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______ASHAY CHITRE BHOPAL SERIES i

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ASHAY CHITRE: BHOPAL SERIES oil on canvas board; collection: Philip C. Engblom

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standstill.
Unfinished Requiem For A Lost Son
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THERE IS NO SHADOW
WHERE THE SHADOW DOES NOT FALL,
BUT EVEN WHERE THE SHADOW FALLS
THERE IS NOTHING.

---SHRI JNANDEV
ANUBHAVAMRUT (317)

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“I made my own mind the sole witness of truth and falsehood.”

TUKARAM

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I was never afraid of my own mind before September 2005. But just
after my 68th birthday I first felt the icy touch of a fear unknown to
me till then.

But that fear must have lurked for much longer and slowly crept
upon me since the sudden shock of my only son Ashay’s accidental
death at our home in Pune on November 29 when Viju and I were in
our apartment in the Villa Waldberta in Feldafing overlooking the
Starnberger See, or Lake Starnberg, in Bavaria, Germany.

I have always been proud of my mind’s resilience in crises, and its


now helpless vulnerability exposed by that trauma was a disturbing
revelation, but it did start a necessary breakdown of my ego.

Hindsight prompts me to think that the shattering wisdom following


a trauma should have come much earlier to help me become humble
in the face of the fragility I share with all human minds; and that
should have made me cry

However, the death of my son failed to make me howl, cry, or weep


to release me from the shock of sudden bereavement and an
inconsolable sorrow I was unable to give vent to. I held back; and I
don’t know how or why. I refused to face that blinding bereavement,

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postponing the pain that accompanies a deep cut, sealing up a mortal
wound.

A part of me was already dead, telling me that I had begun to die,


and I did not want to accept the fact.

We arrived in India from Germany two days after Ashay was


cremated in Pune where we headed straight from the Mumbai
international airport.

On that last leg of a long journey, Viju and I spoke to each other
laconically and avoided speaking about the deep hurt inflicted on us
by this thunderbolt of an event that burnt a hole in our hearts. For
each of us, the deep shock was extremely personal and its pain still
private and unsharable with each other.

Friends gathered around us and hugged us silently at Feldafing.The


closest to us among all of them was Henning Stegmuller and I had
phoned him first to break the terrible news we just received. Henning
and his wife Marie are our family in Germany. They also knew
Ashay personally.

Then I informed Gert Heidenreich and his wife Gisela with whom we
were to have dinner that evening. Gert and Gisela had recently lost
their younger son, Johannes, in a drowning accident. They, too, had
met Ashay at our home in Pune.

I phoned Lothar Lutze in Berlin and Sabine and Peter Erlenwein who

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lived in a nearby Bavarian village by another lake. Henning phoned
my publisher and friend Albert Volkmann and his wife Elke as well
as Heidrun Bruckner. Henning made a long distance call to our
friend Anne Feldhaus in Tempe, Arizona.

Most of these people knew Ashay personally (except Albert and


Elke) and our friend John David Morley, the British novelist living in
self-exile in Germany. Ashay had read all of David’s novels and
deeply felt their resonance. He had been urging me to write about
them though he could have done it himself and much better.

Losses are so personal they cannot be shared even with those closest
to you.

Though I could feel Viju’s loss of our only son, her being his mother
made it so unique that I was afraid of even imagining it in those
circumstances. We were both made extremely lonely by a personal
deprivation we could not talk to each other about. We needed to be
left alone.

For almost eighteen years before Ashay died, and since the trauma of
Bhopal that shattered his world, he became increasingly closer to
Viju, and he became increasingly distanced from me despite our
having lived together since his birth forty-two years earlier.

Unable to understand the depth of his despair and his psychic injury
that was difficult to heal, I just wanted him to take it in his stride, and
get on with his life. I urged him to be tough, prodded him to pick up
the pieces and start afresh. I thought he had survived the worst and

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should have considered himself lucky. It was horrible and heartless
advice. It meant to him that I was insensitive to his real suffering.

For the first time, as the news of his sudden death remained still
undigested, I was haunted by his whole life as I had perceived it from
up close, but still only peripherally, and I began to think of what it
must have meant to him who was at its wounded centre.

The pangs of guilt that engulfed me because of this also separated


Viju and me from each other, though both of us were completely and
separately devastated, we were cut off from each other at this hour of
reckoning.

On the night of December 3-4, 1984 the world’s worst-known


industrial disaster struck the city of Bhopal, in the state of Madhya
Pradesh in Central India.

The U.S. corporate giant Union Carbide’s plant located near the city’s
railway station was responsible for the death of thousands of people
that night because its toxic chemical tanks leaked the poisonous gas
methyl isocyanate into the city’s atmosphere.

Many thousand more of the survivors were blinded, maimed, and


crippled by the poison in a variety of ways. The effect of the toxic gas
was complex and irreversible.

That night, Ashay and his wife Rohini were in Bhopal and not very
far from the source of the emissions that lethally poisoned the city.
Ashay lost overnight sixty per cent of his lung function due to
cellular damage (as found later by a leading lung specialist in

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Mumbai) -----and it was irreversible. Rohini was six months pregnant
then and her health and the health of the child inside her needed to
be constantly monitored after their exposure to the deadly air she had
breathed.

Hearing the sound of the footsteps of hundreds of people running in


the streets and a strange cacophony of human moans and cries, they
opened their bedroom window. The air outside was still, but they
were hit by an invisible blast of something noxious. Their eyes started
streaming and they also had a violent bout of vomiting.

There was something terrible in the air and Ashay first thought of a
nuclear attack. But there was no wave of heat, no unnatural light, no
sign of blazing fire anywhere. They felt strangled. Their lungs were
racked by a spasm. They realized that the air had become
unbreathable. They were in a panic.

Ashay covered Rohini in a bed sheet and they ran out of the
bungalow where we lived, through streets strewn with corpses,
joining thousands of people running in panic as they did not know
what had hit them out of the blue.

Finally, they reached a friend’s house and they were later taken away
by another friend to another part of the city that seemed safer
because it was less obviously poisoned.

A couple of days later, they were put on a flight to Mumbai as they


desired to be treated by medical experts there, and looked after by
family and friends.

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I arrived from France hours before Ashay and Rohini reached
Mumbai. Viju was already in Mumbai. We waited for them anxiously
in Ajit’s flat. Ajit is my younger brother, he is a practising physician
specialized in haematology.

Ajit lived in the staff quarters of a public hospital in Parel, a highly


polluted industrial suburb of Mumbai. His physician colleagues and
friends were the first to examine Ashay, Rohini, and the child
growing inside her. More clinical investigations in some of the best
hospitals followed. We consulted the best available specialists.

Unfortunately, little was known about the toxic impact of methyl


isocyanate until Bhopal provided its several thousand victims to the
medical community as case studies. There were no established
clinical protocols to help analyse the effects and the side effects, short
term or long term, of methyl isocyanate.

Also, Union Carbide ( presumably supported by the Union and the


Madhya Pradesh governments) was quick to persuade the medical
community not to make any hasty statements about the prognosis of
the Bhopal syndrome, or any conclusive diagnosis. They were
probably also coaxed to stick to orthodox symptomatic treatment of
patients. After all the giant corporation faced a monstrous scandal
and the prospect of having to pay billions of dollar in damages to the
thousands of victims even after strenuous hard bargaining. Damage
control was their first priority.

We were plunged into anxiety the like of which we had not


experienced before. A nightmare began for the family ---- at the
centre of which were Ashay, Rohini, and their yet unborn child.

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The ironies of fate work at many levels.

On the very night Bhopal was cut off from the rest of the world, Viju
was in Mumbai waiting for me to return from France where I was
invited with my feature film Godam to participate in The Festival of
Three Continents at Nantes.

Godam was scripted, directed, and scored by me. Ashay was my


Chief Assistant in Direction. He was also my Director of
Cinematography, Govind Nihalani’s Operative Cameraman
(otherwise, he was Govind’s lighting cameraman after being his
apprentice for some time).

As my assistant, Ashay’s contribution to post-production work was


immense. At the editing table, Ashay and I were together with my
Editor, Sanjeev Naik. At the dubbing, re-recording, and mixing stages
again Ashay was by my side. Viju and Rohini were also members of
my Godam team.

On the morning of December 5, 1984 Bhopal was the headlines and


the lead story in every world newspaper and news channel on
television and radio. But it was cut off from the rest of the world. I
was traumatized. I had no news of Ashay and Rohini. I called Viju in
Mumbai. She didn’t have any news either.

Meanwhile, I learnt unofficially that Godam had been chosen by


festival jury for the Jury’s Special Award. The awards were to be
officially announced at a ceremonial function in the evening and
given away only when the winners’ names would be revealed. The
lack of any news about Ashay and Rohini, and the confirmed

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magnitude of the disaster in Bhopal, drained me of all morale. I was
reluctant to attend the ceremony even though the festival grapevine
gave me the flattering hint that I and my film were among the
winners.

It was that doyen among Indian film celebrities, Raj Kapoor, who
persuaded me to attend the ceremony and receive honours as a
representative of our country. We were in the same hotel during the
week-long festival, and met for a round of drinks as my recent
Parisian friend, Vijay Singh recorded an interview with the popular
idol, his life, and the movies he made. Raj Kapoor and his charming
wife Krishna were delightful company. Eventually, I yielded to his
powers of persuasion and attending the festival awards ceremony,
received the Jury's Special Award for Direction.

Ashay was 23 when he became one of the victims of the greatest


industrial disaster the world has known in terms of the size and scale
of the human tragedy it created and successfully covered up. He
lived his life of a victim for another 19 years---a period that should
have been his prime. He didn’t receive a copper penny in
compensation though money alone cannot compensate for a
permanently damaged future and a robbed sense of life.

It was a trauma that estranged him from the world, distanced him
from a wholesome view of life, destroyed his optimism, and created a
chasm between his family and him.

He did not stop fighting to regain his sense of life even in his
darkened world. We all misunderstood his black humour of a

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survivor and his effort to connect with the world, the crying needs of
his fine sensibility and versatile talent, and the fulfillment only self-
expression brings to human life.

Only other victims and survivors of large-scale disasters could have


understood Ashay’s suffering, both physical and mental, and the
handicaps it had inflicted. He had to live in the bleak world of a
victim who could not adequately communicate his suffering to his
parents, his wife, and their little child, his close friends, his former
colleagues, and members of his large extended family, or his and his
family’s wide social circle. It was a solitary confinement for life as he
often bitterly remarked to us.

But he tried hard till the strange and abrupt end of his life, alone in a
flat whose windows and doors were shut, unaware of a burning coir
mattress in the living room till the whole flat was full of smoke. In the
event, he was found lying at the door of his bedroom, there were
signs that he had tried to stamp out the fire from the already half-
burnt coir mattress with his slippers. Inhaling carbon monoxide
creates panic and confusion in seconds, followed by unconsciousness
and death in minutes.

The door to our flat had to be broken open when Ashay failed to
respond to mobile phone calls and SMS messages from a woman
friend living a floor below, and to the insistent doorbell rung by the
lady who did housework for us and her husband who ran errands for
Ashay. He was taken in an ambulance to a hospital where he was
found dead on arrival.

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When we arrived in Mumbai from Zurich on seats procured for us
with great difficulty by Henning, Sanjay Jadhav received us as we
came out of the aircraft.

Sanjay or Sanju was Ashay’s ‘big brother’ and closest friend. He is a


senior police officer in Mumbai. Viju and I regard him as we would
an elder son, though Ashay was our only child, because Sanjay doted
on Ashay, and Ashay would reach for him in every personal crisis for
sympathy, comfort, understanding, and support.

Before he escorted us through immigration and customs in minutes,


Sanjay said to me,
“Dada, hats off to Yohul! He has faced the situation and handled it
with maturity, self control, and efficiency far beyond his years.”

It was Yohul, then only eighteen, Ashay’s son and our grandson that
Sanjay was talking about.
Yohul was in Mumbai visiting his cousins after their (and his)
grandmother’s death just a few days earlier.

Our neighbour Kayuumi did not have our telephone number in


Germany, and she called Yohul in Mumbai about accidental fire in
our home in Pune and about Ashay having been taken to hospital.

She did not tell him he was already dead.

Yohul phoned us first in Feldafing to break the news as he had


received it.

“There was a fire in our house. Ashay has been taken to hospital.

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what should I do?”

“Take a taxi to Pune. Go straight to the hospital. Remember, you are


Ashay’s closest relative there. Handle the situation till we come.
We’re taking the first flight we get. We’re informing friends and
relatives in Pune and Mumbai to help you. But you are in charge.”

There was the inevitable edge of shock, fear, and panic in his voice as
Viju and I heard it on the phone. Yohul was barely eighteen then and
I wondered if he could take the shock.

Sanjay Jadhav, my brothers and sisters and some close friends


followed Yohul to Pune after we phoned them from Germany.

What they saw was a very different Yohul than the one they knew
before. He was a model of composure and efficiency. He did not
reveal his feelings to them. He was rational in his thinking, precise in
his actions, and laconic in his verbal responses.

The child in him was left far behind and the adolescent in him
seemed to be turning into an adult all of a sudden to wear a mask of
maturity and armour of responsibility.

As Ashay’s next of kin, he had to claim his father’s body and sign
papers for the autopsy.

He had to claim the body from the morgue after the autopsy and take
it for cremation.

He had to collect the keys to our flat from the police who had sealed

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the entry to it after the accidental death.

He had to clean the flat for our relatives from Mumbai who would
stay with him till we reached home from Germany.

It was a Saturday morning when Ashay died. He was cremated on


the same day.

Viju and I arrived in Pune on Monday morning.

Yohul had not slept a wink for 48 hours and had nothing to eat. His
friends told us that all he had was black coffee at regular intervals.

When Viju hugged him as soon as we arrived home, he said to her,


“Now that you are back, order a pizza for me. I’m very hungry, and I
want to go to sleep now!”

Viju and I did not see Ashay in his final repose.

The terrible news numbed us when we received it in Germany.

My younger brother Ajit is a physician and haematologist. He runs a


blood bank in Mumbai. He is very close to both of us and he had a
special relationship with Ashay ever since we returned from Ethiopia
in 1963 and Ashay then was barely two.

