Mama Ranade and I

by NINAD JOG

"Uncle is eager to see you," Aunt Tai told me. "He has been asking for you all the time. Will you come over in the evening?"

"Yes, I will," I promised.

But I didn't go that evening; I stayed home. I didn't go the following evening either, although I could have easily accompanied my father on his scooter on the four-mile ride to the hospital.

I had never been particularly close to "Mama Ranade" as I called my uncle, or to his wife, who was my father's elder sister. That was perhaps because my aunt had disapproved of my parents' "love-marriage" and had boycotted their wedding.

Aunt Tai had been keen on arranging my father's marriage to a fair-skinned, green-eyed woman of her choosing, perhaps to one of Mama Ranade's sisters. But my father had gone his own way. He had fallen in love with my mother – a dark-skinned, black-eyed, bespectacled woman from a different sub-caste – and had had the audacity to marry her against the express wishes of all his siblings.

My parents’ wedding had been a doubly sad occasion for my paternal uncles and aunts, since fair complexion was synonymous with beauty and dark complexion with ugliness in many parts of India, especially among people from my father’s sub-caste.

***

One of my earliest memories of the Ranades was when they came over to visit us for a few days in Pune. I must have been around four at the time. On the morning after they arrived, my aunt told my mother to stay at home and cook lunch for all of us, while she and my uncle took me to the park near Deccan Gymkhana.

My mother would have liked to accompany us, but she was duty-bound to accede to her guest's demand, for the guests were from her husband’s side and were elder to her husband. My father was at work, since he had not been able to take the day off.

I played on the swings and the slides in Sambhaji Park as I usually did when my parents took me there, and I looked with wonder at the toy fort and the toy town in a corner of the park. When it was time to go home, Mama Ranade took me in his arms and we made our way to the park's exit.

But I became visibly upset. Something was clearly amiss. "Fanta!" I cried, pointing to one of the dozen drink stalls near the park's exit. "Fanta!"

My uncle and aunt were at a loss. They had no idea what I was referring to. They approached the stall and asked the vendor. The vendor explained, and handed me a bottle of the cold orange drink. I was happy; nothing was amiss anymore. I didn't know it then, but the price my uncle paid for the foreign-brand drink was no chunk of small change for him. He wouldn't have bought it for himself or for his wife, but he couldn't bear to deny me my wish.

I don't remember much of the rest of their visit, but I do remember my father getting angry when the Ranades left. "Mama Ranade has painted a design on the wall!" he cried, pointing to a finger-length brown band on the wall by the bedroom door.

It was a band of snuff, snuff that my uncle shot snuff straight into his nostrils every day. On the morning before he left, he wiped his fingers on the bedroom wall, whether by design or by accident. My father had to spend quite a bit of effort restoring the wall to its pristine green-colored state.

***

Not long afterwards, my sister and I moved to Mumbai with our parents. I started meeting the Ranades every couple of months, since we lived in a neighborhood on the other side of the railway lines from the Dadar Tram Terminus neighborhood where they lived.

Over the years, I saw them tutoring various school kids at their home in the evenings, and often all day on Sundays. My uncle supplemented his income as a government clerk, while my aunt added to hers as a school teacher.

And yet you could tell they were doing it not for the love of money, but for their love of molding young minds. Perhaps it was because the Ranades didn't have any kids, for both their daughters had been stillborn. Each of them weighed over nine pounds, probably because my aunt suffered from gestational diabetes that went undetected during both pregnancies. The Ranades’ stillborn babies became another statistic in India’s high infant mortality rate, as did my elder brother, who died within twenty days after his birth.

The kids whom the Ranades tutored came closest to being the family that they had been unable to build.

***

"Dev Anand!" cried Mr. Ranade. "Doesn't he look like Dev Anand?"

All the half a dozen or so men and women in the room stared at me and swung their heads from side to side in an arc to mean yes. So did my aunt, as did my father. I blushed and lowered my head. I was a couple of years shy of entering my teens, but I still managed to blush like a child when I found myself unexpectedly at the center of attention.

"Look at him," Mr. Ranade said a few minutes later, pointing to a Bollywood star cavorting in the fields on the black-and-white TV screen in the Ranades' living-room. "Ninad looks exactly like him!"

