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.

Is this it?

This morning, I had breakfast at the Tollygunge Club with one old friend I see often and another I hadn't met for 26 years. The first lives and works here in Calcutta and the other teaches at MIT now but years ago, all three of us studied French at Alliance Francaise and read for our undergraduate degrees at St. Xavier's.

As they sometimes do, the years in between just seemed to vanish in the first few moments of our meeting and almost instantly, we were doing the typical Bangali philosophical adda thing even as we tried to catch up with each other's lives.

At one point we started talking about things of Universal significance (again a typical Bangali adda thing) and what if "this was it" and if, when we went, we were just gone--like "blips."

Would we be disappointed if we came to know there wasn't anything more?
No "rebirth" in another time; no reincarnation as another genus or species; no "passing on" to another plane of existence; no journey upwards or downwards; no rewards and no consequences; no being recycled again and again, here on this earth, until our souls couldn't be used anymore...

No reason to anticipate enduring the "going hence" as we endured our coming hither. Therefore, no "ripeness" no "before his time" no grief or mourning for what could've, would've, might've...

Would I be disappointed if "this was it? "
I guess I would be. I guess I'd feel a bit betrayed, as if the Universe promised more than it delivered.

From the gyres of dense black hole pin points growing to ever-expanding galaxies condensing to dense black hole pin points and the poetry of quantum strings endings are not really ends and beginnings aren't really beginnings and the vibrations never end.

Things collapse and regenerate endlessly.

Alia destroys and devastates and kills hundreds of thousands of land creatures but at the same time she churns the ocean and sea life prospers and has a boom year.

Is this it?
Maybe for this consciousness it is.
Maybe for this soul it is.
Maybe for this matter, this essence; this element; this form of energy; this dimension of existence; this universe...

But I'm reasonably sure there is a process and that we're some part of that process and will be until the process is done.
Only to begin again.


Ultimately,
Do I care if I regain this consciousness?
Do I care if there is a collective consciousness?
Do I care if consious life continues hereafter?


It would be nice, I guess, to merge into a paramatman and continue as a conciousness that holds on to the aggregate of all awareness and have the onion peels of the universe unfurl.

It would be wonderful to have the Universe validate this life and begin another becoming into something else.

For the traveller within me, it would be exciting to have the journey continue.

But I'm not going to sweat it. If this is it, so be it.

I'll blip.

Turkish Dynamite

One perfect, balmy night in a small Turkish town, I met Hulya Celek.

Back home, I find myself thinking of her at odd moments. I am glad I met her. Her spirit inspires me. Her confidence uplifts me. Her kindness, warmth, hospitality and above all, her laughter as as she constantly battles the custodians of tradition make her unforgettable.

It was Rubik’s 16th birthday and we were in Selcuk in Turkey. We spent the morning lazing and walking around the town centre, then went to the Pamucak Beach (about 7 kms West of Selcuk) to swim all afternoon in the special Agean blue in Rubik’s honour.

In the evening, after a revitalizing swim in the heated hotel pool, we walked back to the town centre for dinner. On the way, we saw a bakery and bought a birthday cake for Rubik. Cake in hand, we stopped often to admire the colourful shops full of exquisite carpets, kilims, clothes, ceramics and silver displayed in the shop windows. As we crossed a shop, we heard a clear, loud voice calling from behind us,

“So whose birthday is it?”
Rubik turned shyly and made an automatic reply: “mine.”

A diminutive woman with dark hair and expressive eyes walked up to him and gave his hand an enthusiastic shake. “Happy Birthday.” We exchanged polite pleasantries for a while and went our way.

On our last evening in Selcuk, we went shopping. Rubik wanted to visit the shop of the woman who had wished him so warmly on his birthday, and so we went. The children went into the shop to browse for gifts for their friends while we stood outside on the sidewalk. We could see the lady talk to them animatedly and we heard shouts of intermittent laughter wafting out of the shop. After what seemed to be a long time, I went in to get my children out and found that they had really bonded with the tiny Turkish woman.

They must have spent close to an hour in that shop and Hulya had only about 4 YTL in sales to show for it. But selling didn’t seem to be her primary goal. She was just enjoying the children. “Allah hasn’t given me any of my own, so you must let me enjoy yours for a little bit” she said.

Hulya and I hit it off immediately. While we were inside the shop chatting, her husband was talking to my husband on the sidewalk. As she gave the children their change, Hulya suddenly asked me if I would join her for a cup of chai. I said yes and we found ourselves sitting with our spouses on a table and 4 chairs on the sidewalk, poring over Turkey maps and chatting about Sufism and life in Turkey over many, many cups of apple tea.

Hulya talked to us about her difficulties as a woman entrepreneur in a society where owning and running a retail business was still very much a male bastion. She was constantly bad-mouthed by her neighbours and small, niggling troubles kept being sent her way by other shop-keepers and the keepers of tradition around her.

She talked about the gender prejudices just under the skin of “modern” Turkey. She was candidly scathing about the “new” Turkish women of the big cities (“I know it is so wrong of me but forgive me, Allah, for talking badly of other people!”) and the contempt most men still held for women like her who wanted to live and work like men (“because you see, our hair is long so our brains are much smaller”). The contempt, she said, extended unfortunately to her husband, who was seen as less than a man because he chose to play a supporting role in what was essentially her business.

We were joined somewhere along the evening by Margaret, an Irish woman who was on an extended trip to Turkey and the conversation turned to the seamier side of the tourist boom, which was luring little girls and boys to all the wrong things (“easy money, gambling, little dresses, pubs, discos, drugs--they don’t want to work anymore!”); the thriving “granny tourism” in the Ephesus-Kusadasi area (where older western women were “entertained” by young Turkish men in exchange for gifts and good times) and the general failure of the system vis-à-vis the common citizen.

As we talked about her life, her world, our world and the world in general, cups of apple tea kept materializing and when we reluctantly got up to go back to the hotel, we realized that it was almost 1am!

We walked back to the hotel hand in hand, thinking of the children, hoping they were fast asleep. When we sent them back to the hotel from Hulya’s shop, it was only about 7.30 pm and we had told them we’d join them in half an hour or so.

Rubik was waiting for us in the lobby pacing anxiously and looking like an irate dad.

“Don’t you guys have any sense of responsibility? Is this your half an hour? I was just about to go looking for you!”

We slinked quietly, guiltily, to our room.