Ajit was with Yohul in Pune and when I phoned him about the
situation, my primary concern was Yohul. Should they postpone
Ashay’s cremation till we arrived on Monday or Tuesday, Ajit asked

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me. His opinion was to cremate the body as early as possible rather
than keep it the morgue or the cold room for a couple of days.

I asked Viju. She agreed that the body should not be kept waiting for
us.

There was no question of religious rites and those strange ceremonies


associated with them.

My two brothers---Ajit and Ashutosh, and Mrunal and Bharati, my


two sisters---were in Pune with Yohul. He would not be left alone till
our arrival.

A mournful atmosphere prevailed in my house throughout

December. I lost track of the chronology of events. Instead of coming

back to me in serial sequences creating a coherent ‘scene’, they came

to me in a non-linear mode as random ‘shots’ or images, and I tried to

assemble them in my mind’s eye as I sat slouched in a chair in the

living room interrupted every now and then by a visitor or a group of

visitors coming in to offer us their condolences. It was like jump-

cutting a film on an editing table or playing with the lines of a poem

in one’s mind before committing it to paper---activities familiar to

me.

Viju kept herself busy offering them tea and biscuits, or lemon juice.

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My youngest sister Rashmi came from Vishakhapatanam to stay with

us. Along with my other two sisters---Mrunal and Bharati---she

looked after the many guests who came and went. I felt distanced

from it all as though I was a stranger.

Ashay, as I now think in retrospect, must have been in prolonged

unipolar depression ever after Rohini and he were divorced, much

against his wishes.

The breaking of bonds, one after another, was a feature of his life ever

since he came from Mumbai to Pune after his traumatic escape from

Bhopal.

Like a bird with damaged wings, he fluttered painfully into activity

every now and then, finding that he no longer could fly with his

useless wings. He kept trying, bravely, while Rohini mothered Yohul

whom we all watched with a mixture of anxiety and delight. Every

small symptom of illness evoked in us the fear of toxic effects of his

exposure to methyl isocyanate in Bhopal as a six month old foetus in

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his mother’s womb.

All three of them were being treated by Dr. Prakash Ghatge, an

allopathic general practitioner who preferred to give alternative,

homeopathic treatment to his patients for whom allopathy offered no

hope. Rohini’s skin rashes, Yohul’s recurrent infant hepatitis and

allergies, and Ashay’s frequent neuralgic pain responded to his

treatment.

Of the three, Ashay was the most affected by the Bhopal syndrome.

His lung damage was irreversible. Doctors suspected that there was a

chemical damage to his spine as for the first few weeks in Mumbai

and in Pune, one of his legs seemed to have been paralysed. He

would experience sudden loss of muscle tone while walking. His

eyesight too had become weaker after Bhopal and he had an incipient

cataract in both his eyes that, fortunately, did not develop fully.

Both Rohini and Ashay tried to resurrect their lives after Bhopal.

For a while, the growing Yohul occupied their attention. Ashay gave

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him haircuts and home and he and Rohini gave him oil massages,

shampooed his hair, and gave him a bath.

They tried their hand at making soft toys and made lovely ones, each

with an individual character, and gave them personal names as well.

They tried to sell them as they thought this would bring them some

income and they could build a business of their own. It could have

worked in America or Europe. But in India such handcrafted objects

do not fetch the prices they deserve.

Rohini and Yohul were much less affected by the effects of Bhopal.

They responded to Dr. Ghatge’s treatment and led a normal life

thereafter. Dr. Ghatge confided in me that Ashay’s case was difficult

as it was the full ‘Bhopal syndrome’ with many idiopathic

peculiarities. But in two years, he helped Ashay to stand on his feet

and think of reorganizing his life within the limitations his lung

damage imposed on him forever.

During those two years, Ashay developed a passion for bird

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watching thanks to our Swedish-American friend, Philip Engblom,

who was in Pune then teaching and supervising a group of American

undergraduates spending a whole semester studying Marathi and

various aspects of Maharashtrian and Indian culture and society.

Ashay still found it difficult to walk more than short distances

without gasping for breath, and he could not carry much weight on

his shoulders. Yet he managed to carry his still camera and

accessories, a pair of binoculars, birdwatching books, sketchbooks

and pencils, water bottle and sandwiches early in the morning to the

river, the lake, and the marsh lands just outside the city where a

variety of seasonal and local birds came to feed and to breed. Both

Philip and Ashay were advanced amateur bird watchers. They

exchanged notes and enjoyed each other’s company. Both were quiet

introverts which I suppose is an advantage in birdwatching. Both

shared literary interests, too.

The other interest Ashay developed during this period was cooking.

He was a connoisseur of good food of a wide variety and a bon

vivante at heart. Now he started collecting cookbooks and recipes and

trying out cooking techniques as well as adding his own creative

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flourishes to dishes ranging from the mundane to the exotic. He

practised cooking as a fine art where he could express himself and

loved to invite and feed friends at meals designed by him. In a short

time, he developed awesome skills and many of our friends urged

him to start his own restaurant with himself as its master chef. But

always diffident in handling business, Ashay brushed those

suggestions with a laugh --- or a sigh.

Any illness in an adult is eventually a social shame in a civilization

that reduces everything to economics. A person who suffers from an

irreversible damage to her or his body, or a chronic illness, or a

lowered immunity, or a terminal disease develops a guilt towards her

or his family, community, and society. Such a person is slowly

transformed into a non-person through innumerable signals of

rejection even from family and friends. A victim’s growing isolation

from other human beings cannot be measured by those who have not

experienced such victimization themselves.

To rub salt into a victim’s still bleeding wound, we show her or him

compassion---a sublimated form of pity for the defeated and the

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dying. In doing so, we humiliate her or him by exhibiting our

superiority in terms of health and its social rewards and economic

advantages.

As I think of Ashay now, I am filled with a dreadful sense of remorse

that I cannot rid myself of. We tried to hold him responsible for what

happened to him.

It was a strange logic : as though by it we could blame the victims of

Hiroshima for not overcoming the effects of the Atom Bomb or the

victims of Bhopal for not getting over the toxicity of methyl

isocyanate.

We lived together in a ‘Hindu’ extended family, though nuclearized

to some extent, and my American and European friends with their

obsession with individual freedom or pride in personal

independence (often at the cost of love, sensitivity, and the happiness

that comes from sharing a life with others) were often appalled by

Ashay’s apparent inability to make a living for himself and his

immediate family consisting of his wife and his son. Some of them

even privately chided him for depending on his parents. This upset

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him. The support he needed from us was more moral and emotional

than just material. He was ill. He was under treatment for it.

Why couldn’t they see the obvious?

Even I, his father, couldn’t see the obvious.

Ashay was condemned to a kind of solitary confinement, though all

of us were around him. He spent more and more time reading,

writing, and sketching or painting. Or he listened to music.

His appearance and his body language were altered during that night

in Bhopal.

The change was slow but continuous.

When we had a party or a celebration, he had to summon all courage

to be part of it. His fun-loving nature surfaced again at times, but

only briefly.

Sometimes Viju and I wondered if he was nursing a death wish.

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Before the Bhopal catastrophe, he was not bitter and cynical. He was

gregarious; and when among friends, he was the life of the party.

Now, when he had a drink, he would gulp it down neat and quick---

not to enjoy it but to disappear into an alcoholic fog. He could not

handle large quantities of alcohol. With a couple of drinks, his speech

became slurred, his eyes glassy or unfocussed, and his temper

malevolent. He preferred to drink till he passed out quickly. Alcohol

became his drug of choice, and his smoking increased as well.

Three days after our arrival from Germany, I went to the Yerwada

Crematorium to collect Ashay’s ashes. They were wrapped in paper,

with some identification tag, and kept in a clay pot. My hands

trembled as I held the pot. This was all that Ashay’s body was

reduced to, and it was meant to be disposed.

I brought the pot home. Then in two cars---a hired 9-seater Sumo cab

and Anne Feldhaus’s spacious Toyota Qualis driven by Ramdas

Atkar--- the cortege headed for Dehu village, the poet-saint

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Tukaram’s native place, where we decided to consign the contents of

the pot to the Indrayani River. There is no place more sacred to me

than my spiritual ancestor’s favourite river.

The hour-and-a-half long drive to Dehu was Ashay’s last journey as

material substance. Viju and I, my sisters and one of my brothers, and

some close friends drove to Dehu. I sat, distraught, with the pot held

in my lap and pressed tight in my palms. I did not have the courage

of looking at Viju because I was afraid of looking into her eyes.

Sadanand More---my friend and a direct descendent of Tukaram---

joined us in Dehu. We went to the Doha (deep end) of the Indrayani

River where Tukaram was forced to sink the manuscripts of all his

poetry. I thought of this spot as the beginning and the end of all

poetry, and its ultimate rise from its material moorings. This is where

I would like my own remains to be scattered.

With Sadanand’s help, we reached the small paved river ghat

surrounded by trees and shrubbery. I now felt the little clay pot

heavy in my hands and full of a static charge. More asked me to hand

it over to a man wearing only a loincloth. The man raised the pot,

uttered a short invocation, and let it be carried over and into the

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river’s slow flow. It dipped, sank, and disappeared. It was Ashay’s

solemn disappearance into a serenity he had not known in the last

several years of his anguished existence.

On the way back after immersing Ashay's ashes in the river, I

remembered how I first touched him as an infant. Even then my

hands did tremble. He was a beautiful child with chubby cheeks and

large eyes and a nose sticking out. Five days after he was born, I

clicked my first pictures of him. Later, as he grew, I learnt to hold

him in a way comfortable to him. I enjoyed carrying with him and

engaging his attention and making him smile or laugh. As soon as he

was a toddler, Viju and I started talking him on long walks over the

sloping pavements of the wide streets of Addis Ababa near our

house. In autumn and in winter, Addis Ababa can be quite close as it

is several thousand feet above sea level, among the mountains really.

We bought for Ashay a snow white woollen suit for his outings and

at the age of about eighteen months, he could run fast enough to

make me gasp as I tried to keep pace with him. He was a happy baby,

not afraid of strangers, and seldom cried. He cried only when he was

physically hurt, or when he was disappointed or angry. Buying

things for him was a new found pleasure for Viju and me. We bought

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him toys and clothes and took him wherever we went---even to

parties.

After we returned to India, we lived in a room with an improvised

kitchenette and a shared bathroom as paying guests with a Sindhi

family in Mahim, a suburb of western Mumbai. I had a job with an

American pharmaceutical company then and Ashay was about three.

After I returned from work, I showered and then played with Ashay

for about an hour or so. The two of us used to wrestle and the body

play and contact made him laugh with excitement. On Sundays, I

took him to movies to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons, Laurel and

Hardy favourites, and so on. These routines and rituals made us feel

close in body and spirit.

Accommodation in Mumbai has always been extremely difficult and

expensive, and having lived in independent bungalows in Ethiopia,

we did not want to compromise on our privacy. We had to move all

over the city as sub-tenants in somebody else's larger flat or house on

short-term lease though this cost me nearly half of my monthly

wages or freelance earnings. But we saw to it that our child did not

feel cramped for space.

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Memories of Ashay as a child came back to me with surprising clarity

after years just after I immersed his ashes in the river. Strangely,

however, my sadness did not choke me with emotion. I was still

numbed; and I was afraid of sharing my feelings with Viju lest we

should both break down.

Back in Pune, mourners visited us in a steady stream, offered us

silent condolences and consoling words. Some of them even broke

down and, ironic as it may seem, Viju and I had to comfort them.

It became a weary routine.

Then we had the finale of the formal mourning. I invited a party of

Varkari bhajan singers and informed our relatives and friends to bid

adieu to Ashay’s physical presence in their midst in a symbolic way.

We hoped that they would now leave us alone to face our

bereavement and grief.

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Was my deep plunge into depression and my despairing attempts to

overcome it through a sort of extrovert exuberance rooted in an

irrecoverable loss that wrenched away part of my own identity?

It is said that unfinished mourning often leads to agonizing

melancholy or deep depression. I needed to be left alone and allowed

to feel my loss. Instead, I was surrounded by people who would

share it with me.

Bipolar depression is an involuntary and unstoppable swinging

between the poles of a melancholic surrender to non-being and its

opposite---a pathological euphoria that tries helplessly to recover

one’s sense of being. It is a conflict between nivrutti (absolute

withdrawal into the void) and pravrutti (the desire to be omnipresent)

---as the poet-philosopher Jnandev would have put it. It is spiritual

malaise expressed as a psychosomatic condition; but it has a

biological basis like any illness.

Though ten days after Ashay’s death the formal visits of mourners

31
thinned, they were by no means over yet.

Just five days after his death on November 29 came the night of

December 3-4----the 19th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster.

Every year, Ashay waited with silent dread for that date on which his

life was shattered. He did not live to see the that day in 2003, but Viju

and I remembered it with a fresh stab in the heart.

Ashay’s illness continued for eighteen years after the Bhopal disaster,

though with Dr. Ghatge’s homeopathic treatment many of his more

obvious symptoms disappeared and his quality of life improved. It

took him two years after starting treatment to go out and look for

work that suited his physical handicap, and his friends and well-

wishers helped.

The well-known film maker, Shyam Benegal, asked him to do

research for some episodes of his mega television serial The Discovery

of India---for example the episode on Vijayanagar. Ashay was very

thoroughgoing when he undertook any responsibility. He went

32
through several books on Vijayanagar, made notes, excerpted

passages, and produced something that would make the

scriptwriter’s job easier.

Before he learnt cinematography, Ashay was already an

accomplished still photographer. After Bhopal, he returned to still

photography. With a new female model, he shot a twelve photograph

calendar on the Indian seasons that was appreciated very much.

However, Pune is not the best base for such work. Frequent visits to

Mumbai were all right for Ashay for we all regarded that city as our

home. But without a good agent in Mumbai, it was difficult to get

regular assignments.

He returned to television and cinema----not as a cinematographer----

but as a script writer, a model, and an actor. He had a decent income

considering his handicaps. He also did an advanced course in

computer animation. His grasp of film and television management,

his creative flair and his technical knowledge, and his excellent

relations with colleagues were his assets.

