The day it will happen
Today is Friday the 19th and my father is now gone for a week and some hours more. He is dead. I was told of the inevitable on Thursday, 11th 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 12th 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.
Bosciana was the name of the magazine, published by the boys of Don Bosco, Park Circus. We were such proud kids, boys of DBPC! In the second edition of Bosciana, I wrote the article “Only a soldier”. I had earlier read the book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
