An ode to life (and Rina)

Rina lived in London for 50 years and died last week in a local hospital.

While Britain mourns Prince Philip, my thoughts are with my cousin Rina who lived in London for 50 years and died last week in a local hospital.

My wife and I saw her last on October 22, 2020, the day we landed at Heathrow airport amidst a whirlpool of alarming stories. No one was sure what the pandemic permitted and what it didn’t. The authorities seemed to be in a daze. Unofficially, we were warned to remain in self-imposed isolation, going out only for essential medicines. Food had to be ordered online through a special mobile app we didn’t have.

Although crippled and frequently in pain, Rina rose heroically to the occasion. Actually, we wouldn’t even have been in England if she had not completed the formidable paperwork, offering herself as guarantor, necessary to convince Britain’s suspicious officialdom that her cousins from Kolkata were not illegals and subversives. She fixed a car to meet us at Heathrow and got her carer to buy meat, fish, milk, greens and groceries for us. Although everyone said we would have to drive straight from Heathrow to where we were staying, detours being strictly forbidden, Rina had instructed the driver to take us to her house where she had left the front door open and the food in the hall.

We set out expecting a policeman to stop us any moment and nervously glancing through the car’s windows every so often to see if we were being tailed. Rina sat behind the glass of her bedroom window. That’s how we chatted. Closer contact would have dangerously exposed her to infection. We parted promising to meet again. The plan was that my wife Sumita and I would take biryani from Rina’s favourite Indian restaurant in Earl’s Court so that she could join us for an alfresco meal in her own garden. It was not to be.

But her welcoming presence never left us. I had always admired her courage and selflessness as she battled illness and toiled in various airport-related offices to clear the mortgage on her small suburban bungalow where a fox often strayed into the garden. She whizzed around in her little smart car with its disabled person badge, or zoomed on her motorcycle at bikers’ jamborees all over the world until lungs and legs failed her. But nothing was grander than her deathbed valour.

She messaged Sumita almost every night, tapping away at her mobile through the dark and lonely hours, asking about our travel plans and offering help and advice. Aware of my interest in Through War, Rebellion and Riot, by her granduncle, Kunal Sen, who fought in World War I, she found an internet site where I might find the book.

Rina had long left behind the stylish splendour of the India in which she was born. She never looked back. Her grit, all the stronger for being concealed by a cheerfully pleasant manner, sustained her in the present. Few noticed that she discarded her disabled badge, with its parking and other privileges, the moment she felt a little better.

Among her ancestors were Acharya Keshub Chandra Sen and Lt. Gen. Sir Edward Barnes, governor of Ceylon and British India’s commander-in-chief. His home, Barnes Court, is now Shimla’s Raj Bhavan. Her grandfather, S R Das, founded Doon School. Her father was the first Indian to head a large British conglomerate. She had glittering royal relatives from Cooch Behar, Mayurbhanj, Nandgaon and other princely enclaves. But she married a young Cockney house painter because, said her friends, he needed looking after and she felt sorry for him. The marriage didn’t last and Rina didn’t repeat the experiment.

She was happy with her cats while other women complained of hairdressers being shut, and men grew beards and tied their hair in top-knots. A second lockdown, declared to prevent a “medical and moral disaster”, ended on December 2. But more restrictions were clamped down as London moved into the highest danger category. Rina was in and out of hospital, finding breathing difficult, and was strictly forbidden human contact.

The end came late at night on April 11 as her devoted brother raced to the hospital. What newspapers called “Manic Monday” erupted a little later with pavement cafes, boisterous pubs and shops trying desperately to make up for lost time. Rina missed that frenzied reawakening. But I doubt if she would have cared.

Her deeper caring recalled a verse that my grandmother — Rina’s great-aunt, for we were grandchildren of two sisters — wrote in my autograph book when I was 10, “We cannot all be heroes and thrill a hemisphere/ With some great daring venture, some deeds that mock at fear./ But we can fill a lifetime with kindly acts and true./ There’s always noble services for noble souls to do”.

That may have been written about Rina Lawrence (nee Das).