Sand Wind and Stars~

Dear Dadaji,

When I look at your picture I am amazed at how many parts of you have left around us like the sand wind and the stars. Your hands that live in Papa’s hands, Your gentle presence that Papa exudes just the way you did, sitting hours in the winter sun.

I don’t remember your passing away bringing up any sadness in my 5 year old heart.  The stench of urine that coming from your room cut me off from you. I was so scared to enter then. You were growing old and I was growing young. I was getting the power to make choices to be with people or to avoid them. I would avoid you for days and days when you would call for me. I felt I could altogether avoid the unnecessary involvement with death disease and decay (Although not so consciously!) Sometimes when I could muster enough good sense to enter your room which had Papa’s tools hanging on the walls you would lovingly tell me broken stories. Some stories that I already remembered, some I recognized to be warped some completely drones of your sound breaking.

On clear days you would come out of your room and take a walk. And I remember your lively long stepped walk. You were such a tall man. It was difficult to think that someone so well formed could be falling apart in body.

Its strange I never saw you intensly alive. You were always my old dadaji to me. The most electric I have seen you were in your stories of travels across the world. Your days of fighting the world war in Hungary where you got lice in your hair. Your hundred stories of Raja Ram Chandra of Ayodhya who had a dutiful wife. The stories of your illiterate brothers and  your bringing them to civilization and farming in the terai of Nanital. I still read your books kept in the dingy store room in Bareilly now. Although I find it hard to imagine that you read them too. I still remember your shiny white strong teeth. They lasted you more than mine will! I remember that Tall lanky figure with a flowing white beard and didn’t quite know what kind of a man you would have made for woman around you. But I know the man you were in your bones and blood. I carry you inside me like the sand wind and stars.

Love

Seetal