An Eulogy (An Academic Assignment)

Dec 2012
Eighteen years ago, I left my endogamous community to marry someone I had known from university.
That time I was in India, so pre-knowing the person I was marrying, and marrying outside my community, was a double rebellion.
In what many of my countrywomen would consider an inauspicious omen, I offered to write his eulogy last week. He had to speak his own eulogy as part of his Master's course requirements.
In a darkened theatre today, he spoke to a solemn audience of his classmates, dressed in black, each trying to imagine his own eulogy.
This was his as I imagined I would say it, and he based his speaking assignment on it. "I did not think she would be this easy on me," he told the class.
I, on the other hand, could not imagine why he thought I was being easy on him.

I’m afraid this is going to be a very personal speech, something he would not approve of, but as of yesterday, I’m free to do things he did not approve of.
Those were among his last words: “You don’t have to be afraid of what I will say much longer.”
After 67 years of embedding his dislikes in my soul, mind and body, I will miss being afraid. So I suppose.
His likes were few: One big like was our post-dinner walk, and the weekend bike ride. Those he never tired of, though he could be exhausted after an hour at the mall. He learnt to slow down for my much shorter legs on our bike rides; I learnt to let him sit out the mall crawls. He suffered from withdrawal symptoms if he did not get his daily walks, and soon I started getting them too. It helped keep him the way he looks, the silver hair still on his head, almost as tall as he was when we first met. Not all bad for a 94 year-old. That's why I never left him, come whoever else.
Our children and all our grandchildren and great grandchildren are gathered here today, because I made sure they came, or I would not bury him. He loved them for being independent people who never struck roots, for they were reflections of him. Until he was fifty, we did not own an inch of earth, and we were proud of ourselves for being restless souls who would be up and away when we were curious about other ways of living.
There are facts about his life that diverge so much from mine and surprise me still. He was a child in a house without electricity, but scores of relatives to love him and carry him around, while his 18-year old mother worked hard to feed and care for a large joint family. He was a teenager who almost became a priest but abandoned the seminary after two years. He was a student who took an education loan when banks in India were not yet loan-savvy. He was a young working adult who was soon jaded by proximity to politicians and businessmen in India’s capital city. He was a man who took a chance on me and is still with me. He was a father who cut our children’s hair, saved our daughter from choking on a grape when everyone else panicked, our son from deep inside a stinking manhole while others wondered how. He was a migrant who almost adopted the countries we lived in, but for my insistence on going "home." He was once more a student at 42, in awe of the insights he got from his brilliant professors, especially when he got in touch with his feminine side. That’s what his second Master’s degree taught him. Conflict negotiation and leadership after conquering the self. Stuff I have always practised in our family, albeit on a lonely path, as I once told him and never mentioned again.
Well, those effects did not last long, as always when he had such insights. He was still my possessive Indian Malayali male, resigned to being married to a typical non-resident Malayali female.
That’s mid-point on this timeline, and now the boring parts begin. Yet to me they were the best years, because he was learning to be human, as my children and I would tease. He taught our daughter to make sense of economics which did not exist in the intellect of the female side of our family. And he taught himself to say economics did not matter, if it did not make her happy, but literature did. He pulled our son through his bumpy entrepreneurial madcap years by staying firmly away but rapping him on his head when needed.
And he fulfilled his highest ambition of making a political impact. His efficiency and clear objective became assets here. If it has made the slightest difference, I am humbled. That single-mindedness which could drive me up walls has made a difference elsewhere. And in me.
I still can’t get rid of the habit of walking from the dining room to the bedroom in the most efficient manner, on the shortest route, that lets me pick up any book, pin or paper that’s lying out of place and putting them in their places. In my head, he will still be watching, so nothing will be out of place, and I will always be walking efficient routes. In case.
To the grandchildren we brought up together while your mother wrote her books: you will forever be part of the legacy of family love which did not limit itself to parents. It made your grandfather secure and independent from childhood. And to the great grandchildren who are wondering what this fuss is all about, someday I promise to read you the letters we wrote each other so that you understand too.
To the man whom once I couldn’t sleep without, I know you will be mad if I don’t. So I promise to sleep, walk, and achieve a flat tummy that was your one dream for me. Also to finish that book you were writing, and to make it even better, like I always wanted to.