Passing the Torch..

It was a pretty ordinary February afternoon when I (then a seven year old brat), stepped out to fetch the milk supply for the day - a chore I enjoyed because it gave me an opportunity to feel grownup enough to cross the big main road at the end of our lane and perform a real monetary transaction at the milk booth on the other side.

 By habit, I latched the door of our quarter from outside and stepped out, cheerfully attempting to whistle a tune from a Hindi song and failing to do so because of my missing front teeth. My mother, then 8 months expecting , cautioned me from the other side of the door , asking me to be mindful of the traffic. Baroda was set to get into its scheduled curfew in an hour ( thanks to an ongoing communal unrest that used to be a regular feature in Gujarat those days) and office-goers would be in a hurry to return home before it started .

I never managed to get the milk that afternoon. A speeding motorist bumped me off and fled, leaving me lying unconscious in a pool of blood on the sidewalk with a broken jaw . Later, I overheard the doctors say something about my angle of fall, explaining that had I fallen a few degrees to my left, I would have suffered a fatal head injury and died on the spot. By the time people rushed towards the site of the accident and picked me up, the city was in curfew and traffic had come to a standstill. I was in urgent need of serious medical attention and the roads were already burning in a mindless display of human intolerance towards other fellow humans . The ambulance arrived, but the driver made it clear that he won't get out of the vehicle to help carry me into any hospital. He mentioned something about his responsibilities and a waiting family back home. My father agreed.

I still have hazy visuals etched in my memory about the rest of the evening as the ambulance went from hospital to hospital, none of which agreed to admit a half-dead child without a police report. I kept slipping in and out of consciousness on my father's lap , and yet, he curiously never gave in to despair. He knew he had to save his child, and he somehow managed to do so . The next morning, I finally concluded I would manage to survive, just before surrendering to a long medicine- induced sleep and a ton of painkillers in my bloodstream. My dad, my first hero, had lived up to his image. He brought me back from death.

When I woke up, my father announced that I now had a younger brother in the hospital. The entire stress had been too much for my mother to cope and she had gone into premature labor the night before. Miraculously - my dad managed that front as well.

The next day, they carried me to visit the new member. Despite resembling an Egyptian mummy of sorts with all my facial bandages, I remember soaking in the sight of a new life that had added itself to our family, grateful that I was still alive to play with the little one. That was the first time I had thoughts in my mind that tried to co-relate births, lives and deaths in this cycle of life. I was not eight years old as yet.          

Last year, the second fortnight of August was one of the most difficult periods of my life. A rain washed Calcutta, an out of turn break from work, an unprofessional, blood sucking , indifferent healthcare fraternity and a man in an ICU. My father, who had never popped a paracetamol in his life, who had never believed in any lifestyle ailments , and who had no diabetes, no fluctuating BP issues and a HB count of 19 , was suddenly struggling for his life. A callous and insensitively commercialized medical system only added to my woes as I helplessly watched him deteriorate and die in a prominent city hospital, eleven days after the doctor had performed a surgery that was uncalled for, just because my father was a corporate patient whose billing was sanctioned at actuals .

I tried, I even cried, yet I failed. . I lost him on the morning of the 1st of September.

 A year later, as I land back into the same city, I am haunted by the memories of the previous year - the same muddy roads, the same torrential rain, the same sea of people who always seem to be busy about some mysterious objective , always loud, sloppy and arumentative for some inexplicable reason , always headed someplace while the city itself has unfailingly inched backwards with every passing year.

 Muttering my grievances in my mind, I pick my bag from the conveyor, get myself a ramshackle cab and head for my brother's apartment. It is well past midnight and it is too late to go to my mother’s place at the other end of the city and wake her up.

 Then, at 2 in the morning, between swigs of aged Bourbon with my brother , I have the first glimpse of a new entrant to the clan - a robust and carefree 6 month old, sleeping without a worry in the world, in a room whose air conditioning would be too cold for me to handle. The same baby brother of mine who was lying in a crib, that memorable afternoon so many years back, is a responsible father today. His son looks at me and gives me the brightest smile I have seen in a long long time.

 I have reached a bend of life where I have started making peace with my limitations and where I can, at best, sit and admire the miracles of the creator and ignore his shortcomings in terms of attending to my unanswered prayers. Life is moving on at a furious pace. My yesterdays now outnumber my tomorrows by a huge margin . I have accepted that I might not see most of my dreams come true. Nor would I succeed in leaving a legacy that I fantasized as a dreamy youngster. But I have stopped brooding over such things. I am handing over those impossible dreams to the next of kin - A teenage girl who just started college, an infant who stares at me from his bed and gives me a knowing smile.

 Suddenly I feel ancient . My age is passing . But I feel strangely okay about it. I look at the silent picture on the mantelpiece. My father seems to smile at me - a smile that says, ' See, I always told you so , didn't I !? Pity you were too impatient to listen to me! "

The handsome young man is my nephew, Aniran Banerjee. And the dude in the background is Dad !

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( From my blog archives, 31st August '15)