If I Had to Tell It Again

by Gayathri Prabhu

  I called it whatever the doctor called it, went to therapy, took my medication, clawed my way out, inch by inch, over many years.

  My father called my struggles a sign of weakness – nothing at all like that brave drink-soaked angst of his.

  I pointed out that he did not have the stomach for a good fight, like I did. Look, my fists were always curled, I was always in the ring, I stayed up for every single round. He was the one making poor choices, in people, in substances – I was speaking more and more bluntly as I aged. What was there to fear, after the worst came and went?

  Perhaps I could have helped him. But I did not. Deliberately, I stayed angry, I stayed critical. I left no lines of connection open. To me, retrieving him from a condition that he refused to acknowledge, that he insisted on escalating, was not just futile but likely to harm my own recovery. Eventually, when his spirit wanted to live, his body began to rapidly fail, and I avoided him as much as possible. I was withdrawn, curt, rolled tight, like a snail.

  Four months before his death, we were just back from the hospital, with all the cirrhosis confirmations in a file, and he was surprisingly pliant. He stopped drinking, took the medicines he had been given and followed the diet prescribed. He looked at us like he had never had a single self-destructive thought in his life. He even muttered something about liver transplants. Who was this man? It was maddening.

  And when I did try to do something right, it came out all wrong.

  Learn to behave like a daughter, he said over something inconsequential, and do as I tell you.

  I will behave like a daughter if you behave like a father, but you have never known how, I shouted back.

  He blamed my independence. I blamed him. He blamed himself for instilling a taste for rebellion in us. It was a customary deadlock.

  Go away. Get out. I don’t need anyone. His voice was trembling, his knuckles swaying dangerously between us, his eyes bloodshot. I won’t be around for too long, I want to die.

  I will go away. And please do die. I promise you I will not shed a single tear if you die.

  All this shouting happened during our last meeting. We had forgotten how to love and all that remained in the last few years was a terrific hunger for confrontation. We spoke but we did not listen. We yelled into the walls. What did we gain?

  If I had to tell it again, I would do it like this.

  True, you were not perfect.

  But hey, look at me – I am talking to a dead man.

  Are all monologues foredoomed? Am I at dire risk of magnifying a childhood preoccupation with one parent’s gloom while completely absolving the non-depressive one? Do I hold you responsible for the roads I had to walk, the injuries I had to nurse?

  Things happened to me that I cannot tell you about. If I could not find the words when I was eleven, it is understandable, but even now I don’t have a deep enough vocabulary.

  (Tell him, tell them, my sister would encourage. Our parents need to know what happened to you. They let it happen to you.

  Why? What will the telling do? I lost my childhood, irrevocably, so long ago, and the only place it now exists is in their heads. Let it be …)

  Talking, not listening, was your forte. The words, like the thoughts, had looped for years, no way out.

  You said you wanted out, and I believed you. What you meant was that you could not continue as you had for so many years – emotional, impractical, temperamental – and you were too frightened to change, to go back to the drawing board. The uncertainty of daily living, its haphazardness, had made a lonely man of you. Only two remedies had seemed potent – intoxicant and death – and how easily the two fused for you.

  Reminding me of that is this green diary, the one found below your pillow, the pillow we burnt after you left for the morgue.

  The shake in your hand that we saw for the last three years of your life is now a shake in the lettering on its page. Read me aloud, it says, and then, don’t.

  A diary belonging to the year 2001 used by a man dying in 2014 – surely you will appreciate the irony of writing into the past. You use it like a notebook, unmindful of the dates, but they are there, staring at me. Did they also stare at you when you wrote?

  Did you also notice that 1 January happened to be a Monday in 2001? A symmetry you would have liked.

  My eye traces your familiar hand on the page. You have numbered each of the sayings and proverbs that fill the opening pages, some translated from English, all of them in the Kannada script.

  633, that’s how many you have numbered in the first set. From the pages marked January all the way to March.

  Some of these quotes have been ticked, marked, set aside, and it makes me want to pick those out.

  No. 395 – good deeds done for praise are futile

  No. 167 – the greatest education is to facilitate livelihood

  No. 97 – history is a tomb built on the grave of dead events

  No. 58 – if life is to be joyous, our speech and our actions have to be simplified

  No. 306 – deeds done with a good mind are like prayers offered to god

  No. 181 – sports does not always provide pleasure, but there is no joy without sportsmanship

  No. 312 – giving birth and raising children is not enough, giving them education is also duty

  Folded in the diary I find a letter, addressed to nobody and signed ‘true friend’, promising to always be there ‘come what may’. And it has been written by you – who did you mean to send it to?

