The Banganga crematorium in Mumbai is where we should all go when we die. The sea breeze is a balm that brings serenity, the setting more spa than burning ghat. Even so, the boisterous singing of "When the saints go marching in," complete with rhythmic hand-clapping, seemed out of place. And yet since these were the last rites of Aunty Ayesha, it seemed entirely appropriate. She laughed at almost everything, so she was likely applauding her four children for turning convention on its head.
Growing up in Calcutta, I often didn't see my uncles and aunts in Chennai and Bangalore for years together. But Aunty Ayesha took their place with her twinkling eyes and lightning quick one-liners. Paradoxically, given that she was nearly blind in the last couple of decades of her life, her eyes were utterly memorable. They cast a spell on her many students - and on me. A colleague's kid brother was so infatuated with her at the age of eight that he stole all the flowers in his home to make her a bouquet. If I regarded her as an aunt more than a family friend, it was also because my mother saw her as a sister. They had met when "she was still Ayesha Sengupta and fencing champion at the Rackets Club." "Fencing champion?" I asked disbelievingly, as my mother never let the facts get in the way of her stories. But it was true.
As our flat in Calcutta was on Aunty Ayesha's way from Park Street to Loreto, where she inspired everyone who worked with her at the teacher's training institute, she sometimes dropped by for breakfast or lunch. This meant the meal stretched longer - all afternoon sometimes if neither had to return to work.
The Calcutta I grew up in was a city of cosmopolitanism and casualness. My "uncles and aunts" from that city are Punjabi, Bengali, Mangalorean, Anglo-Indian and Keralite. Dropping in unannounced was the rule, not the exception (this was an era characterised by phones that didn't work for months so perhaps we had no option). And no one lived that life of cross-connections better than Ayesha Chatterjee, whose home was always full of friends of all ages and students who became her friends. She held court especially at Christmas - her faithful two-in-one boomed all day with carols, the stockings and decorations were worthy of a set designer and every single person went away with a gift. Aunty Ayesha's parties literally overflowed; people ended up in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.
When I moved back to India last autumn after a couple of decades away, one of the most enjoyable aspects of relocating was reconnecting with my parents' friends. They seemed even more precious because my parents are no longer around, but they spoke about them as if they were.
But the past few months have shattered that nostalgia. The conductor of the choir that my father was a part of in Bangalore, a close friend who happened to be married to my mother's cousin, died just before Christmas. One of my father's closest friends, who habitually introduced me to people with such exaggerated praise that I would protest, died of a heart attack some weeks ago even as his wife battles cancer. The news of his death in Bangalore left me disbelieving and then numb. I was unable even to call his family for a week. When I did, his son picked up and courageously reminisced about the old days. The opening quote from Susan Sontag in Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully expresses this duality of life and death: "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship."
Fate throws us these challenges without warning, but many respond heroically. When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was just months from dying in 2009, friends were surprised that he joked about a cartoon he was given years earlier. It showed a relieved little boy sitting on the toilet. The blurb read, "When you've got to go, you've really got to go." After a fundamentalist Christian acquaintance warned him to stay away from atheists if he wanted to get better, he looked at me, an agnostic, and had the most unseemly giggling fit. One of my best holidays ever was the last month I spent with him.
There is a moving exchange in the film Shadowlands about the late-in-life romance of the English writer C S Lewis, who marries Joy Gresham even as she is dying of cancer. In the middle of a happy day in the countryside, she reminds him that she is dying. "The pain then is part of the happiness now," she says. "That's the deal."
For someone who made little concession to being nearly blind, Aunty Ayesha's response to cancer over the past few months was characteristically unconventional; people who didn't know her well wondered if she was in denial. Fending off commiserations, she said she had full faith in her doctor and her painkillers were up to the task. She dressed as beautifully as ever and still had her gin & tonic. And when I went to her gaily-festooned room, she wondered what the fuss was all about and made me laugh as she had when I was nine.
Twitter: @RahulJJacob
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