last month. And now I am not so sure anymore. I knew him since I was about 3 years old. He was the man who did the impossible thing of getting me admitted to Don Bosco, Park Circus. A refugee from Bangladesh, who had no precedent in “English medium schools”. He never asked me about grades, never ever. He got mad at me for a countable number of times. 9 times. 11 or 13 times. And the reasons were all very unlike the reasons I used to see with other parents. He was so unlike the faceless people that I was surrounded by.