I ignored my uncle's remark. I could not recognize any of the Bollywood stars, even though I was familiar with their names. All of them looked the same to me. All of them danced on screen. All of them argued. Every star fell in love with a starlet, and they got married at the end of the movie.

But I couldn't ignore my uncle's remark when I kept hearing it month after month whenever I went over to his home. He didn't have to be watching a Dev Anand movie to tell me I resembled the actor. My uncle's comments piqued my interest. I learned to identify Dev Anand, and saw as much of him as I could during the weekly thirty-minute program of Bollywood film songs that the sole government-run TV channel broadcast on Thursday evenings.

It wasn't long before I started imitating Dev Anand's actions: the frequent nodding while speaking, the raising of the eyebrows while asking questions, the sudden wave of the hand, the characteristic gait, and the rapid-fire dialogue.

"Ninny imitates Dev Anand so well!" my father would often say. "Don't you think so?" he would ask my mother. My mother would agree, although she never seemed quite as enthusiastic as my father.

I started spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, practicing my Dev Anand imitation. I wouldn't say I spent hours doing it every day, but I did spend quite a few minutes. I also took pains to comb my hair the way Dev Anand did, so I could resemble him even when I wasn't imitating his movements. I could do all of this at leisure since I was a latchkey kid - home alone all afternoon on weekdays until my parents and my sister came home in the evening. My father's praise had clearly gone to my head.

I even showed off my Dev Anand imitation to the Ranades. My uncle appreciated it, but I don't quite remember if my aunt did or not.

***

My father called me into the kitchen one evening. He had got back from work, and was sipping his evening coffee. "Ninny, I've been meaning to tell you this for the past couple of days," he said. "I've noticed you imitate Dev Anand all the time, literally every single waking moment."

My jaw dropped.

“I think you’re doing it without being aware of it, rather than doing it deliberately. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” I said. There was no way I was going to admit the truth.

"This has to stop," my father told me. "It's not a good idea to keep doing it."

I was crushed. There was no escaping the fact that my father was correct. I had started walking like Dev Anand even when I walked the short eight feet from the bathroom to the kitchen; from the kitchen to the living room, and from the front door into the outside world. I nodded and nodded when I spoke, and I waved my right hand every so often. The imitation had become second nature to me, and I was just a wave and a nod short of fancying myself as the star.

But stung by my father's remarks, I shed within minutes what I had perfected over weeks.

***

"Mama Ranade complimented Tai for painting the bedroom and for clearing all the clutter away," I heard my father tell my mother when I entered the kitchen one evening a year later. My mother asked my father how my aunt had managed to do it when her husband was ill. My father said his sister had done no such thing. My uncle had woken up in his hospital bed, and had mistaken his hospital room for his own bedroom. The illness had clearly made him delusional.

I sympathized with my uncle's plight, but I found it mildly amusing nonetheless. Little could I have known that I would have a similar experience over two decades later. Mistaking my hospital room for a hotel room when I was hospitalized in the U.S. for severe head trauma, I would chide the hospital orderly for changing the sheets on my bed, and tell him I didn't need the towels to be replaced, since I planned to check out of the room the next day.

***

Three days later, my father got a phone call from his elder brother when he came home from office. "Mama Ranade is no more," my uncle told him. “He passed away a few minutes ago.”

My father said he would head over right away. He asked me if I wanted to join him.

"Don't take him," said my mother. "He's too young to see a dead body. Besides, it’s evening, and it will soon be dark."

But I insisted on going, for I wasn't an utter stranger to death. I had been devastated when my grandfather passed away a few years earlier, but I figured I could face it now. For I was younger when my grandfather died, and had been much closer to him than I was to Mama Ranade.

When my father and I reached the Ranades’ apartment, we found the living room filled with crying relatives, mainly women. The men were on their way home from the hospital. An ambulance soon arrived with Mama Ranade’s body. My father's brother and his son Shubh were among those who helped carry the bier three flights up the stairs to his home.

It was soon time for the funeral. Most of Mr. Ranade's relatives and friends had already arrived, for they had been told the previous day that the end was near. Funerals are conducted within a few hours of a person's death in my community, for the body isn't preserved in a morgue, and starts rapidly decaying in India’s tropical heat.