When Henning Stegmuller accepted an assignment from Second

33
German Television (ZDF) to make a one hour film on the city of

Mumbai, I was his co-director and script writer. Henning chose

Ashay as his production manager, and Ashay did a thoroughly

professional job even though he would have been happier to work as

an assistant to Henning in cinematography, especially as the subject

of the film was his own city.

Having gone through it myself, now I realize in retrospect that

following the trauma of Bhopal, Ashay was a victim of the more

serious and crippling form of depression----unipolar clinical

depression.

He was used to drinking as a mood bath in the evening or as an ice-

breaker when among friends. But slowly this turned into drinking

alone and spending hours by himself under a cloud of alcohol.

He sketched and painted, wrote script ideas, researched cases of

chemical toxicity shoved under the carpet by giant corporations and

powerful governments----all caused by his own shattering experience

of the Bhopal disaster.

34
This drove him deeper into gloom. He became pessimistic and

cynical as he saw no hope for victims such as himself. Leave aside

uninformed lay public, even medical professionals would ignore the

damaging evidence left in the trail of disasters such as Bhopal or

experimental research in chemical weapons of mass destruction. The

permanent ecological damage many chemicals cause failed to cause

widespread public concern. A conspiracy of silence and the

motivated dissemination of disinformation were responsible for this.

Had I suffered depression myself earlier, I would have understood

the hell Ashay must have gone through and I would have tried to get

him the kind of specialist psycho-pharmacological treatment that can

alleviate suffering. However, whether he would have submitted

himself voluntarily to a therapist is doubtful.

Just after one meeting with a senior lady psychiatrist attached to a

public hospital in Pune, he firmly refused to have counselling and

therapy. A long walk through the corridors of the mental disorders

35
ward of a public hospital can be unnerving to someone who already

feels silently stigmatized by family and friends for a suspected

mental illness they cannot comprehend but are mistrustful of and

fear to face.

Meanwhile, the patient’s resolve not to be treated as mad, hardens.

The visit to a psychiatrist upset Ashay so much that from then on he

was angry whenever the subject of therapy and its alternatives was

brought up.

Most of us have rigid paradigms of responsible and rational adult

behaviour. We often forget that there are cultural variations in such

epitomized stereotypes. We also use them insensitively and

unwittingly damage, stigmatize, isolate, segregate, and quarantine

victims of real illness condemning their inner world as hallucinatory

and unreal.

Oblivious of the idiosyncratic nature of all human individuals, we

ostracize them and inflict on them a sense of social untouchability

through continuous negative signals. We tend to be aggressively and

dogmatically judgmental in order to indulge in a sense of authority

36
that we all easily assume when we sense the weakness and the

vulnerability of an ‘abnormal’ individual. We victimize even near

and dear ones, and perpetrate mental violence in this manner.

I was Ashay’s father and had handled him since he was an infant. He

trusted me till we reached a point of conflict or confrontation as

adults. He was hurt when such conflicts occurred and I felt at such

times that he could have seen my point of view without giving up his

own as though we were testing each the other’s power.

It was unfortunate that, after the Bhopal disaster when he needed my

support most to put his life together again, I drew a hard frontier

between us and acted the tyrannical role of an over protective parent

in a way that must have made him feel insecure and unassured.

He must have rejected me as an unresponsive and unfriendly parent

who betrayed his trust. He became closer to Viju, his other parent,

who was more patient and sympathetic, more articulate and

communicative, and was someone whom he could trust as his closest

friend and confidante. As he became increasingly melancholic and

hypochondriac, he turned to drinking and that depressed him

37
further, often to the point of visible despair.

Those who suffer because they postpone or do not go through the full

cathartic course of mourning caused by a shattering trauma are

stricken by what is known sometimes as incomplete mourning.

I was aware of this since 1971 when my friend Bhola Shreshtha died

of a massive cardiac infarction in an ambulance on way to a hospital.

His wife Leela and I were accompanying him in the ambulance.

When he gasped, choked, turned blue in his face as he gave up and

died, he was in his wife’s lap and I was sitting next to her. Sensing

what had happened but afraid of recognizing it, she panicked. I tried

to calm her. We were still about twenty minutes away from the

hospital by my reckoning. When he was rushed into the casualty

room, a physician on duty tried to resuscitate him, calling other

doctors nearby. They tried hard but he was already dead.

A cold efficiency took over my behaviour after that. Viju had

followed us to the hospital, and she had to escort the already

38
shattered Leela home. Bhola and Leela had three children and their

youngest was a daughter who was then nine. Bhola’s aged mother

lived with them. Bhola was just forty-seven then and this was his first

and last heart attack. The Shreshtha family was very close to us, an

extension of our own small family of three. They were all devastated.

I had to take care of the funeral arrangements and neither Leela nor

we had enough money. We were financially passing through a very

bad patch. I somehow took care of all that with the help of friends

and relatives---both theirs and ours. He was cremated with

traditional Hindu rites.

I went through that entire detailed experience as though I was not me

but another person. I was able to view it as a slow motion cinematic

experience though I could console the children, converse with the

mourners who gathered at the Shreshtha home, and took the body of

my friend for cremation.

It took me almost a year to face the full blast of that postponed

39
response to trauma. One morning, just before Bhola Shreshtha’s first

death anniversary, I sat down to write my long poem Ambulance Ride

and finished it in one sitting. I published it privately on his death

anniversary, feeling freed of a burden that had been racking me for

nearly a year. I came face to face with my own experience and

overcame it.

This did not happen when Ashay died.

I have still postponed my mourning and left it incomplete. Perhaps

this narration of my own encounter with manic-depression that I

think took me to the brink is one way to confront it and face life

again. Or this emergence from silent, corrosive grieving for a loss that

I knew was never going to recoverable. unless I sprang back into

speech, reaching out to other people to share the terror that seized

and shook me the instant I received the news that suddenly emptied

me of all purpose, distanced me from life itself, and threatened to

wrench the rest of me away in its vicious clutch?

Just two months after Ashay’s death, I went to Delhi to deliver the

Katha Annual Lecture---a part of the n.g.o. Katha’s Annual Festival. I

40
had accepted their invitation to deliver the lecture before my visit to

Germany and as a coincidence was in the process of writing the

lecture when the news of Ashay’s death wrenched us back home.

In late December, I went back to my computer with the CD of my

unfinished writing in Germany that also contained my ongoing

manuscript of my friend, the virtuoso sarangi player Ramnarayan’s

life story that I had been working on for ten years.

In the event, I finished the text of my lecture abruptly, ending it on

Ashay’s tragedy that commenced on December 3-4, 1984 with the

Bhopal disaster. That he first choked inhaling methyl isocyanate on

that fateful night ---and lived to die of asphyxiation after accidentally

inhaling carbon monoxide at home in Pune on November 29, 2003 ---

seemed to have brought a wheel full circle.

The theme of my lecture seemed to permit me to bring a personal

tragedy into the open and raise questions of public interest.

Ashay would have been satisfied that his father, a writer, was finally

acknowledging that the personal anguish the Bhopal disaster caused

41
him touched a question of human values that shape culture, society,

and politics as well as of a more fundamental existential

understanding of the human condition itself.

At the Katha Festival in Delhi, there was a screening of films based

on literary works, and my 1983 film Godam was chosen by the festival

curator Prabodh Parikh. Ashay had been a collaborator in the Godam

project since its inception. He was the operative cameraman assisting

Govind Nihalani, my director of cinematography. Govind was doing

post-production work for his own film Ardhasatya then and was

sometimes pulled away to Mumbai, about 250 kilometres away from

the location where Godam was shot.

On my low budget, in order to get the full value of our fixed daily

expenses, I had to go on shooting continuously without a break. So I

had to ask Ashay to be in charge of cinematography whenever

Govind was away. Though Govind and I had meticulously defined

our cinematographic style for Godam and its technical requirements

before we commenced shooting, for Ashay this was a crucial test.

42
I was not present at the screening of Godam but several students

attending the festival including a group from the Quaid-e-Azam

University in Pakistan were excited about it and informally asked me

questions. There was also a formal discussion. Two of the key

sequences in Godam were shot by Ashay in the absence of his ‘boss’

Govind and when some students made appreciative remark about

the visual impact of those scenes, I remembered Ashay.

I delivered my Katha Annual Lecture before a distinguished audience

in the auditorium of the prestigious India International Centre. It was

a rather short lecture of a little over thirty minutes. As I ended it by

recalling Ashay’s haunting last words in a short call he made three

days before he died (on Viju’s birthday).

He was already inebriated, I think, and it was a voice of anguish. He

was talking about the political situation in Madhya Pradesh, whose

capital is Bhopal. When I told him to forget about the country and

stay focussed on his personal life, he said, “But Dada, you gave me this

country!”

43
As I ended my lecture, there was a stunned silence for I opened a

private wound before my audience to whom it underlined deeper

issues of national and personal identity linked with the Bhopal

disaster---and also of civilizational choices. Their silence was

followed by an applause that began hesitantly but was prolonged

until it was full.

Ashay’s haunting last words to me may have meant many things

others who heard me quote him.

Ashay was born in Ethiopia, not India. He went to junior high and

high school in the United States. We were there during the national

emergency of 1975-77 in India, and I chose to return home to India

soon after the emergency was lifted though it was possible for me to

continue to live in the United States at least till Ashay got a university

degree. He was not a citizen of India by choice. His parents born and

raised in India were Indian citizens and he had inherited India from

them just as most of us have inherited it as an ancestral legacy.

My lecture was presided over by Prabodh Parekh. He invited the

audience to respond to my lecture and several hands were raised to

44
express a desire to comment. Among them was the distinguished

hand of author and philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi, Ramu or

Ramubhai to his friends. He made an impassioned speech drawing

out the significance of my lecture. In the course of his comment,

Ramubhai turned to me and said that my son was not mere victim of

the Bhopal but a martyr.

I had not thought of that before, and I continued to wonder long

after---why?

Perhaps my lecture in Delhi, the wound that it opened, was an

attempt to complete my mourning, or the beginning of a requiem for

Ashay that would let that wound bleed to its conclusion. But the

bizarre circumstances that awaited me in Pune on my return resulted

in another postponement of the mourning.

While the Katha Festival was coming to an end, news from Pune

spread like a fire among intellectuals in Delhi.

The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune had been

attacked by some chauvinist and xenophobic organization and they

45
ransacked its internationally renowned library and collection of rare

manuscripts vital to students and scholars of Indology.

The vigilantes’ vandalism was based on the premise that the B.O.R.I.

and some of its Brahmin members had helped American Indologist

James Laine to write a book on the founder of the Maratha State,

Shivaji the Great that maligned the icon all Maharashtra had

worshipped since the 17th century.

James Laine is a personal friend and contrary to what his detractors

said, Shivaji is a hero for him. His book is an attempt to understand

his hero’s continuing charismatic hold on the imagination of all

Maharashtrians at different levels and in different strata. It reports

what people have been saying about Shivaji in Maharashtra for

nearly four centuries and how his legend has grown despite veiled

criticism by some of the great man’s detractors. To anyone who reads

Laine’s slim volume carefully, this should be amply obvious.

I arrived at Pune airport in the company of my friend Sankaran

Shashidharan, Director of the National Film Archives, who was a

46
fellow-participant in the Katha Festival and my fellow passenger on

the flight from Delhi to Pune.

From the airport, I called Viju to let her know I would be home in

twenty minutes or so. She informed me that I was given round-the-

clock armed police protection because Laine had thanked me in his

acknowledgements. A cop carrying a carbine would greet me at my

door.

Shashidharan gave me a lift in his official vehicle and dropped me

home. When I went to my fifth floor flat, the armed cop was indeed

at my doorstep.

Imagine a household still in the shadow of mourning deprived of its

privacy and dignity by an imposed armed escort.

Two young policemen alternately provided me armed protection. A

number of senior officers visited me during the first two days to

explain the situation to me as they themselves had been briefed.

A dozen or so scholars---some of them residing in Pune---were

47
thanked by Laine in his acknowledgments for various kinds of

encouragement, assistance, and help during the writing of his book.

He did not specify the kind of help or encouragement each of them

gave.

The militant organization responsible for the attack, despite arrests

among the vandals who were defiantly hanging around the

institute’s premises after causing damage to its property, remained

on the aggressive and justified their action on the basis of hurt

sentiments and grave provocation for which they held the alleged

offending scholars squarely responsible along with Laine who was in

the United States.

Some of the scholars had been manhandled and browbeaten by other

militant organizations even before the institution itself was attacked

and ransacked.

A campaign was conducted in some sections of the Marathi press

calculated to provoke public disturbances, and the government of

Maharashtra sheepishly tolerated these extra-constitutional forces

that should have been brought to the book first.

48
There were hysterical demands for the extradition of Laine, a United

States citizen, and to give him the severest possible punishment

under Indian law.

As an Indian citizen, and as a writer who prizes his fundamental

freedom in a supposedly civil society, I was angered and my

indignation was righteous. Laine’s alleged offence apart, why should

I be penalized because he thanked me?

Some of my frightened scholar colleagues went to the extent of

disowning their relationship with Laine and his work for the fear that

they would be seen as traitors conspiring with a foreigner in a

planned campaign to insult an icon of Maharashtra.

For nearly three months the armed escort forced on my followed me

wherever I went from lecturing at the university and attending public

events to my routine walks or shopping trips to the vegetable, meat

or fish markets. They followed me even to bookshops with their

loaded carbines.

49
The two cops who were on duty as my bodyguard were nice young

people whom Viju and I treated like student visitors to our home.

One of them was preparing for a public service commission

examination and I gave him free tuition in a few subjects. When my

protection was finally withdrawn, he pleaded with me to ask for

continued protection so that he could study more in peace at my

home and be treated to tea and snacks.

Though their presence itself was a constant violation of our privacy,

and often an irritation and an embarrassment when we had visitors,

we understood that not they but the power-drunk Home Minister of

Maharashtra was responsible for this inflicted and uninvited act of

guardianship by the law.

This pestering intermezzo lasted for three months. The protection

given to me without asking was lifted without notice as state

assembly elections were announced. I visualised my two bodyguards

with their menacing carbines as now assigned the protection of some

polling booth.

