Everything changed that day
Grief and Growing Up.
Everything changed that day. In ways that no one could have imagined.
30th May, 1989.
It is a date of significance for two reasons.
“Can you get me some fish?”, my mother had asked late that afternoon. “I will make some fish stew”. That was all the incentive I needed. I would happily walk the three kilometres up and the three kilometres back from the fish market. There was also an outside chance that I would be in time to get the fresh afternoon catch.
Because, being in a seaside town has its advantages.
Kozhikode is a quaint town-yearning-to-be-a-city. It is also where I was born. But I had never lived there. Not in the real sense.
“Where is your native?”
I used to dread that question growing up. That quintessential of all Indian questions. The question that sends you on a frantic search for your identity.
“Does being born in a place make me a native of that town?”
“Should I say Kozhikode, where my mother was from? Or, should I say Tellicherry, where my father was from?”
“Would I be hurting either, if I said the other’s town?”
“Or, should I say Bhilai, because that is where I had spent the longest anyway”
I had grown used to this inner commentary. Looking back, my overthinking had started way back then.
I had spent every summer holiday in Kozhikode basking in the fawning of my maternal grandparents. Not that my paternal ones didn’t fawn over me. But there were too many of us on my father’s side. His eleven siblings and their children. Which meant that I had a couple of dozen first cousins. Which meant that the fawning had to be shared.
By some strange algorithm, we would spend one and a half months of every summer vacation with my maternal grandparents, and fifteen days with my paternal ones. In a different city. That was the norm. It was one of the very few things that my gentle mother would be firm about. I had always wondered whether my parents had agreed on that algorithm, or whether it was just one of those things that mothers decide and fathers just acquiesce. Had they tabled it? Had they discussed it openly? Had they argued about it? Did they feel okay about it? The socialist in me wanted to ask my father whether he felt hard done by.
One of the many questions that I had filed away to ask.
Until I was a little older.
Because when you are a teen, you think time with your parents is infinite.
Until, it is no longer.
The summer holidays were just long enough to bring me familiarity with the streets.
Not intimacy. But familiarity.
I knew the main roads. I walked the by-lanes. I was familiar with the smell of the choked drains which competed with the fragrance of camphor and the scent of ghee. I knew enough to avoid the crowded street with the tightly packed cluster of shops that have forever sold the same sandalwood incense sticks, the same yellow marigold and jasmine flowers, the same coconuts - all to appease the God inhabiting the temple at the end of that street. I wondered about the blind newspaper-seller who I saw sitting at the very same spot - on the filthy floor of the municipal bus stand – summer after hot summer.
Now years later when I go back, I walk the same roads again.
There is something about a journey back to the small town of your origins that evokes myriad imagery. It combines nostalgia and melancholia in a way that no other voyage does. Perhaps the reasons lie in things that have changed indelibly in that town. Or maybe, it lies in the nature of its soul that has thankfully been preserved despite all attempts at ‘growing up’.
Either which way - and perhaps strangely so - I found comfort even in this melange.
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.
30th May, 1989.
Everything changed that day.
Fish stew. That was all that was in my mind. My mother’s special fish stew.
I was in time for the afternoon catch. I had got fresh seer fish. I was on my back - the finely filleted fish was in the eponymous cheap black plastic cover, icily damp on the outside. I could already taste the fine stew on my tongue. The flavour from the cloves. The pungent bitterness from the garlic. The overall tanginess. In my mind’s eye, I had dipped the freshly baked bread slice into my stew and was about to slurp on it - as I rounded a bend in the narrow street. I saw a small, tight-knit crowd huddled around something. Or someone. I quickened my pace to walk past, since crowds always made me claustrophobic - which one might argue in a country with nearly a billion and half people, makes me destined to be permanently so. Trying my best to avoid any eye contact with anyone, I walked past - the grim muted murmurs telling me that the reason for the crowd was not a happy one.
I walked twenty metres beyond and then walked twenty metres back.
For the twenty metres that I had walked beyond I had convinced myself that it could not be. As I walked past that crowd, in my mind's eye I had seen the familiar thinning white hair combed back, slightly dishevelled. On a man prone on the ground. By the time I reached the crowd and parted them, I knew it was him. The only confirmation I needed was lying face up - a small cut on his forehead, already cold on my clammy palms. He lay on a thin long rectangular black rexine cushion which the kind hearted shop owner in front of whose shop he had collapsed had brought out.
To lay my father on.
With the frenzied swirl of fear and panic, my beseeching look needed no words as I looked around the crowd. For help. For reassurance. For hope.
Hope is a strange thing. I didn't know – and didn't want to acknowledge then - that my father had been felled, and almost certainly died from a massive cardiac arrest. His second in two months. And took what was to be his last and final breath in the middle of a nondescript small-town street.
The rest of that evening will forever be imprinted in my mind. Not the least of which will be the heart-rending scream from deep within my mother's soul as she ran into the emergency room of the hospital to which I took him. One look into my eyes which had long since given up hope of my father's revival was enough to tell her. That scream into my chest still echoes deep in the chambers of my heart.
In those few days, circumstances fast forwarded me into adulthood. Far too quickly than I had ever wanted to. Or been prepared for.
“Too young to go” – is what people said. Yes. I agreed. Vehemently so. Too many questions left unasked.
Too devastating for a wife widowed at 44.
Too tragic for a mother to outlive her oldest son.
Too soon for a young boy who had looked forward to have his father move from being a father to being a friend.
Everything changed that evening.
30th May 1989.
The evening of my 18th birthday.
Author’s Note: This personal essay was written as part of the course work from the ‘Leadership and Selfhood Through Creative Writing’ program run by AshokaX. The writing prompt was “Everything Changed That Day”.
I am deeply saddened to see this. It must have been an incredibly hard thing to go through.
This is heart wrenching. Hugs.