The boy who

was King Arthur

Leave yourself behind, and you'll always be true to yourself. This is
what Rippan Kapur's life tells us, says C. Y. Gopinath

RIPPAN WAS KING ARTHUR.

It was a school production about a small but dangerous ogre who threatens the king
as he rides through a jungle. Arthur contemplates the beast, and then decides it is
really too small for him to fight. The years pass, and the ogre grows larger and more
powerful, but Arthur always deigns to slay it. Finally, the monster is a giant advancing
to kill the king. With great reluctance, for he hates violence, King Arthur engages it in
combat, and of course, wins.

I heard this anecdote from one of Rippan's schoolteachers and it struck me that she
didn't seem sure any more who was the teacher and who the taught. Her
organisation is among the countless that have come into being on the shoulders of
Child Relief & You, Rippan's only child. Gloria was much older than 40-year-old
Rippan, but already age had become trivial. The man was larger than his years.

If your glance moved to the low table in the corner of the hall, you would have seen a
framed photograph of Rippan, and it might have struck you that he couldn't have
looked less like any king. In fact, with his pixie eyes and small-boned, sharp profile,
he could have passed more easily for a prankster. If you ever chatted with him, his
turn of phrase might have struck you as decidedly collegian, with its heavy
dependence on yaars and euphemisms. All in all, there is a good chance that
Rippan, in his white khadi kurta and disappearing presence, would have fooled you
completely. What an ordinary fellow. So much like everyone else. They say he works
with Air India as a purser. Looks the type.
THE BOY WHO WAS KING ARTHUR 2

The first time I saw him, I was mildly annoyed. It was 12 years ago, and the time was
close to midnight. Our sleep was disturbed by Rippan standing in the driveway two
floors below and calling out to my sister. She would drop whatever she was doing,
pick up her art materials and vanish for hours. While the parents conjectured about
what was going on, I wondered why Rippan never bothered to come up to say hullo.

We didn't know, any of us, that this slight young man carried in his belly a fire much
more fierce than ordinary people possessed. My sister, still in art school then, was
merely one of dozens who had been infected by Rippan's cause. According to him,
he was only one human being, and there was far too little time. Everywhere, children
were being brutalised, scarred, battered. They were being claimed by destitution,
discrimination, disease, every inequity that cold, unfeeling minds can conceive and
construct. To Rippan, no life had meaning if it could not respond to the violence that
we subject our children to. Lesser individuals might have had time to say hullo;
Rippan was always behind schedule.

I did not understand the zeal for a long time; it took even longer to acknowledge that
it was sacred. I have a hazy recollection of a long, heated debate with Rippan, in his
house. CRY was by then a known name, and Rippan, as eccentric as only he could
be, had decided to raise funds through an event called Circus Magic. Three British
clowns would entertain slum children in India, and use the event to raise money for
CRY. I got to know Rippan a little better then, but I was still farther away than I
realised. Why, I asked him one evening, did he carry such a low opinion of people
who left CRY? I had heard that Rippan almost took it as a personal insult when
someone moved away from working for children. Is it not enough, I asked him, that
people do what they can, to the extent they can, for as long as they can?

Rippan has always been impatient with such intellectualism. He politely parried with
me for a while, and then wound it all up with, "Look, I don't have time to argue about
these things. It's not enough that you do what you can do. You have to do more than
you can do. Otherwise it's not good enough."

He lived fervently by his own rule; by 40, he had packed several eras into a lifetime
of dreaming and doing. During his last days in hospital, right till the time came to
leave, King Arthur was planning new conquests, spinning detailed tales of aftermaths
and consequences, sure that no one, not even God, would have the heart to
interrupt such a vital enterprise. I don't think, though, that Rippan believed in God.
The fact that children needed CRY must have somehow been proof to him that if
there was a divinity, it didn't care very much.
THE BOY WHO WAS KING ARTHUR 3

Rippan cared, and cared more than he ever revealed. He was not given to mush or
melancholy, and a love that did not express itself in a deed was no love in his view.
But today, in his wake, it is clear that Rippan, of all the humans I know, loved
uniquely all his life, in ways that we cannot and dare not. His heart belonged to a
generation crawling in the dust, and he existed for them alone. His most remarkable
achievement as the founder of CRY must be the anonymity he effortlessly shrouded
himself in. Rippan was not a star. He was King Arthur in a shepherd's garb.
Sometimes, even the sheep didn't know he was there.

A few hundred gathered at CRY last week for a prayer meeting, people who had
dealt with CRY, people who had known Rippan. But it was not a requiem, it was a
hosannah. As they spoke, one by one, haltingly, laughing and remembering this
merely extraordinary soul, Rippan filled the room like incense. It was not grief that
made my eyes wet. It was the knowledge that there, in that hall, prevailed a spirit as
ordinary as mine and immeasurably larger, purer, bolder and beyond conquest.

Rippan never stood for mere Rippan alone, and if his old teacher thought he had
something to teach her, it must have been this — if you really want to travel to travel
far, you have to leave yourself behind.