50
It was not just me but the other two members of our family, our

grandson Yohul and Viju were stricken by incomplete mourning. In

our two bedrooms flat, the master bedroom was meant for Ashay

and Rohini before they separated and were eventually divorced. The

other bedroom was given to Yohul and his growing adolescent need

for personal space. Viju and I used our covered balcony that is large

enough to accommodate a double-bed and a shelf to keep books and

a sound system that belonged to Ashay.

Though Ashay remained behind a closed door most of the time

during his periods of acute depression, he spent a lot of time working

on his oil and acrylic paintings, or reading, writing, listening to

music, or playing his drums shutting the world out.

He shunned company even when friends and relatives visited us,

except when he cooked his own recipes and served them to our

guests.

51
Yohul, Viju, and I have avoided talking about Ashay after his

removal from our midst. Yohul, in fact, is reluctant to stay home after

his father’s death. He prefers to meet his friends outside our home. If

his closest friends visit or stay overnight, his room is out of bounds

for us. He is brusque, laconic, or to-the point when he talks to us.

This is extremely unfortunate, but it may be the only way he finds to

cope with a personal loss and the changed environment in a small

family.

As the only child of divorced parents, he has had to carry on through

a crisis he cannot comprehend. The sudden and shocking death of his

father, and the role he had to assume as his only next of kin claiming

his body after an autopsy, then getting police permission to re-enter

our flat whose door had to be broken to rescue Ashay---all this was

an ordeal that few teenagers go through.

But the absence of Ashay is more palpably piercing than his usually

unobtrusive presence was. When Ashay wanted to make his presence

felt, or when he wanted to communicate something with Viju or me,

52
he would emerge from his room and hesitantly linger near us. This

made me extremely uncomfortable as I did not understand what he

was trying to communicate. Viju, on the other hand, understood his

agony and was sometimes devastated by it. She felt aggrieved that I

had lost touch with him already and was saying that he must get on

with his life, putting Bhopal behind for good.

His restless, hovering presence when he was unmistakably in a black

mood, sometimes seething with anger that had no specific target,

used to unnerve me.

I often asked Viju, “Why doesn’t he do something? Anything? Why

doesn’t he say what he wants to say?”

After Ashay was gone, both Viju and I panicked at the thought of

entering his room, his personal space and its accumulations, his

menacing memorabilia with some of which we could connect, but a

part of which remained private and inviolable. Ashay had the habit

of saving seemingly insignificant objects associated with persons,

places, and events in his life to which he had sentimental attachment.

53
Endorphins are neurochemicals our brain secretes spontaneously to

alleviate pain. That we are congenitally capacitated to encounter pain

shows its vital place in our life. We place a block between ourselves

and the unendurable sources and causes of pain. This is true of all of

us for it is a biological given.

Positivists---including behavioural scientists and a school of

psychiatrists---are driven by a desire to demolish the spectre of the

mind that to the rest of us is a useful construct to understand parts of

our experience that seem to have little connection with the material

world yet a validity within ourselves.

I have been intellectually intrigued by pain and pleasure since my

adolescence, for our body’s self-awareness has always puzzled me.

What attracts human beings outside themselves and what makes

them withdraw and retreat into their inner world defines human

nature has been a fascinating subject of speculation for me all my life.

Likewise, the variability of the threshold of pain, the capacity to bear a

degree of suffering is something about which I have thought a lot. As

54
much as a curious and persistent layman can, I have rummaged for

information and enlightenment in books on philosophy, psychology,

neurology and other branches of medicine, botany, zoology, genetics,

toxicology, tribal and folk traditions, classical religion,

anthropology---the whole assorted bibliographical menu. I have

gleaned a few nuggets of knowledge in the process, too.

But pain remains an elusive or enigmatic feature of the human

experience of life because of the ever surprising and always

idiopathic responses to it.

There are visual images emblematic of pain throughout the history of

art in all civilizations: the various European paintings of Christ’s

violent crucifixion (of which the serene expression of a meditating

image of the Buddha can be thought of as the polar opposite or also

as its complementary resonance); or take for instance, a haunting

modern and secular image of pain in the modern Norwegian painter,

Edvaard Munch’s The Cry.

Coming back to the Buddha’s outer expression of Nirvana ---the

positive and enstatic experience of emptying the mind--- it is as much

55
the opposite of pain in its excruciating vertex as of pleasure at its ecstatic

apex.

The Buddha’s absolute serenity is inaccessible to most of us because a

serenely blissful state is all we seek in life yet seldom find; Christ’s

agony on the Cross before his self-salvation and ascent is almost

universally accessible because it represents the terror of physical

torture causing pain of which all of us have personal experience.

The Buddha smiles, not at you, but to himself; the Buddha closes his

eyes, but only to look inside himself.

When most of us try to look inside ourselves with trepidation, we are

duly terrified by the mess we find, the chaos of hell, the agonizing

bewilderment of beasts trapped by the fears that always stalk them.

The mind is where death dwells in constant conflict with a mating

call, the scent of food, and the assurance of security---all the basic

needs a biological being is moved towards.

We also find inside ourselves, if we do though we may not want to

56
acknowledge it--- the primal face of pain---the source of all our fears.

During Ashay’s early days of homeopathic treatment in Pune, Ashay

and I happened to discuss theme-concepts that could be turned into

mega television serials.

I outlined to him my idea of Pain and Civilization. He was so

fascinated that he asked me if I would spell out the sub-themes and

the contents in each proposed episode. I still have my notes

somewhere in my papers. I told Ashay to take the exercise a step

further by writing a pilot episode.

Soon after this, a friend from Bhopal, Dr. Rajendra Dhodapkar visited

us. Rajendra is a multi-talented artist who trained as a medical doctor

but was more interested in writing poetry and drawing caricatures.

He came to Pune after chucking his job in the Madhya Pradesh

Medical Service where he was extremely unhappy. Rajendra knew

that both Ashay and I had a few connections with film and television

producers in Mumbai.

57
My cousin Sunanda’s husband Sampooran Singh Oberoi alias ‘Obi’

and I were very close; and off and on I wrote film scripts for him, or

made presentations to his clients, or discussed his future projects. Obi

was a pioneer in the field of radio advertising, advertising films, and

television serials. He conceived, produced, and launched the first-

ever sitcom released by Doordarshan---India’s national public

television channel---Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. It was running then, and was

a huge success.

An opportunity came my way, though not from Obi.

A film maker I knew---Vikas Desai---asked me if I would like to

script episodes of a TV serial on ecological issues for Bittu Sehgal,

Editor of the magazine Sanctuary and an indefatigable environmental

activist.

I took Ashay and Rajendra with me to meet Bittu at his residence in

Mumbai. In the event, Ashay and Rajendra produced the script of

58
one episode that I presented to Bittu, and it was filmed and televised

too, as I remember.

However, Rajendra took ill with malaria while he was our guest in

Pune. After a month of treatment and recuperation, he headed back

to Bhopal and from there went to Delhi to become a cartoonist for a

national newspaper.

Ashay conceived, researched, and scripted a successful serial on

women achievers called Shanti for a production company in Mumbai.

The anchor and presenter of this series of candid interviews, Mandira

Bedi, becme a star in her own right.

During this period, till the end of the 1990s, Ashay had become a

widely noticed model in TV commercials and as he loved acting, this

became his main source of income and of optimism as well.

But it was constant swings of fortune in his career and his personal

life that began to be reflected in his psycho-somatic mood swings. I

59
did not know about bipolar disorder then, but now in my recently

gained wisdom, I can say that he became a manic-depressive before

he ended up with unipolar depression in the last two years of his life.

I would say that this is connected with his natural flair for acting, and

his hard work on whatever his given role was, and however big or

small it was. Performance, the more spontaneous and innovative it is,

is often a terrible stress for the performer. You have to work with so

many people, feigning friendship or faking cooperation, that your

mental resources are exhausted. If you happen to be an introvert, this

can make you painfully lonely.

Should melancholy seize you in such a vulnerable state, a death-wish

may surface to invite you to end it all.

One of Ashay’s role models, the British actor Peter Sellers, was also a

victim of depression.

Could it be that mood swings are an occupational hazard for

professional actors and other people who create illusions that their

60
art makes real to their audiences? There is a gap between an actor’s

life as a performer and her/his life as a human being. Many actors

who make others laugh; live on the dark side of life. The mirth and

hilarity they produce is exactly the opposite of what they feel.

Ashay was one of them. He could use the exaggerated body language

of slapstick comedians of the silent era that could both tickle laughter

or needle a raw nerve. The God of silent cinema, Chaplin, is an

example everybody has tried to emulate since. Ashay tried to

reinvent Chaplin’s tramp in his own way.

Ashay was handsome but built small and he had an air of fragility

about him that aggressive females find as inviting as an irresistible

sex pheromone. He had his share of female admirers.

He was the opposite of a macho hunk in looks. His charm lay in his

mobile face and his expressive eyes, his warm smile and his inclusive

laughter. His harmlessness created a reassuring space for females in

his company, and he made friends among the insecure of the

opposite sex more easily than the aggressive males itching to perform

harassing heroics.

61
He had a regular series of girl friends since before he was a teenager.

A sense of timing and the uncanny instinct to be at the shifting centre

of a moving frame are gifts in a cinematic career no grafting can bring

your way. Once you realize that you cannot be the centre of

everybody’s attention all the time, you are closer to your ten minutes

of fame and your one flash of immortality.

The American actor and film director, Jerry Lewis once said, “All

actors are nine years old.”

I found this to be profoundly true when I directed actors myself. All

good actors are natural and they have both the need and the capacity

to transmigrate into roles designed by others, not necessarily for

them, but deftly appropriated by them.

The more gifted of them can invent a personality that becomes

plausible through the intensity and unpredictability poured into their

performance.

62
The difficult part of acting is to know when not to act a role that is

performed and when to return to life that is practised.

This is an invisible and flexible frontier. There is, however minimal it

may be, a bit of theatre in everyone’s everyday life. It may be bad or

mediocre theatre, but when we are carried away by any emotion, or

by feelings raised to a passionate pitch, our bodily behaviour and our

facial expression, the volume and the register of our voice, change

significantly.

Gifted actors are not necessarily in charge of their own personality

though they may succeed in giving that impression to others. Some

of them are even inarticulate in communicating to others their

innermost thoughts and feelings.

Ashay’s acting ability was not impaired by the physical handicap he

had to live with and the mental anguish it inflicted upon him.

Even when he was doing a bit role or a vignette that required comic

self-degradition or self-humiliating humour, he could do it with a

vengeance. After Bhopal he developed a subtler sense of tragic irony

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and a sharper kind of black humour for which he already had a flair

earlier.

Ashay’s acting talent was spotted early.

On a friend’s recommendation, he was auditioned for the main role

in a Hollywood film to be shot in India, The Monkeys of Bandarpur,

with such veteran Hollywood movie and television actors as Allan

Hale, Jr. and Robert J. Wilke. The film, directed by British Director

Tom Stoppard, was shot on location in and around the picturesque

city of Jaipur in Rajasthan. By his twelfth birthday, Ashay became a

professional actor.

But we did not want his attention to move far away from normal

schooling or him to be lured by the dangerous attraction of

commercial Hindi cinema. Years later, Shyam Benegal cast Ashay in a

supporting role---the role of a young tabloid journalist in his

celebrated film Mandi. This was during Ashay’s apprenticeship with

Govind Nihalani as a cinematographer.

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Ashay and Rohini were living together (with us) though they were

not married yet, and Rohini accompanied him to the location in

Hyderabad-Secunderabad where Mandi was being shot.

Working as a member of Shyam Benegal’s cinema ‘family’, both

behind and in front of the camera, was Ashay’s happiest and most

memorable period of life as he would later say wistfully.

The friendships he made there proved to be lasting. He was

particularly close to his acting idol, Naseeruddin Shah, with whom

he struck a friendship. Kalpana Lajmi and Dev Benegal were

director’s assistants then and not actors, but he had a rapport with

them as well.

However (I am told) the star actress, Smita Patil who died even

younger than Ashay, had a special relationship with him. She was

already a cult idol.

Smita nicknamed Ashay ‘Gopala’ for some personal reason known

only to her, and refer to him as ‘my Gopala’.

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After Ashay’s death, Dev Benegal sent me two black and white

photographs taken by him while Mandi was being shot.

One of them is a solo picture of Ashay with the beard he had grown

to play a supporting role in the film. The other is an image of a

hugged and awkwardly pleased Ashay with a sweetly flirtatious

Smita putting her arms around him from behind.

The image does not seem ‘stolen’ or ‘staged’ by the photographer. It

conveys the bonhomie they all shared while living together on the

location---off and on the shooting floor.

During his darker days after Bhopal, Ashay sometimes wistfully

recalled those happier times as though he were longing to return to a

family he had since lost.

Ashay’s last spell as an actor was in a commercial feature film

produced by a successful TV soap producer.

The film was haphazardly made by her with a midstream change of

directors and arbitrary changes in the script. The shooting took

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Ashay to locations in New Zealand, Austria, and the Kulu Valley in

Himachal Pradesh because the script required scenes shot in the

snow or while snowing.

Ashay was reluctant to accept that contract but Viju and I pressed

him to take it. We naively hoped this would help him to get out of his

depression. Hardly did we expect that it would have just the opposite

effect and plunge him into extremely agonizing melancholy.

His depression deepened during his shooting schedules and when he

returned after it was over, he was at the end of his tether as though

the whole experience had been of a debilitating illness. He looked

haggard and beaten by his travails. It did not look like ordinary

fatigue at all. It conveyed the outer face of a deep mental illness.

slowly draining out its victim. It is a characteristic expression of the

malaise of melancholy, as I have discovered now, looking into the

mirror during my recent descent into it.

I now think that Ashay was in the grip of a massive depression

during the entire shooting schedule of that film, Kuch To Hai.

Nevertheless, he took Viju and me to the premiere of the movie in

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Pune. Our family friends and former next-door neighbours, Anil

Awar and his wife Smita, were among Ashay's fans. They loved his

unique antics in television commercials that were seen on most

channels in India. They joined us at the film's first show in Pune.

Ashay warned us that the film would disappoint us. He thought that

the film was a product of expensive confusion and incoherence. It

was a fusion of the thriller genre with comedy. We found he was

right. The film fell flat at the box-office, too. But we found Ashay's

role, a character role, executed with his usual flair for pointed

understatement and with professional polish.

