Cheeku,
It’s just another day. There is nothing different. I woke up and went about the morning chores as I do every other day. I get to office and disk on my desk. There are a piles of files stacked up waiting to be disposed off. The phone rings. There is someone seeking time to meet, there is another with instructions from the superiors. Panditji, who works for me, walks in with a cheque to be signed…
It’s just another ordinary day…
But there is one difference. I am not within myself. I am at the desk working, meeting people, smiling, writing on files, walking in and out of the office…but I am also sitting outside myself looking at myself and wondering. In seven years since you left on this day for the longest of long journeys, am I the person I always was for fifty years of my life? Has life been different without you being part of everything I did, sometime physically but all the time in my conscious and sub-conscious state…Cheeku-Tubby, always there, indivisible, omnipresent…my life revolving around them even when outward seeming overpowered this truth.
In this sense nothing has changed. Every time I call out to Tubby to come to the table for a meal my first instinct is to call out: Cheeku-Tubby! Every time we plan a family trip, the number count is always Cheeku-Tubby +2. When planning an investment, constructing something or the other, buying a car, the first thought is how would Cheeku-Tubby like it. In the night I so often dream of talking to you, laughing with you, planning with you…and with Tubby. Cheeku-Tubby are there in the dream driving my ambition, my desires, my material wants…
Our lives are so full of you, every time we celebrate life, every time we reminisce, every time we go to eat out…who else should determine the agenda but Cheeku. Your wonderful friends who have so much of you in them embrace us with their love and warmth, we never feel they are far from us even when they physically are, they spend evenings with us and weave the magic of Cheeku, “our hero, our King” as Gaurav Kashyap so fondly describes you. In those times your presence is real, it is palpable…you are there laughing, driving the conversation, enjoying every bit of life, squeezing every ounce out of it.
I sit and look at myself, more bald, more grey, older. And yet, not ready to give up because Cheeku’s dad can’t give up. Always wanting to push the boundaries because Cheeku-Tubby must be proud of their father. Striving to excel because Cheeku-Tubby would want it no other way. My life continues to be centered around Cheeku-Tubby and what they would wish me to be.
But at another level, the need to see you physically, touch your hand, hold you close in a hug, hear your voice is undiminished. Sometimes the force of this need bursts through with tears. Most of the times it is well hidden behind laughter and the crowded moments of my life…I acknowledge mortality more easily and also the fact that more of my life is behind me than before me, and that is comforting because at the end of it, I would be able to journey with you through the universes.
I sit in front of my computer and stare at the picture on the screen of Tubby and you when both of you were perhaps six and seven years old respectively. Such promise in your faces, such wonder in your eyes, joyful and carefree…
Nothing changes, everything changes. As you commence your journey all over again today, you seem to sing out loud “When I Go”…
Come, lonely hunter, chieftain and king
I will fly like the falcon when I go
Bear me my brother under your wing
I will strike fell like lightning when I go…
And when the sun comes, trumpets from his red house in the east
He will find a standing stone where long I chanted my release
He will send his morning messenger to strike the hammer blow
And I will crumble down uncountable in showers of crimson rubies when I go…
And should you glimpse my wandering form out on the borderline
Between death and resurrection and the council of the pines
Do not worry for my comfort, do not sorrow for me so
All your diamond tears will rise up and adorn the sky beside me when I go…
And I can sense you rising high, setting off towards the distant stars, so far away from this mortal world…
Love
Dad