It bugs me, this

I grew up in a difficult family, and so I had a difficult childhood. Materially we were comfortable till I was in my mid-teens, when my father lost his cushy job with a public sector company, and we discovered he had never saved anything at all for a rainy day. The decade that followed gave me a taste of hardship and poverty first hand, and loneliness too – it went so deep that I have since then always had a profound contempt for people who have known such things only from books and movies, and a special respect for those who have fought their way through these things to a better life, be they day labourers or tycoons. Meanwhile, my academic career, after going excellently upto a fairly advanced stage, suffered a sudden big jolt: that is something I shall not discuss here; only let it be known that had things gone ‘normally’, I’d probably have been a senior World Bank official or an advisor to the Government of India today, as so many others, much less well endowed, have managed to become in my own time. Not that I am sad or envious that I didn’t – I know far too much about such positions and lives to find anything desirable or admirable about them, no real power, money or fame – just saying. My budding career in journalism, too, I quit early, because it paid very poorly in those days (I was desperate to fend for myself and find a little comfort and dignity in my life), and because I tired quickly of talking about what other people were doing and saying. My own life and work was not that unimportant; I had things to say of my own, and I wanted to work primarily for myself, and for the sake of people I personally cared for, and bring about little changes for the better that I could see with my own eyes.

Very few people, not excluding my parents, have ever done anything significantly good for me. The man I shall forever be most indebted to – after my grandfather and Sudhirda, that is to say – was Father Adrian Wavreil s.j., then headmaster of St. Xavier’s School Durgapur, who hired me as a teacher in June 1988. The rest, as they say, is history. I had taught privately ever since I was 17, and I now discovered that teaching was my calling and métier, and plunged into it with all the energy and enthusiasm I could muster. God gives us opportunities and challenges; what we do with them defines who we are. I began to flourish early in my job, as much in pecuniary terms as in terms of pride and self-satisfaction. That was back in the early ’nineties, and it has been up, up, up all the way, though in a quiet, plodding, unspectacular manner. I haven’t been seriously ill for more than 25 years now, and taken ‘medical leave’ for three days only once, God be thanked. I built a house with my father, married off my two sisters and got married myself, had a daughter and brought her up happily. I helped my wife and father in law through major medical crises. I got my own two-wheeler bought with my own money only at age 26 (a few years before that even buying a bicycle would have meant several months of hard saving), and went on to a second-hand car first, then a new one. We began travelling often, and comfortably every year (juxtapose this with the fact that I first ever travelled air-conditioned class by train with my own money only when I went on my honeymoon!). I bought my wife a house of her own, and have decked it up comfortably to her satisfaction. I am nearly done setting up a fund that will take care of my daughter’s college education. If I live more simply than I could afford today, that is only because I deeply regard it as a good virtue, nothing else. Much of this has been done in a ‘jobless’ state, too, and I shall go on insisting that almost the entire urban Bengali middle class – that small part of it which reads me and meets me, that is – will do well to keep it in mind that that alone, besides a lot else, puts me poles apart from them, because they cannot imagine existing without ‘secure’ salaried jobs, all talk of self-worth and self-respect be damned when it comes to the crunch. All this done, too, without demeaning myself before anybody, without ever asking for a favour, without ever offering or taking a bribe, without ever stabbing someone else in the back for my petty immediate advantage. And now, if I can work just ten more years as I have been working all this time, I can retire comfortably…much of my life is done.

All this has kept me more than moderately ‘busy’, as most people understand busy-ness in this country. Now what I want to underscore is the fact that I still have always ‘had time’ for far more. From reading widely on every subject under the sun to writing almost as much (and never utter trivia), from watching thousands of movies to giving my daughter and wife the time of their lives, from doing the meanest household chores to charity to counselling old boys and girls on a more involved and intimate footing than most professional counsellors can dream of, from walking and swimming and pranayaam to helping out people with their doctoral theses. Yes, it has made me well-known to a lot of people, some of whom regard me with awe, some with disbelief, some with exasperation, some with the meanest jealousy. Yes, it has somehow never won me the kind of fame and wealth that could have allowed me to do all that on a much wider scale, for other people’s benefit more than my own: that I ascribe to karma and  nothing else. Yes, it has caused me much frustration and bitterness, seeing how little people remember with affection and gratitude once they have got what they wanted from me. And no, I am not sorry about the way I have lived, because it has helped me know myself as well as a lot of others most uncommonly well – indeed, as I often tell people both young and old, ‘I know you better than you know yourself, as you will perhaps realize someday…get back to me when you do, and then maybe we can spend more meaningful time together’.

