Horemheb's Musings

First Published on 26 January, 2013

It was a bright morning of 1992 and I was sprinting down from Vaishno Devi temple in Jammu and Kashmir, the climbing stick in hand and playing a silly form of train train down the winding roads to the town of Katra. We had gone to the mountain shrine along with some family friends and after a night long trek to the mountain top temple and an early morning visit to the Bhairav Mandir still higher up I was in high spirits of a 7 year old having fun. It was while running down on one of those U turns that I suddenly realized that my legs were no longer under my control. I was nearing ever closer to the edge of the precipice neither my stick nor my legs following my instructions to stop me from having a very violent death. It was just at the precipice when I was looking down at the abyss below and my immediate death that a hand grabbed my shoulders and stopped me. My father had saved me from death and destruction.

This was a pattern that I would relive for the remaining 20 odd years I shared with my father. At my heights of exuberant spirits, borne by my incredible stupidity there was always my father who reached in the nick of time to save me from the abyss. My father was always the master of panic situations. In ordinary matters he could be completely cuckoo, senseless, illogical downright silly even at times, but in times of crisis my father has always been the anchor of support for me. During the heights of my lunacy in the third semester of my engineering college, when as a counselor representing my batch I was leading a strike against the college administration my father chastised me for standing out, that too so stupidly. Head swelling up with the leadership role I wielded the lone voice of criticism from my father was not heeded much by me. However when I was suspended from college and everyone from my mother to other relatives were telling me to buckle down and beg for mercy from my college, my father once again pulled me from the abyss. He told me that I had stood for something I believed in, so take whatever punishment came my way, but never backtrack from my position. Even if I lost a year or two it was okay. That single voice gave me strength when all around me people were losing their heads. When after 4 years of regular engineering college and 2 more years of writing supplementary exams I was desperate, depressed and in dead gloom about my future, at a time when I realized how the engineering college had been the bane of my life and I was despairing on how to let go, it was then again my father who gave me the courage to leave it and walk another path. When everyone about me lost their heads my father has always been there as a source of strength to me.

And now that bed of strength is no more. After 2 years of inevitably losing battle with acute liver cirrhosis on Wednesday, 23rd of January, 2013 at 4 PM my father passed away.

My father was not a perfect man. He was however a real man. A man with flaws and perfections. A man with vices and virtues. A man who made mistakes and also did the right things. He was a mortal. He was a man. I know better than most his imperfections, having borne the brunt of the said flaws myself. But I also know better than most his greatness. It was often during our regular and extremely incendiary fights over his flaws that I let him know of how much I appreciated him. For that has always been my greatest worry, whether or not my father knew how much I admired him, respected him, adored him.

My father was the definition of a self-made man. Born in a family rich in tradition and an exalted dynastic heraldry but poor on finances, he was the proverbial truant. Never listening to his parents, always fighting with his siblings, naughty to the point of being a rascal. Never one to accept authority at face value, he always insisted that people earn their respect rather than meekly submitting to them and it was this strong sense of independence that translated into the disdain he often felt for his teachers which eventually resulted in his poor academics. However with the right teachers and the right challenges he proved to everyone that he was not the idiot they had condemned him to be.

Always a man who chased his dreams he took the risky path of being a pilot. A childhood dream he chased it by enrolling in the Trivandrum Flying Club. After earning a Private Pilot’s License he followed it with a Commercial Pilots License and later an Instructors License. He often regaled and at times bored his visitors with excruciatingly detailed stories of his life from those days. He may not have realized how many people were squirming in their seats to escape or change the topic, but for me those stories stand out in my mind as the saga of an extremely adventurous and self-confident man, a man who dared to tread the path taken by the few. The challenges of being fit for flight duty, the challenges faced during the certification flights, the scares and near misses and the near ridiculous daredevilry that he occasionally performed moulded me into what I am today.

Always an intensely personal person, rare at making friends and quick at making enemies, he was never a very social person. However the rare friends he has had, they have stuck with him through the years. His friends always remembered him as a person who saw them for their qualities and never saw them down as is wont for the majority of the people around us. Having lived a stigmatized life in his youth my father was always willing to lend a helping hand to people who were looked down upon by our nasty society because of their unconventional abilities. Even after being burnt several times by being cheated by unscrupulous people, having lost countless money and time and affection on them, my father was ever willing to lend a helping hand to people in need of a supporting push.

