Found and lost

I was chatting with Father while pottering about the kitchen this morning and suddenly remarked about everything that had come and gone in my life. While friends are almost entirely replaceable, people you consider family rarely are – well, the people I consider part of my world and therefore mine in emotional fact. There are some who peek in, woffle wishy-washily about staying or not and then either leave or are ejected/rejected without much ado; they are just passing ships, nothing too important. But the others, those that do stay, those who are welcomed into the fold, linger for much longer, until it is time for them to leave too.

Of course, parents don’t count in this. Whether you like them or not, you almost always love them and they create a huge, gaping, unfillable hole that, every now and then, hurts with unbelievable, unbearable, incomprehensible pain. And then, suddenly, you remember the laughter, the sunshine, the good rather than the bad and you smile again, even though that little niggle of hurt never ever goes away.

Then there are people you never knew you cared so much about. One of these I have written about before – an old family friend who lived in Delhi. I had met him many years before I actually moved to that city, but only as a sort of old-schoolfriend-acquaintance of my father and his brothers. But then, after we met again as real people in a city where I was still an alien and he was willing to ‘adopt’ me, we became friends. We went to parties together, to openings, to plays, to charity sales and dance recitals, polo games and leisurely dinners. And he beamed happily al the while, when he introduced me to his friends, when someone paid me a compliment, when someone teased him about his new ‘girlfriend’. He was like a father once removed. And now he is removed from my world.

My godmother was a wonderful person. She was a woman who liked the finer things in life, who sort-of-introduced me to beauty-care face masks and romance novels, rich food and kitchy décor, bitchy gossip and minor entrepreneurship. She was a close friend of both my parents and treated me with the same casual affection as she gave her own young relations. Being a very large lady, she occupied rather more space in my physical world than my mother ever did, and gave bigger, warmer and more breath-taking (literally) hugs, without the angst and involvement a maternal relationship would have. And she is now in another world, one where life is all one big dish of delicious biryani.

Another elderly gentleman was a public curmudgeon, but a teddy bear at heart – at least, with me. He had known me since before I was born, in a manner of speaking, and kept up the contact with my family, though at a distance, for a very long time. Then, as he got older and edged towards being retired, and my life got busier and more absorbed into everyday work and life requirements, we drifted away, apart, to different worlds, not just physically, but intellectually. When I saw him last, it was many years after he had retired from his long-term position and was acting consultant for a well known firm in another city. We were the visitors then, Father and I; we had just lost my mother and perhaps we looked him up because we both wanted some kind of reassurance that some things were still where we wanted them to be, even as others had left us adrift. He was old, fading, fragile. But still curmudgeonly, still hyper-critical, still as fond of me as ever. He wanted us to take him to our home, so we could give him the kind of life he wanted, the kind of support and care and perhaps family that he missed. I refused, knowing it could not happen. And I never saw him again.

He passed away not too long ago at over 80 years old, still grouchy, still determinedly independent, still stubborn and mumbling bad-temperedly at his doctors, we are sure.