After his death, I pretended to still obsess over Bret Hart, the Hitman, and Hulk Hogan like my other classmates to be, you know,normal.
It suddenly fell quiet inside the house. Maa–Baba’s voices reduced to distressing whispers. Their sadness seeped through the mosaic of the floor, the fabric of the curtain, the wired mesh of the gate and clawed into me. Maa came to fetch me after an hour, crying and repentant. After dinner Baba came bearing a new set of WWE trump cards. Over dinner, Maa–Baba and I analysed my chemistry question paper and they were as confounded as Brahmi was.
‘Don’t do silly mistakes the next time,’ they both echoed.
‘I won’t.’
‘What do we have other than the two of you?’ said Maa.
‘I know, Maa.’
After they put me to bed, they took a taxi to the airport to get Dada home. They must have told Dada about today’s happenings because he came to me once he was home.
‘They expect more out of you. Don’t disappoint them, Raghu,’ he said.
‘And you can go about doing whatever you want to, isn’t it?’
‘That’s unfair, Raghu.’
‘Absolutely not! I’m the one who has six scholar medals, thirty-three certificates, and the first row in the annual-day choir. What have you given them, Dada? Just a lousy 1650 rank in IIT JEE? 89 per cent in boards?’
‘I didn’t get the memo saying we had to do certain things to qualify as being a worthy Ganguly.’
‘But you were certainly given plenty of instructions about what they expected you to do.’
‘Raghu.’
‘And what you weren’t expected to do!’
‘Oh please, I am too tired for this,’ said Dada and left the room like he wasn’t so obviously at fault.
These days Dada has a way of making everything worse.
Bad day in all, but right now I’m thinking of Brahmi’s and my sweater—twisted and tied and unified.
P.S. That beautiful abandoned building I saw a few days ago? Yes. They are tearing it down or maybe it’s just falling apart.
29 March 1999
Dada was born in ’78. It was a year of great turbulence, Baba always tells us. The government at the Centre was tottering, the saviour of Bengalis in West Pakistan, Indira—Maa Durga in the words of Atal Bihari Vajpayee—had been re-elected to the Parliament, and two men hijacked a plane with toy guns asking the cases against Indira Gandhi and her younger son Sanjay Gandhi to be dropped.
Ridiculously enough, Baba tells me that both those men became Congress politicians. Of course, Indira and Sanjay Gandhi are both dead now, Dada tells me. Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguards as revenge against her defiling their holiest place of worship, the Golden Temple, and her son Sanjay died in a fiery plane crash.
In stark contrast, 1983, the year I was born, was quiet. Apart from India’s historic cricket World Cup win there was nothing to write home about. This tells the story of us too. Dada is the turbulent one, to whom things never cease to happen, sometimes brilliant and sometimes the embarrassingly low-grade drinker of alcohol and maker of friends, finder of lovers from different religions and holder of their hands, doer of a software job, receiver of business trips.
And then there’s me, the mama’s boy, the more intelligent one, and who has almost never had to hide anything from Maa–Baba. But then Sami died and everything changed.
But Dada still thinks he enjoys a certain immunity because I have been—largely—the mature one.
In a string of his recent stupidities, he has added another one. He has agreed to his company’s offer to shift him to Bangalore. They will put him up at a five-star hotel—all expenses paid—for three months. Maa–Baba have vetoed it violently.
‘You’re not going anywhere! Your Maa didn’t feed you, bathe you, and work day and night for you just so you could leave her the minute you grow up. You’re not leaving your Maa,’ said Baba and left the table mid-dinner.
Maa chose to express her disapproval by maintaining a cold, steely silence.
Later I went to Dada’s room.
‘You can’t just leave them here,’ I said.
