I often think of Bheemeshwara Sharma. He comes into my thoughts unbidden, a small man projecting fake humility, rheumy eyes darting here and there, looked at with scorn, pity, or distrust by everyone around him. I remember him on those evenings, sitting next to thatha at 7.30 in the evenings, trying to recite the same few mantras over and over again as thatha sometimes scolded him, sometimes encouraged, and ocassionaly looked at him with unveiled disgust. I remember his wife telling everyone she met on the day thatha died that it was thanks to him that he had been employed as a priest in a small temple and their station in life had gotten slightly better- "..ఈయన నలుక మీద నాలుగు మంత్రాలు రాశారు" - is the phrase I remember her saying with genuine warmth and gratitude. I also remember him learning of thatha's previous marriage, at the same time as I did, and him leaving the house with his wife and daughter, Subrahmanyeshwari, never to return. I think my respect for him grew a little after that. But again I remember him not so much for his actions but for representing a certain phase of my life. The period around 2006-2009 maybe when on some evenings ammamma watched tv in her room, thatha watched tv in the hall, and I was the computer room and we all waited for amma to return from office as the clock struck nine. As I stood at the gate sometimes, waiting to see her turn into the deserted streetlit lane, I remember feeling so intensely small, inconsequential, irrelevant, a hopelessly clueless human being in one godforsaken corner of a below-average planet revolving around a modest star in a universe staggeringly vast, my tiny pulsating meek aliveness no match to the cold uncaringness of the universe that it gave me vertigo even to think of the obvious mismatch between the so little I knew and felt, which nonetheless was my entire universe, against the weight of existence.
Not being able to see ammamma during the last two years of her life, watching helplessly from here as she and amma went through covid, floods, house-moving, her illness and hospitalisation alone, has inflicted such psychic violence on me that I suspect a part of me will never get over it. The guilt and the pain is right there, unresolved, just below the surface. Kangaroo Island, for all its stunning beauty, will forever be tainted for I chose to go there intead of going to India in December 2021. It'll be four years since she died soon. Four fuckin' years- where does time go? And why do so many memories seem inseperable from the particular texture of light in which they're bathed in. The sharp flourescent white tubes of those lonely evenings, the glow of tv on old, withered faces in dark rooms, the jaundiced-yellow of outdoor lamps, the way colour drained off the world as dusk turned to night and the maghrib calls richocheted across the silent world outside my paternal grandfather's house in kakatiya nagar. I remember the hot summer holiday afternoons in dilsukh nagar, around 1-1.30 PM, when the roads became empty and quiet, and I sat outside the house on the gattu, sweating and reading, trying to escape the listlessness and melancholy that is such a normal but overlooked part of childhood. For long durations as a 10-11 year old, you have nothing to do- can't go out, don't want to nap, waiting for evening to fall, not too many thoughts or worries to keep turning around- so you sit there, almost meditatively in a sense, daydreaming (with or without a book) and just being.
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Dharani woke us up at 3.30-ish AM today and perhaps I was dreaming of all this that I felt compelled to jot it down in darkness as Sravani rocked her back to sleep.