What upsets me today, then? Well, to put it in short, the fact that I still haven’t been able to ‘cure’ myself of a certain weakness that people continue to take advantage of. As my wife diagnosed a long time ago, I tend to let people get very close to me – people who are lonely and confused and tired and sad, and show a need for my company and counsel – and sooner or later, they invariably start abusing the privilege, either because they never valued it enough, or because their ‘need’ has been served, or they are by nature too flighty to value a serious relationship, or too scared to get closer beyond a point, or whatever. And then it leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth: why on earth did I give so much of my time and attention and affection to this undeserver? This is a strange thing about my life: I have never really needed anybody to live my life my way, in the sense that I can live pretty well physically as much as mentally all on my own (I said earlier I owe very few things to anybody but God), yet I tend to get involved very intensely when I do, and I expect the same kind of sincerity and intensity in return, and I am disappointed, often very painfully, again and again. Yet I still have trouble accepting that human beings are essentially shallow, and I must not expect much from them. Maybe that is the last step of wisdom I still have to climb… to really accept that everyone counts upto a point, but nobody really matters. After all, somebody is going to burn my remains anyway, for their welfare, not mine – a rotting carcass is a threat to public health. So why should I care?

What rankles even more is that many of the same people can somehow find time to gush over celebrities, even write glowing tributes about them if they are literate, notwithstanding the fact that those celebs never really touched their lives in any meaningful way. I remember the raucous public mourning by drunken lumpens when Satyajit Ray passed away, I recall a female pupil mourning theatrically when Shah Rukh Khan as Devdas died in the movie which provoked her dad to wonder aloud whether she’d cry as much when he died. Now it’s happening all over again with Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy and Rituparno Ghosh’s death – nothwithstanding the fact that the latter’s biggest claim to fame was his penchant for cross-dressing and some in-your-face verbal mannerisms, who probably killed himself early through a lot of unnecessary medication and surgery (face it: where would Stephen Hawking be without his blessed motor neuron disease?), and he was, in his own words, not to be counted among the world’s five hundred greatest directors, so the less I said about that the better. It is a teacher’s fate rarely to be acknowledged publicly with that kind of respect, affection, gratitude and sadness at parting, I suppose. No matter how extraordinary an impact s/he made on real lives. And maybe that’s the crucial point: a teacher belongs too much to the real world, whereas tycoons and popstars and movie personalities are like the djinns and fairies and princes of old – about those we can gush to our hearts’ content, but how can we emote like that about real people, especially while they are still alive? What will people say? It would be sooooo embarrassing! Maybe I’ll have to die and come back to read the obits. And what makes it all the more painful is the fact that a tiny handful do write and talk in worshipful tones, to the extent that I have to tell them every now and then to pitch it down a bit! Their existence, by contrast, underlines the truth that real love, love which is not afraid but proud to make itself known, is so rare in this world, though so many pretend…see, once more, the post titled 'A girl who admired her teacher' along with all the comments: it is there on my most-read list.

So maybe I’d become a happier man if I really told the whole world, at fifty, ‘Pay me if you want to talk to me’? Or would I? And would that make me a better man to know? Could I have been of so much ‘use’ to so many people if I had become that way in my mid-twenties? If I really did cut off my email connection and took on a new phone number that only my wife and daughter and doctor would know and put a gatekeeper at the door to stop people I don’t want to see from coming in, would that be a nicer thing for everybody who feels it is important to keep in touch with me, yet would never do a few things that make me happy?

P.S. June 06: Well, we all live in a democratic world, a world of free personal choice. Only, as I never tire of telling people, that, without being balanced by other conditions, cannot make for warm, happy relationships. Your choice to play footsie with me, my choice to ignore you - that's democracy. Even my wife was telling me this morning that she hates it when I stop talking to her. Only, like just about everybody else, she can't remember for long that there are conditions: I am not a robot you can press to amuse you at your convenience. You need to give me things, too...