I.
The word orphan had no basis in my life until the 7th of September 2024 when I lost my dearest father to eternal sleep. My father was a strong hearted person who thrived on taking long walks, enjoyed in cooking biryani and other time-consuming delicacies in our small apartment kitchen amidst a suffocating and sweltering Calcutta weather, persevered by commuting to work daily on public transportations battling the incorrigible Calcutta traffic, so when I heard the news of his passing, I let out an agonized cry of disbelief. He and I were on the opposite sides of the Atlantic: he was in India and I in the United States. I knew he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s for the past two years, but what gave me confidence that he will be okay was his ‘miracle’ genes that kept him alive despite falling unconscious and remaining unresponsive to medical stimuli for multiple times over these two years. I came to believe that my mother was the spiritual force behind my father’s staying alive, and so naively and quite happily had been nursing the belief that my father was perhaps immortal. My sister and I touched his face with burning sticks symbolically signifying the Hindu ritual of mukh-agni (literally: lighting fire to the face), an important step in the cremation process that has primordially been a son’s job to do, but given the lessening of the gender divide now and society’s attempt in situating the girl child at an equal footing with a boy, flexibility in orthodox Hindu rituals have come to exist. While his body was being electrically cremated, we waited silently and patiently because we felt weak from crying. 9th September was the darkest night of our lives: our baba was gone forever.
He was a different kind of a father: overprotective, overbearing, and over sentimental to the point where he would simply stop communicating if we erred on his wrong side. My mother maintains that Baba and I are ‘same’; what she means by it is that I am a carbon copy of his mannerisms, attitudes, and style of thinking, which I consider a blessing. My father loved to argue passionately and honestly which people found hard to confront with because I guess their arguments lacked that sincerity to match with his. He never took a single rupee as a bribe even when the family struggled to make ends meet. To him, the fact that he was the son of a humble and an upright police officer, who got selected to serve in the Scotland Yard at the end of his career, was far more valuable than a briefcase full of corrupt money. He worked hard, learned fast, and grew strong by each passing year in his work. My father was a coconut, a favorite metaphor of my mother for him. People around him failed to see his kernely softness which we saw and felt being permeated every time we were around him.
He was not perfect, but none of us are. I discerned an evolution of his personality from his younger self to the one he was cremated with: he evolved from being brutally blunt to silently selective. I think with growing age he had begun to realize that blood ties do not guarantee a permanent bond: his self-respect was hurt the most by the ill behavior of his brother and two sisters. Being the second eldest of the four siblings, my father had tried his best to stand by them and be a part of them, but the conniving and hypocritical acts of his youngest sister against him had ruined his mental sanity and excluded him from his own. While I cannot confirm if the vile politics of his own triggered his mental and physiological breakdown subtly at first and progressively later on, my father never showed any signs of depression to us at least.
In fact, when he visited us in the US in 2020, he looked exuberant to explore America. Looking at his animated self, I often felt he was a Pilgrim who couldn’t contain his excitement being on the New World. He gifted us generously: bags from Vera Bradley, perfumes from Perfumania, and watches from Fossil. At times, my husband and I mildly objected to his gift giving ways because we wanted him to see that he was spending in dollars, but my father was a difficult man to argue with and had replied that he knew how to spend his money and where.
My parents were married for 44 years, and I believed I knew theirs was an arranged marriage just like mine, but I was a fool to have assumed so because on the 10th morning when we were all reminiscing our memories of baba and looking at his wedding album and other photographs where he is apparently alive, our Rangamama, my mother’s own brother, accidently tumbled out that my parents had courted each other for some years before eventually tying the knot. So in sum, my parents were together for more than 44 years, almost half a century. But why was their love story delicately hidden from us I asked, but my mother only blushed, and everyone else reciprocated with a laugh.
I have decided to frame the picture of my parents standing under the Statue of Liberty. They look golden, inseparable, and so much in love. He was Suhas, and she is Sumitra, and they were made for each other.
My biggest takeaway from my father is this word – control. He had taught me to control my emotions, control my impulsivities, control my anger, and control my temptations. Being a Krishna devotee, my father lived a life of simplicity and humility. Although his death has reduced me to a half orphan, he continues to live in my DNA and memory. I’m certain I’ll will meet him again in that heavenly abode after I leave this material world.
II.
Today is 15th October and I’m riding back home on the metro after my evening graduate class at American University. As I sit next to the window looking at the slate blackness of the sky, I’m reminded that it’s been a little over a month since Baba’s passing. The image of Baba’s dead body floats in my memory and every time I’m not engaged in deep work, like now, that image re-surfaces before my eyes as if I can touch his lifeless face and caress his cold forehead again. More painful is the memory of him being ushered into chamber 4 of the electrical crematorium. Despite Rangamama’s tight grip on my shoulder so that I don’t do anything hysterical or impulsive as Baba was about to be burned in a few seconds, I tried ungripping to reach forward and touch him one final time but failed. My eyes were burning from over crying. I caught a glimpse of the merciless fire that immediately began streaming onto his body, but before I could stare long, the doors of the chamber slammed shut cutting us off from Suhas Chandra Chattapadhyay, our adorable baba, forever.