My father asked me if I wanted to join him at the funeral or stay at my aunt's home with my aunt and all the female relatives, for women do not attend funerals. I decided to accompany my father, partly because it was the first funeral I would ever attend, but mainly because I didn’t want to sit in a room full of weeping women for hours at a stretch.

The men placed Mama Ranade's body back in the ambulance, and we headed over to the electric crematorium by the Dadar beach, which was about two miles away. Indian ambulances typically split their time herding critically ill people to hospital or acting as hearses.

Once we entered the crematorium, my cousin Shubh marked Mama Ranade’s body with ash under the direction of the priest as the priest chanted religious chants. The dead person's son usually performs these rituals, but Shubh had volunteered, since the Ranades were childless.

I was in awe of Shubh, for he was just a couple of years elder to me, yet he was so mature and so unafraid. I on the other hand still blushed like a girl at the drop of a hat.

My father and I waited at the crematorium for over an hour, since my uncle's body was the third in line, and the undertaker told us they had to make do with one crematorium, since the other had lost power. I can still remember the smell of burning flesh that permeated the complex that night, although the memory is mercifully no longer as vivid as it could have been.

My father and I left for home around 1 a.m. My uncle's body was still in line, but Shubh and his father and the other relatives said they would take care of it. The undertaker said he would give them the bones and the ash the next morning for Shubh and his father to disperse into the sea.

I took one last look at Mama Ranade as his cold body lay listless on the bier on the cold stone floor. Gone was his easy wit, and gone were his jovial smile and his raucous laughter. His terminal illness had made quick work of sapping his flesh and his bones, for he looked rail-thin and considerably shorter than the five-foot seven that he had been.

His bushy gray mustache and his bald pate were the only two features that appeared unchanged. Nostrils stuffed with cotton balls and head tilted backwards, Mama Ranade’s face looked stressed, as if he were still in great pain. Peace may not have eluded him in life, but it had certainly deserted him in death.

***

To this day, Mama Ranade's funeral is the only funeral I've ever attended. My grandmother and an aunt died a few years ago, but I did not attend their funerals, for I was in the U.S. while they died in India. When you don't see a dead person's remains, the logical part of your brain knows the person has died, but the emotional part of your brain thinks they have disappeared.

While Mama Ranade died and so did my grandfather, my grandmother and my mother's sister simply made themselves scarce.

I still do not know the exact cause of Mama Ranade's death. Maybe he died of a heart attack or maybe a stroke or maybe some other malady. I could have asked my father or I could have asked Aunt Tai, but I haven't asked either of them to this day.

***

Of the few scattered memories I have of my uncle's passing, one has remained more steadfastly with me than the others.

"You didn't come to visit Mama as he was dying," my aunt said to me moments after I entered her flat and we waited for her husband's body to arrive. "It would have made a world of difference if you had come yesterday or the day before."

I hung my head. There was nothing I could say.

I have often thought of why I never visited him in hospital when I could have. I don't think I was afraid of visiting a dying person in hospital with tubes sticking into him all over. Perhaps I resented my uncle for setting me up as Dev Anand, especially since I had fallen back to earth a few weeks later. I knew he did not abet my preening and my pretense, and I know he wasn't aware I had stopped doing it. Yet I couldn't help reflexively point my fingers at him.

Perhaps I thought the longer I postponed visiting him, the longer he would survive. He could not possibly die before meeting me. I was simply trying to prolong his life by putting off meeting him.

And atheist though I thought of myself even back then, I had implicitly assumed that I would surely meet him after I was done with my own time in this world.

But it's far more likely that all these speculations are nothing but after-the-fact justifications that I have concocted to keep myself from feeling guilty. Maybe I was in denial about his impending death, and maybe I just didn’t care enough about him to wish him goodbye.

If only I had spent even a fraction of the time with him in hospital as I did at his funeral, it could have gone some way towards repaying him for his kindness in buying me a bottle of cold, refreshing Fanta in the park in Pune on that hot summer morning almost four decades ago.

Close to Mama Ranade though I was not, my blatant refusal to honor his pleas to meet him on his deathbed will surely merit more than just a passing mention in my Book of Regrets.