While Ashay's film was being shot at exotic locations as the script

required lots of snow everywhere came my invitation to visit

Germany for a two-month stay. Ashay had already worked at

shooting schedules in the Kulu Valley among the Himalayan foothills

and to New Zealand with his producer chasing snow that refused to

fall in her presence or melted away to frustrate her actors and her

technical crew.

Viju was in two minds about accompanying me to Germany, leaving

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Ashay and Yohul to their own devices when Ashay seemed to be

going rudderlessly into the doldrums again.

The film's one-sided contract that was for a fixed fee, and its ever-

changing schedules not only exasperated him but also deprived him

of the substantial for television advertisement quickies that were

more efficiently made by professionals.

But it was Ashay who insisted on her accompanying me.

He packed our suitcases with great care, anticipating our smallest

needs and came downstairs with us to see they were loaded in the

taxi that was to take us from Pune to the Mumbai international

airport.

He gave me a nervous hug for a goodbye , acting brave, and he

looked forlorn when he said, “ You take care, now, Dada. Don’t worry

about Yohul and me. I’ll take care of everything at home.”

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Both Viju and I had been to Munich and Feldafing before---I more

often and many more times than her and Yohul accompanied Viju on

one of her earlier visits.

The City of Munich Administration awards a sort of fellowship to

selected foreign writers and artists to live and do their own thing at

the picturesque Villa Waldberta donated for that purpose by a

philanthropic multimillionaire.

The Villa Waldberta overlooks Lake Starnberg Called the Starnberger

See in German the lake could be seen as the pendant among the

beautiful string of lakes that make Bavaria so special as a resort.

For poets living an uncertain life and artists who cannot afford a

large studio of their own, there are independent furnished

apartments; and the visiting painters and sculptors get, in addition, a

very specious and well-lit studio to work.

Feldafing is only a small village on the edge of the magnificent lake

where richest among Europe’s richest country own private properties

that are their holiday homes. They include members of the former

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aristocracy, billionaire tycoons, celebrities from the world of sport

and entertainment, and only a small number of tourists who can

afford to get a glimpse of the scenic vista of sub-Alpine Upper

Bavaria and the grand presence of the Starnberger See.

Feldafing is about forty kilometres from the city of Munich to which

it is connected by the S-Bahn or suburban railway, it is an hour’s

pleasant drive from the Neuhausen neighbourhood in Munich where

our ‘family’ in Germany, the Stegmullers, live.

In and around the city of Munich, we have many close friends ( more

than we have in Pune and as many as we have in Mumbai). Munich

has become, thanks to Marie and Henning Stegmuller, a home away

from home for us.

Even when we are in Pune, a weekly phone call from Henning is

what I am used to.

Other than my own work that I intended to do in Germany, I had

invitations from Dr. Heidrun Bruckner to lecture to her students of

Indology at the University of Wurzburg and from Dr. Mirella

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Lingorska to do the same at the University of Tubingen.

As usual, during my Bavarian sojourn my friend Lothar Lutze would

come down from Berlin for a visit and the chemistry between Lutze

and Chitre has never failed to produce translations of poetry---even

in brief meetings.

Most of all, Henning and Marie wanted us to have an elderly

honeymoon by the famous lake over which the snowcapped peaks of

the Alps rose.

It was idyllic till it lasted. It was too good to be real.

Ashay’s sudden death plucked us out of Germany when we were

barely half-way through our visit.

We rushed back home to face a terrible void that everybody’s

unconscious mind knows and fears----left behind by the loss of a

loved one--- and the guilt of being survivors looking down the

opening left behind by a remembered presence.

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The Lake Starnberg has a special poetic resonance for me.

On its yonder shore, as seen from the Villa Waldberta’s glass tower,

lies the fairy tale palace Neue Schwannstein of the mad King Ludwig II

of Bavaria, the patron of the composer Richard Wagner who also

played a role in the insanely brilliant philosopher Nietzsche’s life;

and who shares a romantic home in fantasy such as our own Wajid

Ali, the Nabab of Avadh---more a princely poet, composer, and

connoisseur of the sensuous contours of life as an art, than a ruler

with a flair for political intrigue or military adventures.

Both Ludwig II and Wajid Ali Shah are likely to have been gay or

bisexual, and on the side of the feminine in the sexual spectrum---if

not actually in bed, then at least in their sensibility and inclinations.

Both were considered incompetent to occupy their respective thrones

and decadent wastrels dissipating the contents of their royal coffers

to commission and patronize all manner of craftsmen, draughtsmen,

artisans, architects, engravers, musicians, dancers, actors, composers,

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choreographers ---and the like.

Ludwig II and Wajid Ali Shah were both, I imagine, melancholic and

hypochondriac by disposition.

The King met a mysterious, violent death by drowning in the Lake

Starnberg, the ultimate receptacle of his illusions and hallucinations;

the Nabab died in exile, away from his beloved Avadh, the

playground and the stage of his fantasies.

Both wanted to defy the crass practicality of figures on whom

historical responsibilities are imposed by their ancestry and both

used their sceptre more like a paintbrush, or the bow of a violin or a

sarangi, or the tongue of a gourmet.

Both suffered from anguish and insecurity, despondency and

despair, their only fault being their attempt to celebrate their

misfortune, their sensitivity to tragic nuances and the subtler filigree

of sentiments that robust realists choose to ignore in order to lead

what they consider positive and purposeful lives.

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I would concede that both these royal misfits were decadent and led

a life of dissipation and indulgence. But I also see their nobler and

tragic aspect, their search for beauty in inevitable doom, and their

mood swinging from despair to hypomania, from bankruptcy of the

spirit to impotent elation.

Both Ludwig II and Wajid Ali Shah had a death-wish that they tried

to sublimate. They were on a suicide course from the start. But they

had a taste for the finer nuances of life, the details in a dark work of

art, a chiaroscuro image that no human dares to view as a whole ----

because its sharp highlights hurt.

When I called Henning from Feldafing to briefly convey the news of

Ashay’s accidental death in Pune, it was still before daybreak.

Henning said he would immediately drive down from Munich. Both

Viju and I made a flurry of phone calls to numbers far and close, and

kept busy while digesting the indigestible news that had struck us

like lightning though the thunder that should have followed has, in

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my case, come now.

Absentmindedly and automatically, we started packing. The

experience of pulling out of temporary homes was not new to us.

Only, this time it was caused by a sudden rupture and a throbbing

that kept missing beats.

I went to the window, opened the curtains, and opened the windows

to feel the chill blast of November cold and to take a last look at the

lake, still dark before sunrise. The black surface of the Starnberger

See had begun to reflect the glow of daybreak beyond the silhouetted

hills. I looked at the far spot in the lake where I imagined Ludwig

had drowned and died.

I remembered that Ludwig did not die alone, his shrink too was with

him, and he died as well.. One of them murdered the other and then

committed suicide according to Bavarian folk gossip since.Though

nobody will ever find out who killed whom before committing

suicide.

The lake has guarded its darkest secrets forever.

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Having lived in the Villa Waldberta before, and having turned the

lake into a metaphor in a series of English poems in which the lake

and Ludwig merged, I had strange thoughts welling up from my

mind’s unforeseen darkness.

They were thoughts of death---my own and of my loved one’s. They

were thoughts of suicide and the absurd possibility of a Marathi poet

finally drowning and dissolving in the most beautiful and sinister

lake in the world.

Is this a dirge for Ashay or a requiem for a part me that died that

day? Is this the final crescendo of my scream of incomplete

mourning? Why did I start writing this? Is this the therapy I need to

recapture a lost sense of being myself, or is this just a salve for a

wound with which I must live till my own breath finally comes to a

standstill, like Ashay’s?

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Ashay’s struggle for breath began in Addis Ababa on June 21, 1961

when he was born.

It squeezed his lungs again in Bhopal at midnight on December 3-4,

1984.

And it choked them, finally, in Pune some time in the early hours of

November 29, 2003.

His fear of death, I imagine, was rooted in his first spasm of life as he

was surgically removed from his mother’s womb. She herself had

been fighting for life for a whole week before he was born. Her

kidneys were infected and showed signs of a likely sudden failure.

She had very high fever, very high blood pressure, and was in a near

coma. Even as a foetus, Ashay must have suffered extreme agitation

before he was born.

The husband and wife team of gynaecologist and obstetric surgeon---

Dr. Nicholson and Mr. Hamlyn (In English a distinction is made

between a physician and a surgeon, the former regarded as superior

and deserving to be addressed as ‘Doctor’) ---decided to perform a

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Caesarian section surgery to bring the child out.

They had been postponing this decision for a week to try to save both

mother and child. When Viju was being hauled to the operation

theatre in near-unconscious state, Mr. Hamlyn---a devout Christian---

gravely advised me to pray for both their lives.

Ashay’s graduation from being a insecure foetus to becoming a

tortured infant was his first taste of an inhospitable, hostile,

menacing, and cruel world.

Did that first crisis in his life conclude in his death forty-two years

later? For when he was born, he was kept in an incubator providing

extra oxygen, and Viju saw her baby for the first time on the third

day. For a long time she lay in an anaesthetic coma and I sat by her

side wondering if this how one became a parent.

Before Ashay’s traumatic birth in Ethiopia, far away in India my

grandmother Tai had a dream. She saw Viju coming out of the ocean

with glowing pearls in her cupped hands. He was the first Chitre

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child of his generation and he was the cynosure of all our extended

family’s eyes when we arrived in a ship and disembarked in

Mumbai’s docks on July 31, 1963.

Even my otherwise restless and irascible mother who was opposed to

my marriage with Viju, forgave us all our sins for having produced

this lovely two-year old boy that she saw, her first grandchild.

We were supposed to return to Ethiopia for another three-year spell

before the start of a new semester in the Amharic month of

Maskaram---September 1963.

But Ashay did not find Mumbai agreeable. He developed several

allergies probably caused by a genetic auto-immune idiosyncrasy

and triggered by Mumbai’s notoriously polluted air.

His lungs got infected again and again. We had to take him to one of

Mumbai’s top paediatric physicians who advised us to postpone our

return to Ethiopia till his treatment brought back Ashay’s health to

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normalcy.

We stayed on in Mumbai till January, 1964. When we boarded the Air

India plane for Aden, in Yemen, on our way to Addis Ababa via

Djibouti in French Somalia on the Eastern Horn of Africa, Ashay had

a nasty cold and a slight fever. Within an hour of our flight’s take-off,

his fever kept rising and his breathing became difficult.

When we landed in Aden as transit passengers to change planes,

Ashay was seriously ill. We sought help from a distant relative living

in Aden to get urgent medical attention.

The physician who examined Ashay diagnosed his illness as a

complicated double infection---typhoid and pneumonia. Aden’s strict

immigration laws disallowed transit passengers a stay longer than

already permitted.

We were in a dire dilemma. We had to make a hard choice between

taking our onward flight from Aden to Djibouti and take the further

connecting flight to Addis Ababa on another airline.

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Aden is steaming hot throughout the year and Addis Ababa is

extremely cold in mid-January. Both of Ashay's lungs were affected

by pneumonia. Could we risk taking Ashay to Addis Ababa, and put

him through a shocking change of climate? And how long would it

take after landing to reach a hospital to continue his treatment?

The only other alternative was to return to Mumbai by an Air India

flight due to take off in a couple of hours. It was a direct flight though

it would take hours for us to reach Mumbai and drive straight to

Bombay Hospital where Dr. Tibrewalla, whom we had consulted

before, was a Honorary Paediatrician.

By then, Ashay would probably be in a critical condition needing

intensive care.

In the event, we decided to gamble on Mumbai, our home city and a

city that offered more sophisticated medical treatment than Addis

Ababa.

Though this would put my contract with the Ethiopian government

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in jeopardy, and a huge debt on my head for the expenses incurred,

Ashay’s life was in peril, and it was far more important to us than

anything else.

We came home to Mumbai, never again to return to Ethiopia, that

beautiful country where our only child was born.

After Ashay’s death, there were two more deaths that deeply injured

me: my friend Arun Kolatkar’s in 2004, and my youngest brother

Ashutosh’s in 2005.

Arun and I met as fellow-poets in 1954 when I was sixteen and he

twenty-two. We bonded instantly and our friendship a last century

ended with his death. From the start, we were very different from

each other, though people bracketed our names as avant garde

Marathi and English poets rising together in the mid-1950s.

We were bracketed together also because we were co-founders of a

mimeographed irregular journal exclusively devoted to poetry and

translation. The journal was named Shabda (or Word) and it was

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launched at the end of 1954.

Since then, we continued to drift apart----geographically or

professionally---and come together again, though the affinity that

was the basis of our bonding was never ruptured by any

circumstance. And, in our own way, each of us went through

volcanic upheavals in our personal as well as social lives. Inner and

outer forces defined our lives and the poetry we found in it

differently.

Arun died of intestinal cancer that was already advanced and

declared terminal when diagnosed.

But he got an extended lease of life through the homeopathic

treatment he received. Arun’s bread and butter profession was

advertising art and his primary form of self-expression remained

poetry till the end.

Still bleeding from the wound of Ashay’s death with which we had

not yet come to terms, Viju and I decided to make a video film on

him----a film I had wanted to make long before he took ill. Had I been

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successful in making the film earlier, Ashay would have been

involved in it as he was with my other films. Ashay had his own

equation with Arun and had taken several still photographs of him---

some of them of portrait quality. Arun used to show keen interest in

Ashay's work as a visual artist and had exclusive conversations with

him in his room whenever he visited us in Pune. Arun was so shaken

by Ashay's premature death that he avoided meeting us till a month

after his death.

We launched the film starting a race against time. I told Viju to take

Ashay's place by my side and it was she who assembled the research

and helped me design the film.

I knew that Arun would never make any statement about his work,

on tape or otherwise, but would, at best, agree to let me film him

reading his work. The film we made consisted of Arun’s reading

from his work and he insisted that I selected the poems for him to

read on camera.

The other component of the film was brief interviews with people

associated with his life in its different phases.

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I wrote the narration and Randhir Khare and I alternately voiced it

on the soundtrack. Randhir and I also read off-screen Arun's Marathi

poems in my English translation with his approval.

The film Arun Kolatkar has been since purchased by the Sahitya

Akademi and released as a VCD.

