Read: Fiction: At ninety-four, a retired engineer writes his third and, as he insists, final autobiography
Vivek Pinto
An excerpt from ‘My Last Autobiography’, by Rajendra Banahatti, translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto.
Yesterday, my ninety-third year ended and year ninety-four began and I decided to start another autobiography. When I turned sixty-five, I wrote my first autobiography. I wrote the next one after I turned eighty. This one at the end of ninety-three. That means you can’t call me old with only a few years left to hit a century.
Why an autobiography? Not because the extraordinary has happened to me but because nothing happens. Or in other words, because I have nothing better to do and because there’s nothing much else I can do. When people retire, they write autobiographies. Thirty-five years have dragged by since I retired.
I worked for thirty years so that’s thirty-five years of pension dining. In those thirty-five years, I wrote two autobiographies. That’s not much; writer types knock off a book in a year or six months. I’m not a writer; by profession I’m an engineer. And that too an immortal engineer.
Why an autobiography? There might even be reasons – my hands are still working, my memory is clear as glass. The rest of my body however has packed up. Some of my faculties are missing in action. My ears have become walls. When I put in the hearing aid, some sounds filter through, but that’s about it. I keep the hearing aid in all day. It’s no ordinary device; my grandson bought it for me in America even if it is of Japanese manufacture. So my ears function. My eyes? I have eyes and I don’t have eyes. I can see long distance well enough but everything close to me is in darkness. I read with a magnifying glass but only the headlines of the Times. No fine print. Even if I could see the fine print, I wouldn’t read it. You need everything you need to know from the headlines: the essence of the news. That suffices. These are days of essences. Am I doing research?
So as I was saying, my hands work. Not as well as they used to but better than my legs. My legs just about manage. I have to use a stick but my hands still can do their job. They’re all right, they shake a little. My handwriting was bad anyway. The letters would come out wobbly, crooked. Now they seem to have fallen asleep. They run parallel to the line. Sometimes they get muddled in with the lines, sometimes it’s only a line and that too, not very straight. Like a child’s. But it doesn’t matter. Others may not understand my handwriting but I do. It’s not as if only God could decipher what I write. Not yet. You can still tell it’s my handwriting.
Meaning the people who know me, love me, my relatives, my friends. Perhaps they might not get what I’ve written but they know who wrote it. Some of me is still intact in my handwriting. Two days ago, I wanted to celebrate my ninety-third birthday with a Satyanarayana pooja. When she was alive, my wife handled everything, made all the preparations, invited the priest. But she’s gone. Four years ago. Poor thing, she was bedridden for a year before that. It was a blessed release when she did go. Each morning I would pray for mercy before the image of God while offering flowers: Let her go now, I would say. A stroke had taken her legs completely and so she was imprisoned in her bed. The body was there because there was a heart beating inside it. But she couldn’t move at all. There was nothing left inside. Finally, one day she was released and so was I. That was the last connection and it too broke. When we got married she was a ten-year-old girl in a petticoat from Asurda. I was sixteen years old. For seventy-five years she built a world for me. What a garden flowered there! Eight children – four boys and four girls. Good limbs, sturdy bodies. She did everything. She took care of all my likes and tolerated my hobbies. She did everything for the children. In those seventy-five years we never had any major differences. Once the antarpaat* was removed, there was never any distance between us.
Seventy-five years passed like seventy-five minutes or so it seems. The past always seems to have lasted a very short time. But, however painful or difficult it was, it seems to have been a happy time because it’s in the past, because it’s gone. It’s not coming back. She’s gone too. I will never see her again. It hurts to think that but I’m happy she went. It was time, she was eighty-five years old, she couldn’t manage, her body had shrivelled; how much pain can a person bear? She was freed from suffering. For us it was grief, for her relief. She died a married woman, her good luck. If I had gone first, what would have become of her?
How would she have managed? When I was around it was bad enough for her. Without me, it doesn’t bear thinking about. My soul would have turned into a ghost and haunted her. Therefore I say: her release was my release from the cycle of birth and death.
A few days before her death she lost the power of speech. Not that she couldn’t speak. It seemed she didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, it was as if she were about to burst. She would try to say something and then for days on end, nothing. She’d just lie there, staring fixedly at the ceiling, her eyes empty. She would not even ask for water. Sometimes I’d wonder: has she gone? And then one day, just like that, she did go. Her eyes open, her lips closed, not a word said. We didn’t even know when it happened. Did she know? Can’t say.
But a few days before she died, she woke me up.
“Aaho, could you come here?”
“Aaho, do you hear me? Get up!”
She must have been calling for a while. She would do this often but how could I be roused, when I couldn’t hear her? How could I have woken up? I take off the hearing aid when I go to bed. Even during the day, I don’t hear much so when I sleep all is bliss.
On a mat between our beds lay Chandrabai, the servant who does night duty. She’s also an old lady, must be about seventy but her ears work all right. So Chandrabai woke up. She put on the light, came over to my bed, shook my arm. At first, I thought something else was happening. That’s what happens when someone wakes you up suddenly. I thought Yama had come for me. “Come, let’s go, it’s your turn.” When I opened my eyes, a dark ruin of a face was looming over mine. You could even say it was cruel. White hair, black tobacco-stained stumps for teeth protruding from the mouth, eyes dim like a zero-watt bulb. Then I saw the sari over her head so it couldn’t be Lord Yama, for whatever else, He is a man. It is therefore unlikely that he would put on a sari to come for me. I turned my head on my pillow and realised it was Chandrabai, croaking in my ear. That she was shouting was only clear because of her wide-open jaws for her otherwise bass Hanuman-like voice called into my ear as if it were the voice of an ant. “Aajoba, Aaji’s calling!”
I got up and looked at the clock on the wall. An old clock, we got it on our first anniversary. Hands joined in prayer. Midnight. I descended gingerly, took the hearing aid from its box on the bedside table, and went to her. She patted the bed covers by her side with her right hand. At that time, she still had control over her right hand. She had worn herself out calling. She said nothing. I sat down beside her. I bent over her, bringing my ear close to her mouth. Her lips moved, her breath brushed against my ear. Faint words emerged.
“Tell me, what month is it?”
“Paush…”
“Next month is your birthday.”
“Next month? No.”
“Isn’t it Phalgun?”
“No, next is Mag. Then comes Phalgun.”
“That’s right.”
“But what of it?”
“Make sure you do it right, your birthday. Call the priest. Have the prayers said. Do it properly. God has given you such a long life. God’s blessings…”
Her dry eyes filled.
“I will, I will. Close your eyes now. Sleep.”
“What did you say? You will, won’t you?”
“I will. Sleep now. It’s very late. Sleep.”
“I told you what I want. Whether I am there or not…”
