Excerpted from A Long Season of Ashes with permission (India Viking, Penguin Random House, 2024) .
The Ghosts of History
May 2022 New Delhi
Me: 바카라Pa, you must resume writing your diary again.바카라
He: 바카라I am trying . . . I wrote a few sentences some days ago . . .바카라
Ma: 바카라He has lost interest now. He says he gets tired soon. Something바카라s happened to him.바카라
Me: 바카라Do you remember the years we spent in Udhampur?바카라
He: 바카라Every single day.바카라
Me: 바카라Write about those days.바카라
He: 바카라I am reading a book these days.바카라
Me: 바카라What about the translation of Lal Ded바카라s poetry? It바카라s been almost two decades in the making now.바카라
He: 바카라I will go through it one more time.바카라
Me: 바카라I have our domicile certificates. Shall I send them to you?바카라
He: 바카라Keep them with you.바카라
Me: 바카라Do you remember the exact date and month when you sent Henna and me away with Ratni Aunty and family? Was it February, March, April or May in 1990?바카라
Pa: 바카라It was a winter day.바카라
Ma: 바카라It was spring.바카라
Me: 바카라But the diary says there was snow on the highway . . .바카라
Henna has inherited Pa바카라s memory. She was nine years old when the two of us left our home in Kashmir. She remembers that day. She reminds me too바카라Muslim neighbours arriving at our house early in the morning to carry our luggage to the truck parked on the road near the house of the Kaw family. Little would have been possible without their help. They made leaving easy. We didn바카라t need to lift the heavy things ourselves, not that there were too many of them.
바카라Remember the day in 1990 when Pa fractured his toe in Jammu because a minibus ran over his foot,바카라 asks Henna. 바카라We met him by chance at someone바카라s place. We had been searching for him for days when someone informed us that he had been injured in an accident but there was nothing to worry about. We had no idea where he was at the time. Such were those days when we were scattered . . .바카라
It is only now바카라when I am approaching the end바카라that the memory of many incidents has begun to resurface, layer by layer and image by image. After all, memory works in the strangest of ways. Henna recalls incidents and experiences that I don바카라t remember, while Ma adds some other details from her memory. Pa recalls things that he has never told anyone else. He doesn바카라t remember whether or not he has eaten in the present day, but he remembers what he used to feed Babuji day after day for over a year, when Babuji was unable to eat with his own hands.
This is what has become of us in exile. This is who we are now. We have become ghosts of history. The memory of our own history has become disjointed, partitioned, broken, hazy . . . but at the same time, it is alive and throbbing. Those who remember everything but choose to remain silent are one half of it and I am the other half.
This 바카라exile memory바카라 has begun to consume me. I fear a day will come when I will have no recollection of my own past. Perhaps not even of myself.
Over the last two years, I have spoken to Pa and Ma every day about everything that happened to us to ascertain that I remember everything correctly and completely. Sometimes, during conversations about the past events that shaped our lives, we remember other people바카라s experiences more vividly than our own.
All the incidents are important because they바카라ve determined people바카라s destinies and impacted the course of their lives and those of their children. I owe the preservation of this memory to each one of us. To those who wish to understand the nature of the human condition and of suffering. However, several memories could be lost forever. And many can never be recalled, for it is their fate to be lost. Our lives will be equally defined by these un-memories, no matter how hard we try to conjure them up. There is no count. There can never be a count.
The loom of memory and un-memory spins in the strangest of ways. Years from now, some memories will resurface even when I am gone. They will come alive in the minds of our descendants.
바카라What do you make of everything that we endured?바카라 I keep asking Pa, knowing full well the ramifications of asking such a question. It has now started to impact his memory. He doesn바카라t talk much. I observe his silence. It is not an ordinary silence. It is the silence of each one of us who, for years, witnessed the suffering of others while suffering ourselves. Pa has come to personify our collective silence.
He has laughed and cried. He has endured pain. He has held it inside as though it were a treasure.