It was premiered in Arun and his wife Soonu's presence at the Prithvi

Theatre in Mumbai just before his illness took its final turn towards

the worst.

Arun came to die in Pune in his younger brother Subhash’s house.

Subhash and his son are both physicians who would medically care

for him till the end came. In choosing the venue of his final

departure, Arun must have had many reasons, some practical and

some emotional.

Arun seldom revealed his inner feelings even to the people closest to

him except though a subtly nuanced language of minimal gestures,

or gently ironic words underlining the painful absurdity of life

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viewed as a black comedy.

But Arun had been away from his immediate kin for over fifty years

since he was estranged from his authoritarian and disciplinarian

father.

At the same time, he had warm memories of a childhood and

adolescence spent in an extended family with brothers and sisters

and cousins and aunts and uncles.

He also had a very special relationship with his late mother whose

protectiveness he seemed to have inherited. He must have wanted to

be with his family again before he made his imminent exit from this

world.

The tiny apartment in which Arun and his wife Soonu lived in

Mumbai had just one room divided into living space, kitchenette, and

bathroom. It could hardly accommodate visitors, particularly when

the man of the house was gravely ill and the lady of the house the

only other person around.

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A very private person who got more out of his solitude than out of

gregarious interaction, Arun must have found his illness inviting an

exasperating invasion of his privacy in the form of visitors.

For weeks, the nature of his illness was kept under the wraps and

Arun continued his weekly visits to Military Cafe in downtown

Mumbai. Arun’s regular table there was his meeting point with

friends every Thursday.

But as his condition deteriorated by the day, he decided to focus his

remaining energy on his unpublished and unfinished work as a poet

and go out in a dignified way, his own style.

When he and Soonu shifted to Pune, Arun expected to live only for a

few days. His life was rapidly ebbing away. He could speak only for

a few minutes at a time, with great effort, with a voice that faded

down to a sepulchral whisper.

His mind, however, was focussed exclusively on his unfinished work

and the final instructions he wanted to give his friends about it.

88
Arvind Mehrotra had arrived in Pune from Allahabad to stay with

Arun as long as needed and once Adil Jussawala came over from

Mumbai to spend a number of hours by Arun’s bedside as Arun

finalised his selection of his unpublished poems and translations or

made precise alterations in their text.

Viju and I visited him every day, except after he went into coma

before he died. We would be at Dr. Subhash Kolatkar’s house in

Bibwewadi----over an hour away by rickshaw from our home ---by

ten o’clock in the morning and stayed on till about seven in the

evening.

Arun’s alertness and a rush of some semblance of energy enough to

voice a few words was brief, precarious, and intermittent. We just

waited by his side, watching for some signal from him that he was

ready and able to speak. Soonu fed him morsels of food from time to

time, or coconut water to sip so as to give his parched tongue and dry

throat some relief.

When alert and able enough to speak a few words, Arun used his

newly learnt skill of a dying man to measure and edit what he meant

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to say before he actually voiced it. He possessed that skill already as

his poetry shows, but this was its last critical test.

The life of his poems that would outlive him depended on it. His

struggle to finish his work to his satisfaction was tragic yet noble.

His gaunt face was pointedly determined. His frail frame stretched

supine on the bed; every movement he made was painfully strained.

We who watched him die slowly felt it in our bones.

Arun died on September 25, 2004.

Arun’s death in September was followed by Nirmal Verma’s in

October 2005.

When I reported Nirmal’s demise to our common friend, Daniel

Weissbort, Danny wrote me a brief e-mail in which he made a pithy

low-key observation, “We are getting fewer.”

Indeed, death had been rather stridently robbing me of my poet,

writer, or artist friends in recent days. Or maybe, death was a

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discerning anthologist of poetry summoning contributions from

them.

Agha Shahid Ali died of cancer in America; Nissim Ekekiel who

suffered from Alzheimer’s disease died in an old people’s home in

Mumbai; Dom Moraes was suffering from cancer but died of cardiac

arrest in sleep in Mumbai.

Soon my mental graveyard would have little place for myself.

It was already the only and the most expensive piece of real estate my

mind possessed.

Was I being led slowly but surely to my own quietus?

It was the late morning of June 9, 2005. I was half awake as the effect

of a sleeping pill I had taken late the previous night had begun to

wane. I overheard Viju speaking to someone. There was panic in her

voice, then a stifled sob.

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I instantly knew it was bad news again, very bad news. It made me

shake off the fog in my head. I got up and asked Viju, “What is it?

Who called?” She said, “It was Ajit. Ashu is no more. He died of a cardiac

arrest in sleep early this morning at Goregaon. He was found dead by the

neighbours. Ajit said they are taking the body for cremation now. He said

we need not go to Mumbai immediately. We can go when Rashmi arrives

from Vizag.”

When Ashu visited us last, it was immediately following Ashay’s

death. They were born only five years apart, Ashu and Ashay, and

we were both very fond of Ashu whom we had carried in our arms as

a baby.

In his last years, Ashu’s life had fallen apart. He and his wife Shaila,

lived with my parents and with their own little son, Mihir.

From his early adulthood, Ashu was given to boozing with his

friends and my parents encouraged him to bring them home to

partying. He must have become dependent on alcohol before he got

married and more so after.

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An alcoholic blames his career graph not on what he compulsively

swills but on the cruelty of personal fate.

Ashu was a trained printing technologist and only the second in our

family after my father to go into that profession.

He had grand dreams of setting up a state of the art offset printing

press in partnership with his friends.

Since none of us had the means to finance such a venture, he thought

of getting a bank loan. But with no collateral security to offer, no

bank would give him financial support.

So Ashu decided to freelance. He was a master scanner in colour

reprography and was in a seller’s market for his skills. He worked

with some of the best printing establishments as a consultant earning

handsome fees and he also undertook printing jobs and got them

done under his supervision. On the face of it, he had no reason to fail.

But for some reasons obscure to us, he began to consume larger and

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larger quantities of alcohol---a common and freely consumed

depressant--- and developed a weakness for wet business lunches,

that sophisticated urban form of addiction that is still fashionable in

India.

When his clients found him with alcohol on his breath during

working hours, their trust in him started to erode. His assignments

thinned down to a trickle until they dried up. His friends also

scattered away as they seriously built up their own careers, got

married, and raised families.

Realizing that Ashu’s addiction was serious trouble for him and his

family---our family by the logic of extended family bonds---we all

tried to get him through de-addiction therapy.

Alcoholics have a Sisyphean tendency to roll their bottle uphill, then

drink it up at the peak and chase it as it slips and rolls downhill---this

goes on ad infinitum.

They keep returning to drink even after their shrink declares them

cured. It is the shrink who gives up the patient in the end rather than

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the patient to give up his boozing.

Ashu started indulging in marital violence. He developed a dual

personality. He was always sweet and charming, but now he became

sly and lied in order to borrow money from all sorts of amenable

sources. He forced his wife to undergo abortions rather than get

himself vasectomized. He managed to exasperate even our parents

who had all along been pampering him.

Then my mother died after a series of crippling cerebral infarctions.

My father developed mood swings (perhaps of the kind I

experienced myself a few years later).

Then he just withdrew from life slowly. He would sleep for hours

and would be awake only for a couple of hours or so. The doctors

said it was ageing and that therapy had its limits.

Eventually, my father died in sleep in 2002.

Ashu’s wife Shaila went back to her parental home, found a job in

Aurangabad, and did not return. She said that their separation was

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final, giving Ashu another justification for drinking.

Shaila left their son Mihir with Ashu in our parent’s home. My sisters

looked after him and he later lived with my brother Rohit’s two sons,

his cousins while Ashu now lived alone in my parents’ small flat in

Goregaon, a suburb of Mumbai.

His death was sudden, too, though he seemed to be on a suicide

course fuelled by ethanol in any accessible form, even cheap country

liquor.

Nobody knows with any certainty what the aetiology of melancholy

or depression is and how many different forms it takes.

Did it swoop on me suddenly like a black vulture, or was it

surreptitiously spreading its tentacles like an octopus hiding in my

psyche before I found myself seized by it?

Did it, in other words, come from the outside, or emerge from

within?

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Depression is a serious and often terminal illness of our master

organ, the brain, both the controller and the control panel of the rest

of our body.

But can we separate the brain from the rest of our body when we

perceive that they comprise a single coherent system?

Is there psyche without soma and soma without psyche? Or is there

no fundamental dichotomy between them? Are we all born bipolar?

My own mood swings commenced with the arrested process of

mourning the loss of Ashay on November 29, 2003.

Depression engulfed me slowly till the beginning of the next year and

a hypomanic upswing started with my Katha lecture where I publicly,

but rather obliquely and laconically, started releasing my suspended

grief by quoting Ashay’s last telephonic conversation with me.

My participation in the Katha Festival brought many friends, well-

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wishers, and acquaintances around me, as they had heard of Ashay’s

sudden death but they were not sure if what they heard was true.

Some of them knew Ashay personally. They offered me

condolescence through consoling words and gestures---that are

awkward but unavoidable cliches---but by then I was in control of

my emotions and no cathartic encounter was expected in that festive

atmosphere.

This was followed by the news that the Bhandarkar Institute in Pune

was vandalized by a group protesting against James Laine’s book on

Shivaji.

Populistic demands for bans and censorship of books and works of

art ending in violence and vandalism by illiterate and semi-literate

fanatics and instigated by irresponsible media or self-styled leaders

not able to look beyond a political advantage are not new to me.

I have lived in this uncivil society long enough to know that this will

continue for a long time; but I carry with my faith in constitutional

morality and judicial wisdom.

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My anger is roused by such violent protests that are extra-

constitutional, and I am infuriated further when the government

shows a soft corner for law-breakers and miscreants by trying to

appease them and declaring its firm resolve to use its power against

the alleged offences imagined to have been committed by authors of

scholarly debate, intellectual disagreement, articulate dissent, or the

creative arts.

I was provoked enough to use my pen and my speech as a weapon.

When I reached Pune, I felt insulted and humiliated by the

government of Maharashtra to have imposed armed protection upon

me instead of probing the perpetrators of violent vandalism further

and punishing those instigating them.

I was forced to spend the next three months in the shadow of my

carbine-wielding protectors; I kept writing articles and making

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speeches in the hope of a public debate on the constitutionality of

such forms of public protest in a supposedly civil society.

Even that may have been a phase of intellectual frenzy---hypomanic

excitement? -- And I was determined to use a pugilistic approach in

retaliation of forces in our society who would Talibanise India and

terrorize their fellow citizens whom they think they have the right to

chasten.

I was living on my own adrenaline again and the stress, itself

triggering a mood swing, may have led to the next sweep of my

mood pendulum.

This had started with anxiety about Arun Kolatkar’s terminal illness

which I tried to counter-balance by deciding to make a film on him.

With the completion of the film, I finished my mourning for Arun,

though his death came after the premiere and public release of the

film.

Arun’s slow death only created a void in my mind as I was given a

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long enough advance notice of his departure.

But Ashay’s traumatically sudden death had already wounded me

deeply and almost fatally

I grieved for Arun’s impending death through an objective cinematic

expression of a loss that was gradual; and thus I emptied myself and

freed myself.

In the case of Ashay’s death, our physical distance from him when he

died gave rise---additionally--- to a growing sense of guilt.

We also mourned the relative brevity of his life, though after Bhopal,

the life-expectancy of thousands of similar victims was feared to have

been drastically reduced.

Viju and I also felt guilty to have been away from Bhopal on that

night of disaster when Ashay found his life and his hopes damaged

beyond recognition and Rohini with a baby growing inside her saw

her anticipation of joy instantly turn into a prolonged anxiety and a

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nagging fear.

We felt guilty for being absent parents and supposed guardians,

whose children faced a terrible disaster and felt orphaned by a crisis

that would haunt them for a lifetime.

Ashu’s death, in some ways was a sequel to Ashay’s.

Both their lives were prematurely cut off, making their older kin and

survivors experience a persistent guilty conscience, and a feeling of

inexplicable remorse for not having taken the place of those who

died, or were sacrificed to some malefic and bloodthirsty deity.

Ever since I started writing poetry in my adolescence, love and death

are recurrent and inextricably interlocked themes in my poems.

A significant number of my poems written in the last fifty years

mourn the loss of people, places, and times that were part of my

ongoing experience of life.

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In poetry, painting, cinema, and music---evocation of presences,

images, movements, and perceived shifts of direction are deeply

etched in my memory. They are for me the essence of art and

transcendental awareness.

I cannot protest against the psycho-pharmacological treatment

suggested to me by my friend Dr. Mohan Agashe, professionally a

trained psychiatrist whom the world knows better as one of the finest

contemporary stage and cinema actors in India; and I cannot thank

more my present psychiatric physician Dr. Vidyadhar Watve, or the

earlier Dr. Dalaya, for stabilizing my mood when I was going

berserk.

From my sixty-eighth birthday on September 17, 2005 till Ashay’s

second death anniversary on November 29---a period of ten weeks----

my thought processes went on gathering momentum, often making

leaping connections among heterogeneous contexts, and with greatly

enhanced verbal felicity, and a brighter than usual wit.

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My subjective perception of this did not perturb me or shake my

temporary belief in my own impeccable sanity and rationality.

I thought I was on the verge of a deep new insight into the nature of

life; as though I was about to make some stupendous discovery

leading to rich and profound creative work.

As a poet and an artist, and as a thinker as well, this was not an

unfamiliar experience to me and nothing could undermine my self-

confidence. Turning personal crises into poetry and art was, I

thought my forte.

Like all believers, I possessed only half-knowledge that I mistook for

the whole fundamental truth.

Grieving, when gagged, bleeds one internally; and it is hard to

handle such internal haemorrhages of feeling.

Loss is a feeling of having been dispossessed of something owned as

an inalienable birthright: something that you have taken to be forever

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and exclusively accessible to you.

Violently wrenched away from you with a cruel suddenness that

shocks and numbs, your loved ones are possessions you would fight

to retrieve from whoever it was that took them away from you..

It is, as it were, an attempt was made on your own life; and your

insane search for the invisible assassin or assassins begins.

But you also know that death is no person with whom you have a

chance to get even, settle the score by fighting a duel.

You can only fight death in a fight unto death; but that death itself is

your own; for death is a cosmic law as the law of entropy underlines.

