Chapter Three

Summary

Kabir kahai: Kabir says:

Dus darvazay ka pinjara A cage with ten open doors,

Us main panchi paun Holds a soul freer than the wind.

Rahai Achamba hoat hai The miracle is that it chooses to stay;

Jai Achamba kaun? How can you wonder when it goes?

And then, as the final cadence took flight, my father laughed. We were walking by the Birmingham Reservoir when he recited that poem, reminding me yet again of the wealth of poetry and songs he carried so unassumingly with him, but which I had failed to mine. The words wove themselves into the familiar nasal rhythm of his breath and the squish of our footsteps on the slushy path. I watched the ripples of my father's laughter leave a trace on the water. The lines raced to the other shore where a misshapen dance hall from Britain's age of industrial supremacy stood in disrepair. The echo of that laugh undulated back over the shimmering surface lit by a late English sun and came to rest in my soul.

My father died the following summer, his body fit and lithe with the daily practice of yoga. He was 59. I have the day stark in my mind. I had just reached his sister Swaran Kanta's house in Delhi, having finally returned to India 17 years after that first visit. It was five o’clock in the morning and I had lain down in the spare room to recover from a sleepless night flight from London. I heard the old black phone ring in the corridor, and my aunt shuffling to it from her room next door, muttering words of puzzlement. I opened my eyes to the sound of her scream and the utter clarity of an intuition that my life had changed. I rose unsummoned. She handed me the bone-shaped handset wordlessly. Her big, intelligent eyes were open wide, glazed with tears. My brother was on the line from England. He spoke with unnerving calmness.

‘Papaji's gone.’

Those two words carried an absolute finality, the ineffable grief and mystery of bereavement always leading back to that cold fact. Through a numb haze I heard him say that our father had died two hours ago from an aneurysm in the brain. An artery had burst in his head, as he lay asleep.