Au revoir mon ami

At 11.50 am on January 28, 2009, Dr. Christopher Augur, a scientist working with the French government’s IRD in Mexico City, was shot in the head for a princely sum of four thousand eight hundred Euros. A friend was driving him after he had exchanged the money at the airport. As their car entered the viaduct, three cars blocked their way and two gunmen demanded the money from Dr. Augur. He handed over his satchel immediately but was still shot point blank in the head. He lay in coma in a Mexico City hospital until his family decided to remove the life support. He finally died on the morning of January 31, 2009.

Christopher was one of my best friends for the last 22 years.

Actually, after all the years of knowing each other and all the strange experiences we’ve had together; after all the meetings and all the staying over at each other’s over three continents; after all the getting to know each other’s families and friends and cousins and aunts at some time or the other; after all the ways our entire lives intertwined, we had become more than friends and more like family.

I remember my first meeting with Christopher as vividly as if it were yesterday.

I left the safety of my extended family two days after Holi in March 1987 for my first flight alone anywhere. I flew Calcutta-Delhi, Delhi-Frankfurt and Frankfurt-Atlanta with long stopovers in Delhi and Frankfurt. By the time I reached Atlanta, I was exhausted. It took me a long time to pull my two huge suitcases (in which my mother had packed everything she thought I could ever need including a pressure-cooker) and get my bearings and find the shuttle to Athens that the Foreign Students’ Office had suggested I take. Another couple of hours later, the shuttle dropped me off at the Georgia Centre at the University of Georgia. It was late afternoon when I got there.

I had been asked by Neelesh Bangalore, then the president of the Indian Students Association of the UGA to call him once I got to the Georgia Centre and he would come and pick me up. He was supposed to have arranged temporary accommodation for me until I found off campus housing.

I kept calling Neelesh and his answering machine kept picking up. Afternoon turned into evening and then night and with every passing hour, I became more and more numb and unable to think, too tired to actually panic.

At nine pm, I called the Neelesh again. The phone rang four times, again. His answering machine picked up again. I was now tearful when I started to leave a message, again. But this time, before I had gone beyond “This is Ranee again—” a strong, sure, matter-of-fact and very un-Indian voice came on line and said “Hang on. I’ll be there in 5 minutes.”

I walked my incredibly heavy suitcases to the driveway in front of Georgia Centre. It was a cold and windy March night and by this time, I was a jetlagged and bewildered zombie and the saree and bangles I had so patriotically worn for my flight out of India and into the United States now seemed impossible to control.
Five minutes later, a tiny white Renault Le Car zipped into the driveway of the Georgia Centre. A tall-ish blue-ish eyed blonde man jumped out of the car, stalked towards me, said “Hi, I’m Christopher. I’m Neelesh’s roommate. Let’s go,” hoisted my heavy bags into the boot of his carlet and opened the passenger side door for me.

In another 5 minutes, I was ensconced in the warm and cosy living room of the small on-campus home of Vijay and Gayathri Kumar. As Gayathri hovered over me asking me what I wanted to eat and drink, Christopher answered for me in his firm, no nonsense way: “Nothing. Just let her sleep.” Immediately, 3 year old Puneeth was thrown out of his room and I was in his warm and soft bed.

I slept for sixteen straight hours.

Christopher, Vijay and Gayathri were my first friends at the University of Georgia and over my years there, they became my surrogate family.

Birthdays, picnics, fevers and colds; dawn drives to the annual Rich’s warehouse sales; visits to the farmer’s market; all-night back-to-back Hindi movie marathons; pot-luck dinners at Diwali and Holi; India Nights; watching Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson; movies, malls, haircuts and grocery-shopping with each other; dropping and picking each other up at Hartsfield; taking each other’s company and homes and vehicles and food completely for granted—since that moment I entered their lives, we were just people who sort of got along well and then we just stuck.

After our PhDs, Vijay-Gayathri stayed on in the US, I came back to Calcutta and Christopher eventually returned to France. Thanks to Christopher’s jet-setting and our ritualistic fervour for summer vacations we kept meeting through the years. We met in India, in Europe, in the US every one and a half year or so on an average.

Christopher came to Calcutta a few days after I got married. My husband Sanjib and my friend Christopher thankfully got along famously after an initial sizing-up period. Over time, Christopher became our friend. In fact, I will even admit to a tiny spark of jealousy that my exclusive rights to Christopher’s friendship were so easily usurped by my husband.

To my kids, he was Christopher Uncle. They adored him. They loved his wicked sense of humour and his rapier-quick repartees. They were in awe of his life-style and the way he would constantly jet from one continent to another with that schoolboy satchel and that tiny suitcase. They admired his eye for the beautiful things that he collected relentlessly, then obsessively labeled, numbered and photographed before he packed them up into cartons. They so totally appreciated the way he could be rude to me and laugh at me and make fun of me the way they never could! Christopher was great with all kids. He connected with them on their level; he understood them; he never, ever talked down to them.

Christopher, Vijay and Gayathri spent 5 days at our home in Calcutta just 2 months back. In fact, the photograph on the right when we went for a sunset cruise on the Hoogly river in early November 2008. It was the first time we were all physically together in one place since 2001. In retrospect, I’m so happy we could all get together one last time. We will never get another chance.

I can’t believe I won’t see him this summer. On the day he was shot, I got an e-mail from asking me to hurry up with my summer plans so that he could arrange how and where to catch up with me. But always the intrepid traveler, Christopher has gone ahead of us to discover new worlds.

Wherever he is, I hope it is sunny and warm there because Christopher hated the cold. He absolutely loved Mexico: he loved the people, the landscape, the art, the pottery, the atmosphere but most of all, he loved the weather there. That’s where he wanted to open all his cartons full of treasures and set them up forever. That’s where he wanted to live his final days.

He did.

Christopher got his way in most things.