Progressive disintegration of any created order is inherent in the

order itself.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," as W.B. Yeats described the

state and its certainty and inevitability.

Death is inscrutable; it is an enigma.

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As biological beings with their adherence to a sense of an embodied

self, an awareness of life with which they are congenitally infused,

we refuse to die.

In our tenacious refusal to die till we are struck by its final blow, we

blindly believe in being endowed with immortality.

All religions are rooted in the fearful premonition of death; the

pernicious perception of its perpetual proximity.

And we continue to battle what we cannot ward off.

We are all Abhimanyus in the ongoing Chakravyuha of life, or

Arjunas looking for a Krishna's verdict on the human condition, our

own ontological status in a universe of quirky uncertainty, our own

identity menaced by it. And how does Krishna exorcize Arjuna's

truthful perception of a battle in which one is confronted by one's

kin, and the friends with whom one grew up playing and learning to

successfully win those games that have a result?

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The Great Trickster, who cleverly opted to be Arjuna's charioteer in

the battlefield rather than be his brother-in-arms in a bitter contest

that would end in epic genocide, sings The Song of the Lord---The

Bhagavad-Gita--that all Hindus continue to recite to keep death away

from its shadow darkening every human door.

All crises are life-threatening.

They teach us that fear is the deepest driving force in our lives. The

seeming fortitude with which we temporarily triumph over it is a

beast's savage last stand, nothing more.

We are built to collapse, and we all know it innately.

Fear and pity, as Aristotle thought, were the essence of the tragic

experience, and the audience of tragedy in a theatre is moved by the

ritual sacrifice of created heroes or heroines in front of their eyes.

Catharsis---Katharsis---was a goat sacrifice, a rite performed to

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appease death and postpone it for a while. A martial race had to

perform it regularly and be prepared for the next battle where they

faced the binary option between killing or dying.

If Aristotle had the chance to read and digest the Mahabharata---its

epic and apocalyptic vision of the human condition---would his

Poetics have turned out to be something different than what Greek

tragedy led him to believe?

There was a change in my voice that Viju noticed from her vantage

point as my lover, witness, and compassionate observer for nearly

fifty years.

We had been together through thick and thin, seen each other rise

and fall, and rise again---often in conjunction but sometimes in

agonizing isolation and separation as well.

We were weathered and worn, but had emerged as survivors with

some grace.

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The change in my voice disturbed Viju and she consulted Sameer,

our ENT surgeon friend as this was his specialist field.

However, when Sameer heard the full description of my other

symptoms and behaviour on telephone, he told her it sounded like an

emergency. He came to our home immediately, driving the distance

of twenty kilometres through the snarled and chaotic traffic of the

city. He took a close look. He observed my talk, my behaviour, and

my frenzied look. He slumped into a chair, as though he feared

something terrible coming. He told Viju, "We have to take him to a

hospital. This can be handled only there."

He spoke with Yohul and told him what the situation was. Then he

called Dr. Shiva Aiyyar at the Jehangir Hospital, who agreed to see

me as soon as I was taken there, and advise Sameer and Viju what he

felt should be done.

He told Viju to go to the Jehangir Hospital that was the nearest fully-

equipped hospital in our vicinity where he would ride ahead of us on

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his scooter and meet us outside the trauma centre.

I refused to leave the house, maintaining in a hard and determined

tone of voice that I needed to finish Ashay's room, my project and my

agenda, according to the deadline I had given myself and the

carpenters. My voice sounded adamant as s threatening. Yohul was

upset by seeing me in a frightening light. He went into his room and

talked to my brother Ajit in Mumbai, as he would in any family

emergency. Besides, Ajit was a physician himself.

Zuber nervously hovered around, afraid to enter the black circle of

my unpredictable rage. Everybody except I was losing their nerve. I

went up to Yohul and said I was not going to the hospital, patting

him gently and telling him that nothing was the matter with me.

Choked by a sob, and on the verge of tears, he pushed me away and

said I had to go to the hospital and there were no two ways about it.

Viju and he pleaded with me, cajoled and coaxed me, but nothing

would move me except brute force. None of them were capable of

physically forcing me to go with them to the hospital. Sameer had

probably reached the hospital by then.

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Ajit and Rohit, my two brothers, were already on the way to Pune,

and they arrived the same time Sameer must have reached the

hospital.

I was finally persuaded to go to the hospital in Zuber's rickshaw with

Rohit by my side. Viju would take another rickshaw and Bunty alias

Utkarsh would go with her. Bunty was assisting me in writing down

the details of my visualisation of Ashay's room till then. I had been

working in that room for the previous forty-eight hours, without

sleep and with little food, as though I were in a fierce trance of

extremely focussed creative activity---my memorial for Ashay. Zuber

was my other helper.

Ajit was uncharacteristically nervous and resigned. Yohul was

agitated and seized by a fear he was trying hard to fight and control.

Viju seemed outwardly calm, as she always does in such situations,

but this was a rare and unforeseen situation for all of them.

Ajit and Yohul chose to stay back home.

I dressed up reluctantly, putting on the most crumpled and baggy

pair of trousers I could find, and an equally wrinkly shirt. The shirt

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had fewer buttons than necessary, and my pants were just half-

zipped and without any belt, they could have slipped down any

moment unless clutched by at least one hand. I was showing to them

all that I did not care how I looked, and to hell with the world. I

made them understand that I was going to the hospital against my

own will and just because they were many against one. I conveyed

this through my condescending gestures and with a sarcastic scowl

on my face, or with a grimace that came off my face like a falling

mask.

All I knew was that they were taking me away from an unfinished

work of art : Ashay's redesigned room---I had written on its entrance

door the legend, : "Ashay Chitre lives here" in my own hand, and

pinned a small artificial red rose made of paper to the soft- board I

had fixed for that purpose.

My memories of the next forty-eight hours are now a rather hazy and

slowly receding impression left by a mental tornado carrying

disparate images in its violent velocity : I remember reaching the

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hospital in Zuber’s rickshaw accompanied by my younger brother

Rohit.

My other brother Ajit, himself a trained physician, preferred to stay

back home, his usually cool nerve failing him after he saw what I was

heading towards. I was crazed, frenzied, talking without a pause.

I made Zuber drive his rickshaw to the nearest ATM branch of my

bank from where I wanted to withdraw cash.

I said I had thousands of rupees coming my way very soon and that I

would take care of everybody’s financial problems.

I asked Rohit if he would lend me one hundred thousand rupees

right away and I promised to pay him back in three weeks---and so

on, and so forth.

I was examined by Dr. Shiva Aiyyar, a noted cardiologist in Pune, at

the trauma centre of the Jehangir Hospital.

My heart rate and blood pressure were surprisingly normal, but my

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state of delirium was obvious. The hospital had no room for an extra

patient, and I needed to be kept under medical vigilance.

So, I was taken to the Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital that was some

twenty kilometres away.

Sameer’s wife, Ashwini, was the Chief Radiologist there and she had

the necessary influence to get me immediately admitted.

I heard snatches of cell phone conversations in urgent whispers about

my condition. But I did not care.

I thought everybody around me were a bunch of slow-witted people.

I thought I was lucid, in fact at my brilliant best; while they, poor

idiots, were forcibly taking me to a hospital when I needed to go

home and be left alone.

It was on the third day after this that I was discharged from the

hospital with a prescribed regimen of rest, watchful care, and an

exotic cocktail of pharmaceuticals.

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All through this, I was hopping mad at people rather than able to

realize that I should have been grateful to them for having saved me

from a longer voyage through the nether world of my own mind.

Was this a beginning of the completion of my unfinished grieving for

the loss of Ashay?

Or was I simply losing my own mind in a maelstrom of melancholy?

Viju and I were both slowly going over the hill and were showing the

outward signs of ageing and suffering its inner ache and

apprehensions

My sexuality goes into an overdrive whenever I am working

feverishly on some creative work, in whatever medium or mode; or

even when I am engaged in some scholarly task or project. It seemed

to have gone absolutely cold this time. But this was a different time ,

and it was disquieting, as she told me later.

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I seemed disturbed, and my behaviour---though not discernibly

different to other people looking at me--had seemed to Viju to be less

than (or more than) coherent in many subtle but critical ways. Now it

had come out into light in nakedness and an abandon that startled

even strangers standing at a distance. This abrupt flashback ends as

abruptly here and

I do often suffer from laryngitis, and my amazing relapse into

smoking after a decade of absolute and voluntary abstinence, has not

helped.

One of my friends in Pune, Dr. Sameer Kulkarni is a highly skilled

ENT surgeon. Incidentally, he is also a playwright and of late he has

been writing screenplays for a well-known film director.

Sameer affectionately addresses me as Guru-ji---reminding me of my

Greek poet friend Anastassios Denegris addressing me as Maestro.

This has a touch of affectionate irony, it is a tease that does not rankle

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if it comes from a younger friend and a faithful follower in certain

matters, who really treats you, at times, as his guru.

Sameer noticed the recurrent and worrisome swelling of my larynx

and forbade me to speak ---a three week rest that he further extended

by another three.

He also pleaded with me to give up smoking for good, and as he was

witness to my unbelievable abstinence for a whole decade after a

lifetime of addiction to nicotine, he was confident that if determined,

I would repeat that feat.

As for the speech-rest part, I followed his instructions so

meticulously that I purchased slates, pencils, a box of chalk sticks,

and even a rolled up blackboard to write instead of speaking to

anyone who needed to converse with me.

In fact, I perversely enjoyed the comic aspect of the situation.

My students and my visitors---among them were some close friends

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---found it very disconcerting, however.

I am a talker who is garrulous to a fault if unleashed..

I love to argue, debate, discuss, and (I suspect) even to preach and to

sermonize if given the opportunity.

Such silence on my part must have seemed to them a change in my

identity.

I felt stifled very soon.

My freedom of speech and my spontaneous need to speak were

temporarily repressed by this prescribed regimen; and it made me

very edgy and bottled up.

I tend to gesticulate a lot when I speak. Now gagged by my surgeon

friend’s professional advice and fearing permanent damage to my

vocal cord, I gesticulated even more wildly in my exasperated

attempts to communicate with others.

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As a writer, I have honed my writing skills to a degree.

But they failed me this time because I tried to take impatient short

cuts through instant aphorisms and witticisms that would not cut

any ice with my bewildered visitors.

I found my mind racing too far ahead of them nor could I summon

the physical stamina to put words down on paper at a matching

velocity.

One day, in a fit of fury, I told Viju, “I’m tired of casting pearls before

these swine!”

Long before I went through this ordeal, a friend had requested me to

suggest a name for and to visualise the interior of a snack bar and

lunch home that would create an atmosphere of Bhakti associated

with Marathi saints devoted to their deity Vithoba and their

followers who go on regular pilgrimages to the sacred town of

Pandharpur where the premier temple-abode of their Lord is.

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He had briefed me about his first modest requirement, while his

building was still under construction: a name for his purely

vegetarian restaurant and snack bar, that would evoke the

unflinching faith of the Varkari pilgrims, their avoidance of sinful

food, and the satisfaction they expected from a simple, but

deliciously ample meal.

This was sometime in October and before my hectic schedule

delivering keynote speeches, theme-bound lectures; inaugural

addresses and so on began.

I was in a state of melancholy but people expected exactly the

opposite from me by way of displaying my eloquence as a seasoned

keynote speaker or stimulating participant at symposia and seminars.

I enjoy talking to people but I hate the very sight of a lectern---the

pedagogical counterpart of a pulpit, which I hate even more. I hate

the proscenium and most forms of high platforms and stages.

No, they do not give me any stage fright. I do not cringe, but I shy

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away from a podium because it is obviously pompous to address

them from a height that establishes the speaker even before his first

solemnly idiotic or compulsively jocose sentence drops down

towards the audience supposedly waiting for edification.

I do not aspire to be an impressive performer at conferences and I do

not have any illusions about my capacity to enthral large

heterogeneous audiences.

I do not know what made me accept invitations that would make me

fly like a bird gone berserk from Pune to Thiruvananthapuram via

Mumbai, and after addressing the audience at a National Book Fair,

fly back to Mumbai to fly from there to Vadodara on way to deliver

an inaugural speech at the Adivasi Academy's tenth anniversary

celebrations at Tejgadh, return to Pune via Mumbai, fly again to

Delhi and back like an efficient courier delivering gift parcels. Then

after a small pause, fly to Hyderabad, from there to Bhubaneshwar,

then driving to Cuttack on way to Sambalpur to receive a national

award for poetry, come back to Cuttack to make a hurried return trip

to Konark, then flying home hopping from Bhubaneshwar to

Hyderabad and heaving a long sigh of relief in Pune before the next

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take off, this time to Delhi to attend another festival and to return to

Pune utterly exhausted by this self-destructive itinerary that put me

into an uncontrollable overdrive. All this while, I was being secretly

given lithium to stabilize my mood swings.

This was an insane and suicidal spree taking its toll. The last straw

was the effort to fulfil a prestigious commitment to deliver another

lecture. Viju was with all through this, giving me my medicines on

time, and making me eat regular meals, and controlling my

consumption of the most popular depressant in the world, alcohol,

that I religiously imbibed every evening in relative privacy.

We spent four days in Delhi. My depression had almost touched the

clinical frontier by now. I avoided company, shunned formal

luncheons and dinners, stayed away from invitations to cocktails, did

not speak with Viju for hours, and did not read beyond a page or two

a day.

Finally, Viju and I spoke about the illness that had become apparent

to us both. The mood swings were involuntary but the dominant

mood was melancholia, not euphoria. My manic-euphoric bursts

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were -mercifully brief now, but they were triggered by any visitor,

stranger or friend made no difference. I quickly put on my mask of

perpetual cheerfulness and zest to hide the hard black face of

melancholy behind it. I was learning the schizophrenic art of quick-

changing a personality from its bipolar double-face, not unlike

Janus---the Roman god of doors, gates, entrances, and exits with two

opposite faces.

I recognized the face of my own illness that was subconsciously

familiar to me by now. I vow to see my therapist and physician on

my return to Pune.

Just back from the airport to my home in Pune, while experiencing

involuntary tremors, I entered the bathroom to have a nasty fall that

broke my left wrist so badly that I had to go to the hospital and get

operated surgically under general anaesthesia.