Throughout the camp days, Babi kept us engrossed by narrating riddles and challenging us to crack them. We were never good at cracking them. Often, these riddles concealed memories from her own past and stories about her own youth. Memories and stories that pertained to our own lives too. She kept reminding us about the good times to come. Even in the most desperate of circumstances, she always sang of arrivals and never of departures. I realize now바카라all arrivals are departures too.
바카라I want you to be with me at the time of my death,바카라 Babi said to Pa one day. She kept saying it day after day and night after night. 바카라I want you to light my pyre.바카라
All he lived for from that day onwards was to fulfil her last wish. And he did. He was the saddest of us all when he lit Babi바카라s pyre. That sadness will never go away.
I can never forget his words: 바카라This madness will save us from ruin.바카라
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, says, 바카라Sometimes I am asked if I know 바카라the response to Auschwitz바카라. I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don바카라t even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.바카라
Yet once again, I explore the prospect of taking Ma and Pa to Kashmir for a few days this summer. What kind of trip will it be if we do get to undertake it? I worry. I am fearful of the psychological impact it might have. What will we do there? We will sit by the window of a hotel room and look at the world outside. Like a boy marvelling at the sights and sounds for the first time.
바카라He looks for you and keeps on asking when you will be coming over, even when you are nearby,바카라 Ma says to me about Pa.
Memory, after all, is a book of faces.
(The extract ends here)
...
"Be Brave"
On September 23, my father, Arvind Gigoo, fell sick at a hotel in Jammu. On the previous day, Pa, Ma and I had taken a flight from Delhi to Jammu. The purpose of the trip was to get Ma and Pa바카라s physical verification done at the Treasury office in Jammu so that Pa continues to receive the monthly pension from the J&K Government.
The next day, Pa started slipping into a strange state from where revival seemed almost impossible. Given his condition, I decided not to take him to his house in Lower Roop Nagar, Jammu. Some of his friends came over to the hotel to see him. They narrated happy memories, worried that they might never get to see him again.
바카라Be brave. I will last five more days. I am not thinking about death,바카라 whispered Pa into my ear, knowing he might not be able to do any more talking with me. We gave each other a kiss.
The next day, while waiting outside the Intensive Care Unit inside Metro Hospital, Faridabad, I re-read Pa바카라s will which he had drafted many years ago. It had specific instructions for me.
바카라You will do what I want you to do when I die. I should be cremated wherever I die. In no case should my dead body be kept in home/house or a mortuary for my children to come to perform the last rites. I should be cremated the day I die. There is no need to wait for my children and their spouses. Soap and not clay should be applied to my dead body at the time of the last bath. Four or five neighbors or persons should carry my dead body in a vehicle to the nearest crematorium for cremation. The electric crematorium, if there is any, is better. There is no need for any funeral procession. My son Siddhartha Gigoo, daughter-in-law Aishwarya Pillai Gigoo and daughter Henna Gigoo Koul should not give the horrible and weird wail on a morning. The last day of everything should be the day when the ashes are collected and immersed in the nearest river. Any Arya Samaji can take care of other things. That day the inmates of the Missionaries of Charity should be treated to a meal. In no case should my wife (if she is alive) or any other member of the family light the lamp in the evenings. Rice and water and other eats should not be offered to the dead man, i.e., me. There should be no tenth day, no tonsure, no pachiwar, no masawar, no shadmos, no waharwar, no shraad and other rituals. There is no need to go to Hardwar or any other holy place. My daughter Henna Gigoo Koul should not perform any ritual connected with my death in her family. She should not perform the yearly shraad and observe fasts. She should attend the marriages and all functions of her relatives and friends.바카라
바카라
On September 28, the day after Pa바카라s 79th birthday, I picked up Pa바카라s bone from the mound of ash바카라all that remained of him. The bone that had bothered him and caused him discomfort for the last two years. I held it on my palm for some time and gave it a kiss before placing it in an earthen pot with the rest of the bones. We immersed the bones in Yamuna.
바카라Take me home, to Kashmir, for a few days,바카라 Pa had said to me some months ago.'