I remember how he never used to stick to a Paan wallah in Delhi for more than 2 weeks as in 2 weeks he would have a fight with him. Even with and especially with his closest of friends he would have vocal fights but they were all tempered with great love between them. His fights with me are usually audible all over the Kochi kingdom limits, but I know that he realized that I argued and fought so fiercely with him only because I cared and loved him that much.

In fact the constant friction between me and my father was always a defining feature during my adulthood. Having grown from the age of 10 to 18 raised by my mother and grandmother while my father was living and working in New Delhi it was tough for him to be reconciled with the fact of a grown up me when he took Voluntary retirement after the death of my grandmother in 2003. Very rarely did he use to display his affection for me openly, and most of it was on those rare nights that he used to have a few drinks with his friends. My mother naturally never approved but I always silently cheered myself whenever my father had drinks because I knew those nights he would be at his affable best. I guess it was on those nights that he laid down his defenses.

It was especially due the extremely abrasive nature of our normal interaction that on that night in March 2011 when my father was admitted at the Lakshmi Hospital when after another bout of vomiting he held me close and hugged me that I was scared to my bones. My father had been having loose motions and vomiting since evening and was admitted at the nearby Hospital for some drips. At his uncharacteristic display of affection, I sensed that he was at his weakest. After assisting him to bed I immediately ran over to the nurses’ station and asked them to check his vomit. They saw the specks of black I pointed out to them and found his blood pressure to be 60/90. Within minutes we were blazing off to Lakeshore hospital where he was immediately taken to the Intensive Care Unit. The doctor later said that had there been at least 30 minutes of delay, my father would have been lost.

And thus the fight with cirrhosis started which ended this Wednesday.

The doctor in ICU had talked to me while my father was sedated and briefed me fully on the disease. He told me there was no recovery from this stage, we can only manage the symptoms until the inevitable. I remember how I paced the corridor outside the ICU for those several days, eager for any small glimpse of my father from behind occasional gaps in the curtains. I remember the intense fear and suffocation of not being able to cry out my fears as I had to be strong for my mother lest she go to pieces. Most of all I remember how four days later my father scolded me for wearing pants in the afternoon and I realized gladly that was getting back to normal. Normal for this father son relationship has always been abrasion hiding beneath it depths of affection.

I have always been proud of my father. Proud of his self-made status. Proud of how he designed and supervised the construction of our home, his dream home from several thousand kilometers away. I am proud of the stoniness he described when he told of how his friend had died in a plane crash in Kochi during Utsavam several years ago and he had assisted in the mortuary. I have also been extremely in awe of the care and respect he showed my grandmother, his mother in law. My father gave the care to my grandmother while she was wasting away due to cancer that was above and beyond any duty of a son in law. And it was during those days that I pledged and prayed that I have the strength to give my father the care that he had given to my grandmother. And I am proud today that I have been able to do those filial duties.

Though I am sad at the passing away of my father I am also extremely happy that he did not have to suffer. He died after living a full life. He truly completed the Circle of Life. He died like he lived, surrounded by love. However I regret that I have been such an unsatisfactory and disappointing son. My father had always been hyperactive and athletic in his youth. Always an engineer’s engineer he was also a master craftsman. I also knew that he always despaired of my own lethargic and sloth nature. He was extremely glad the day I won the National Talent Search Examination, but after that I fear I never gave him a chance to say he could be proud of me. Academically I have screwed up beyond all recall and he always despaired of my poor career positions. I know that I will change them, the confidence and strength to change my conditions I gained from my father, but I will never be able to forgive myself for the fact that my father could not see his dreams about me achieve fruition in his lifetime. Towards the end of his lifetime he too was affected by the Bullet bug that he contracted from me, in fact only a week or so ago he told me that he too had the Bullet dream. In December 2012 I finally booked a Bullet and I knew that he was eager to see me ride it. A week ago I had prayed that he lived long enough to see me with my Bullet, but that wish went unanswered.

Though he is no more in life as a person, I have memories of him to give me strength in future moments of near destruction. I know he would be there to hold me from the abyss. Even though I am not the sort who pays much heed to the concept of afterlife I like to think that my father is now in the realm that he always thrived in – the skies. From ashes to ashes and from dust to dust indeed.