I should at this juncture (the avid filmmaker that I am) resort to a

flashback to the incident that made my condition visible to others.

The request to name a vegetarian restaurant serving traditional

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Maharashtrian food was a trigger to my pent up self-expression,

touching the very nerve of my imagination.

I responded by feverishly visualising, in great and I still think very

innovative detail, not just the restaurant, but the three vacant floors

above it as a single integrated interior designed as a museum

depicting the cultural history of Maharashtra and the role played by

the Varkari poet-saints in shaping its mainstream.

I made a four hour presentation to the young owner of the proposed

restaurant that was so detailed and contrary to his modest, cautious,

and prudent idea of the venture that he and even my artist colleagues

whom I wanted to collaborate on this ambitious design project were

simply flabbergasted.

My artist friends ---Sandip Sonavane, a painter and Sandesh

Bhandare, a photographer --who were with me then, and my loyal

rickshaw-driver, Zuber Shaikh, noticed that there was something

very wrong with me that afternoon.

My overflowing ideas sounded brilliant in both outline and detail but

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they belonged a realm different and distant from mundane reality

and practical wisdom.

When Sandip, Sandesh, and Zuber described my performance to

Viju, in a way as respectful as it was delicate and diplomatic, she

began to fear for the worst unless she firmly took charge. But she

hesitated. She feared offending me. She thought of consulting a

physician psychiatrist, which she did with a bad conscience for not

having taken me into confidence.

Concurrently, with my team of commissioned carpenters and Zuber

as my loyal assistant, I launched my project of transforming Ashay's

room into a memorial for him. This too was visualised in amazing

detail and was not difficult to execute.

This is what had frightened Viju out of her wits. She was at the end of

her own physical and mental resources.

I was obviously about to go over the edge unless I was treated

quickly and properly by my reliable physician.

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Even Yohul was getting upset by my obsessive activities at home.

Ever since we entered the front door of our flat that had to be broken

down to rescue Ashay from our smoke-choked home that suffocated

him to death, entering and exiting that door made me tremble. I

decided to change the door, as though to announce to the world that

our mourning was over.

But I extended the idea to re-designing Ashay’s room by converting it

into a permanent exhibition of his paintings, photographs, and

assorted memorabilia. Like a possessed Don Quixote, riding in

Sancho Panza Zuber’s rickshaw, I visited the timber market of Pune

to buy plywood, laminate, and hardware; I interviewed the headman

of a team of young carpenters from Uttar Pradesh, briefed them

about the design of the interior of Ashay’s room I had in mind, and

launched my project of a permanent memorial for Ashay.

We did not have more money in the bank than to see us through the

next two or three months of basic expenses at home and my ATM

card was no Aladdin’s Lamp or cornucopia. But I plunged into this

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project with such obsessive élan that Viju and Yohul found it scary to

watch me among the carpenters, instructing them with crazed eyes

and in a preacher’s incorrigible tone of voice and my own pitch of

prophetic intensity peaking till it seemed I would crack apart any

moment.

Exposure to sawdust caused an allergic return of my chronic

laryngitis. But there was an irrefutable method in my madness, a

perspective any sympathetic person could understand, though would

shudder at the thought of sharing. I went on my way with a

relentlessness that almost daunted those who watched me in action. I

had set a deadline for finishing Ashay’s room a week before his

anniversary, though in our hamstrung financial circumstances such a

deadline was out of my reach. What I was doing was going on a

suicidal spree. Ashay was gone forever and lost to this world. But I

was trying to create his presence in his room, the room where he

lived and worked and drank and cried to himself; and the room

where he was found when neighbours broke the door open.

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69.©

128
©©

There is another symptom of classic textbook hypomania that

characterized my behaviour as November 29 was unforgivingly

approaching. Individuals in this state of upswinging mood often go

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out to do exorbitant shopping, purchase things that they have no

conceivable need of, become outrageously generous--- and their

expansive largesse is laced with unmistakable insanity.

There! I have used the taboo word, forbidden precisely because it

describes certain mental states, and the acts caused by them, with

cruel precision.

Madness in any of its myriad varieties is a stigma so hideous in

people’s minds that only the classical Greek or Latin or Sanskrit or

Persian lexicon can give it a mask of learned and cryptic

respectability that impresses the plebian mind. Call it dementia

praecox and it may make the schizoid cuckoo seem like a peacock

dancing in the heat of love. Or, use the term madness for the

mystifying popular idea of what only geniuses and artists are

licensed to go through, and it sounds even more fascinating in the

context of the Van Goghs and the Hemingways who are killed by

their own depression. The list of globally eminent people who were

victims of unipolar or bipolar disorder in its severest form and driven

to commit suicide may fill a book. But such a book will only contain

the names of celebrities who killed themselves because they could

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not contain the death-drive--and not its euphemistic synonym death-

wish-- any longer. There will remain, outside this black magic circle,

countless others who commit suicide in a violent mood swing.

“There is only one truly serious problem and that is suicide,” said Albert

Camus. It is not my optimistic view of life that is responsible for my

surviving the blackest and the most excruciating moment when life

seemed indistinguable from death. My life, recognizing itself,

painfully and with the greatest effort, pushed itself upward again.

Maybe fifty years of having been a translator of Tukaram made me

refuse permanent darkness and gave me the glimmer of a near-divine

purpose, or nature’s irrepressible thrust, towards what the dying

Goethe is said to have uttered, “Light, more light!”

Was it a sign of weakness, or courage and grit, that made me

voluntarily ask for psychiatric help?

As I was on the way to recovery a Marathi novelist---Vishram

Gupte---came all the way from Goa to visit me. He brought with him

a paperback copy of the celebrated American author William Styron’s

slim but rich and revealing book----Darkness Visible: A Memoir of

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Madness.

I wish I had read it earlier so that I would find my approaching crisis

with clarity and courage and sought expert medical attention earlier

as Viju wished. I have never shown a cowardly countenance to my

own experience, though in a few periods of emergency, I have taken

my ignorance to be some kind of built-in fortitude.

It is such a relief to find the face of an idiot in one’s mirror. One is

liberated by that pang of self-recognition.

CODA

In the last few months, my mind has encountered some dramatic

interior events that compare with tempestuous cerebral

hyperactivity, sweeping tornadoes of ideas and thoughts, volcanic

eruptions of feeling and emotions, the hurling of awareness into

unstoppable spirals, and the strange experience of everything coming

to a slow standstill.

And yet I get the feeling that all this is deja vu--I have already been

there before.

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_____________________________________________________________

_______________

PROLOGUE

What is madness?

How do we know who is mad and who isn't?

Who has the right to decide who is mad?

Nietzsche, who himself went mad, was perhaps the most brilliant

philosopher of his time. In his path breaking work, The Genealogy of

Morals, he used a novel method of separating one epoch of history

from another by highlighting the difference or the gap between them

as the marker between the old and the new. Michel Foucault, whose

work Histoire de la Folie known in English as Madness and Civilization,

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acknowledges Nietzsche as one of his influential precursors. Foucault

himself influenced the course of my generation's thinking.

I have a reason to recall them because I myself had a recent brush

with what might be called madness. Words, however, can be minced.

We may use the broader and vaguer label of mental illness to

describe my condition, building towards a starker manifestation since

the accidental death of my son Ashay on November 29, 2003. There is

no one kind of madness but a plurality of madnesses; and there is no

single mental illness but many illnesses that could be described as

such.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, always the philosopher, once remarked that a

question is like an illness; it needs to be treated. I can literally reverse

that remark and say that an illness is like a question: it needs to be

answered.

How does one answer a mental illness?

The positivist-behaviourist turns around and says that there is no

mental illness; for there is no mind. What you treat is a

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malfunctioning of the brain; and there is a moot point here.

The brain is our master organ in many senses. It controls, through its

extensions and its secretions, nearly all our bodily functions. It sends,

receives, modifies, and controls the trillions of signals within the

integrated entity we call our body. What we call the mind is only a

representation of what is done by the brain of which we still

understand very little, and therefore the mind---to which we attribute

all of our social and interpersonal behaviour---is just a contested

hypothesis useful in certain contexts, especially contexts we create in

order to explain to ourselves our behaviour.

Micro-electrical and psycho-pharmacological intervention produces

astounding alterations in what we still describe as 'mental processes'

and 'states of mind' ---including madness. It is possible to clinically

produce or reproduce madness and conversely to manage the

symptoms and manifestations of madness. It is possible to control or

manipulate pleasure and pain, states of awareness, qualities of

sensation and perception, and emotions with the use of such clinical

intervention. For thousands of years, mankind has searched and

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found naturally occurring substances that alter states of mind. On the

other hand, every civilization has explored the possibilities of

training the 'mind' to explore varieties of experience and to regulate

experience itself by sheer concentrated auto-suggestion.

Sigmund Freud, in his last and most profound work Civilization and

Its Discontents, noted the bi-polarity that we contain as biological

beings: the desire to live---Eros or the libido and the wish to destroy

or to succumb to death---Thanatos or the destrudo.

In contemporary consumerist civilization, and using advanced

technology, analogues or components of naturally occurring

molecules affecting behaviour are created in laboratories and made

available by pharmaceutical corporations to an expanding global

market. If certain forms of temporary madness give certain kinds of

pleasure, we can be sure drugs to induce pleasurable madness will be

produced. My generation understood this in the mid-1950s or half a

century ago.

By the mid-1960s we had experimented with cannabis, peyote,

psilocybe Mexicana, LSD< opium and opiates so that we could alter

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our perception of our own life in an increasingly intolerable world.

By the mid-1970s, it was difficult to find young adults among

leisured classes who had not experienced at least one drug high.

They were as rare as virgins. We tried amphetamines and cocaine;

and some of us killed themselves consuming alcohol followed by

overdoses of barbiturates.

It is not new for the human species to experiment with their own

bodies. Satisfying hunger and sex have a history beginning with our

cave-dweller ancestors; and look at how, in the 21st century, the

culinary and the erotic have assumed the status of fine arts. When

warped and distorted, the same biological needs drive us to crime

against our own species.

As in the case of hunger and sex, fear is the other primal biological

motivator governing our lives. The Other stares back at us from

everywhere, either as God or God's opposite; and we feel persecuted

by the stalker or the hunter or the enemy in pervasive plural forms.

Fear makes us suspicious and paranoid. It turns us into racists,

sexists, and communalists targeting sections or all of the rest of

humanity.

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There is yet another biological factor that drives us : the instinct to

appropriate and acquire, to possess and to accumulate---and this is

greed in its monstrous and grotesque form and it can turn into a

quest for unlimited power over the 'other' viewed as an 'object'.

Taking a detached view of our species as biological beings, if such a

feat were possible, one is afraid whether we are not a seriously

flawed race, a victim of spontaneous malfunction both at the

individual and the social level. How otherwise are we to explain

why, in the 20th century, every scientific and technological

achievement was somehow twisted into an instrument of war and

intraspecific as well as ecological destruction?

Other than two world wars, the last century saw many regional

conflicts, a number of genocidal acts, and billions of human deaths

due to humanly engineered sins of omission or commission. Those

statistics are no secret. They are facts of our history as a species. Even

more terrifying is the fact that human war against humanity is a

product of human organization and perverse human self-

management.

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I lost my only son, bit by painful bit, since he suffered the trauma of

the industrial catastrophe in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India on the

night of December 3-4, 1984. A toxic leak from the chemical tanks of

Union Carbide, a global mega-corporation, killed thousands of

people that night, maimed and crippled thousands, and mentally and

socially disabled many more. My son, Ashay, lived a restricted life

for the next 19 years---a life that blighted his talent, his capabilities,

and his ability to connect with other human beings. His battle to

overcome the handicaps imposed on him was lonely and private.

Even I, his father, was unable to see it in a larger perspective.

It is only after his death that was traumatic for me, did I see that he

was one of the nameless many whose lives were shattered by a

system that brought together a mega-corporation and a nation-state ,

or two nation-states, whose 'economic' agendas made that disaster

possible by locating a potential source of toxicity at the centre of a

densely populated city.

Crimes committed against humanity are not justified even in a war.

In peace, they are heinous in the extreme. Crimes of a corporation are

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inherent in its goals; and crimes of a government are contained in its

policies.

The Bhopal tragedy had some ironic consequences. Union Carbide

was asked to pay compensation to the thousands of victims and their

families but with the skills at negotiation they wriggled out of the

worst scenario for them and were able to 'cut the losses' as they say in

America. The Indian judiciary determined the amount of

compensation to be paid to the victims and asked the state

government of Madhya Pradesh to distribute money accordingly.

God knows how and where the money went and who filed the claims

that were settled. Ashay did try to put in his claims through

registered letters. When nothing happened, he went in person to

Bhopal and met a high government official who happened to be a

friend and resubmitted his claim. Nothing happened. Embittered and

cynical, Ashay decided to drop the matter. In the event, of the

millions of dollars supposedly showered on Bhopal victims, Ashay

did not see a red cent.

Ashay believed that as a writer and a filmmaker, and as a concerned

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kin of a victim, I would do something about Bhopal. It was not until

his loss overwhelmed me that my mind lost its centre and started to

involuntarily swing between life and death that I started seeing

Ashay not as a victim of Bhopal but as a martyr as the philosopher,

Ramchandra Gandhi pointed out to me. Yet, as I wrote the following

pages, what drove me on was my own anguish and sense of

involvement in a tragedy that involved more than a lost son and his

grieving father; and that is what it is at its core---a human tragedy.

Seven centuries before Freud's 20th century speculation on what

drives human life, Shri Jnandev wrote his mystical long poem in

early Marathi---Anubhavamrut---that I have translated into English as

The Immortal Experience of Being. In Jnandev's view Pravrutti or

'outgoing desire' and Nivrutti 'the will to relinquish' are a 'coherent

One'---Shivadvaya, the Indivisible Shiva that tends to expand infinitely and

to contract into nothing in an exquisitely balanced act of being. Where

'pravrutti' and 'nivrutti' do not seem to cohere, there is 'ajnana' or

'incoherent cognition', chaos, and noise without resonance. Where

'pravrutti' or 'recognition' reflects 'nivrutti' or cognition, awareness is

liberated from the bonds of ignorant life.

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