I was forty years old then. I had requested a transfer from Delhi to Chennai. Delhi, being the capital, it was easy to ask to be transferred to another city from there. Initially, I didn’t want to relocate to Chennai, but due to some unavoidable circumstances, I had to make the move.
At that time, we considered the Brahmins as outsiders. The Tamil they spoke was different. However, they treated us students like their own children. There was only one exception—our maths teacher, whom we called Arkay Saar. Despite being fond of us, on Mondays and Thursdays, if anyone hadn’t done their homework, he would grab his bamboo wand and beat the boy severely.
Being quite the coward, it was impossible that I would have defied a court summons, right? The truth is, I never received the summons. How do you explain that to the police? They were from another State and they didn’t understand Tamil. Worse still, English was totally alien to them.
I told the policemen, ‘Charu Nivedita is my chittappa (the younger brother of father), and he has stepped out briefly. Please have a cup of tea somewhere and come back soon; I’ll call him on the phone.’
Whenever I think of Georges Bataille’s story ‘Ma Mère’, I start pondering about the concept of sin. Most of what he wrote was autobiographical and was condemned during his time, as pornographic. Yet, the idea of sin runs like a thread through all his writing. Whereas, in India, which is considered by the west as a society that is …
When someone commits harakiri, he tears his stomach open with a dagger. A trusted man should stand by, to swiftly cut off the head in a single stroke. This is done as soon as he has made the initial incision. Mishima’s military coup failed miserably, and he proceeded to rip open his stomach.
I’ve often heard my friends speak about their fathers as if they were their die-hard enemies. Some even call their fathers bastards. Many of my friends are teetotallers. When asked why, the most common reply is- ‘My father often got drunk and abused my mother.’
Prakash bought the blade and said, “Do it carefully da. If you cut a vital nerve, you’ll have to live as a khosa for the rest of your life.” So, I took the soap and the blade, stole Naina’s shaving brush and went to the cremation ground.
My mother and Naina treated me like an emperor; there was no scolding or reprimand. My mother often remarked that I should have been born in a mansion, but instead, I ended up being born in that slum. Education was nowhere to be seen in her family – only one brother among my mother’s eleven siblings received an education.
Because I have Telugu, Burmese, and Tamil ancestry, my East Asian friends often inquire whether I am from Thailand or Burma. Perhaps in my face they see the images of all these dead.
So the death of my father is now fodder for a story. This is the story of the writer in me walking all over my Naina’s life, and maybe his corpse too, and putting the journey into words. ‘Ordinary’ ethical frameworks can’t apply to a writer who walks on the ‘corpses’ of others.
The Asian Review 