  April is empty. So is May. But July is full of more numbered wisdom. This time nothing is marked as important. There are 194 quotations. All the way into the second day of August.

  August, September, silence again. But on 1 October, the words resume just for five more days – more poetry this time, mostly couplets, extracts. And the alphabets are trembling more than before.

  The rest of October and November is very quiet, just empty spaces.

  It is December that starts to break my heart.

  The lettering is harder to read. More quotations. A few pages of silences. And then comes 15 December.

  I see poems in Kannada that you are careful to attribute to yourself. These are no borrowed sayings, this is your voice and you want to make sure the diary knows it.

  This is the first. I translate roughly in my head as I read:

  Birth is accidental, death inevitable

  Between birth and death, a life of worry

  And yet this desire to live, till the end.

  Enough. I cannot, I should not translate you. This language, this poet-father are like distant waves – hypnotic but distant. Let the rest be just between you and me.

  My eyes turn to the one under 18 December. It’s a poem called ‘Me!’. It talks about being a drunk, which you declare is far less of a crime than being a hypocrite. Your attention, you say, is only for those who truly love you, and your obeisance is only for those who act as they speak.

  You are not much of a poet. But your voice floats across eons. It smells of earth. Till the end you believed it was a greater joy to give than to receive.

  What have I received? What have you given me?

  This green diary on my table, is it you?

  From 15 December to 22 December, you compose, and then lapse into another patchwork tapestry of words collected and copied with care. Like a Baya weaver bird, you forage for the perfect twig, the loveliest blade of grass, the resilient straw, all words belonging to others. And somewhere in there, you have nested, you have enclosed your own words to yourself.

  And I remain an eavesdropper to the dead.

  I now see that there were no beginnings in the narrative that had been sold to you as life, only fragments, and only ends, only ends.

  It is all over. You are gone. Like the lights.

  When the lights went off, you would drag out your bongo drums (how you loved drumming!) and we would sing those old mournful Hindi film songs, you and me in perfect unison, singing into the dark for hours and hou
rs—

  I was like the canned laughter for your jokes, the straining ears for your stories, the devoted spectator, and what we shared in my infancy was raw and honest, just between you and me—

  The smell of your collar, the lilt of your lullaby, the metal chain of your watch cool against my skin as you rock me to sleep – the memory of your love is older than the memory of your pain, and all that remains now is memory—

  The way you gave us a bath, scrubbing our little arms and soaping our hair, as though we were buffaloes in a village stream—

  The way you cut out elaborate lace patterns from a paper folded eight ways—

  The way we walked together, same gait, same pace, long stride after long stride—

  The way you sat us down on a newspaper and gave us nifty haircuts with the kitchen scissors—

  The way you wrapped and sealed any parcel in a precise meditative way—

  The way you recited long-worded poems entirely from memory, every word a jewel to you—

  The way you taught us to cut vegetables, finely, evenly, the knife like an extended finger—

  The way you collected and displayed little Ganesha idols, especially those from each place I visited, your faith and my travels tied together—

  The way you wrote my name with large loops in all my books—

  The way your entire being brimmed to the plaintive singing of Mukesh, each song sadder than the other: Khush raho har khushi hai tumhare liye—

  The way you hovered around your old red typewriter and me, teaching each finger to find its alphabets—

  The way you stood at train and bus stations in different cities, your eyes filling up, your teeth biting your lips, when the wheels started to turn, taking me away from you—

  The way you watered your plants with watchful trickles of water—

  The way you cried all the way home, for more than three hours, when you saw how close I was to giving up—

  The way you could add lies to a true story and still keep it true—

  The way you were always you, so flawed, so unbearably flawed—

  You, my father.

  Leap

  (one-act play)

  CHARACTERS

  W – a woman in her early forties. She wears long flowing clothes in muted earth tones and is barefoot.

  M – a man in his mid-sixties. He wears a slightly oversized t-shirt, preferably in bright colours, and aged trousers.

  S – a shadow, a woman of no specific age wearing all black, including black shoes, socks and gloves. Her face is painted black. S represents different possibilities through the play – an individualized quirky character, a voice in the woman’s head, the dark illness itself, an echo of the dramatic tensions between the other two characters – and is meant to be played in all these shades. Hence it is important to pay attention to shifts in tone.

  SCENE ONE

  One half of the stage is cluttered with low stools and tall piles of books placed between them. The other side is an elevated platform with a sturdy ladder propped against it. The platform should be broad enough to accommodate two characters and a few strides, and the ladder should be between the audience and the platform.

  Two spotlights fall at a distance from each other among the books. The platform is poorly lit but reveals S sitting on it with dangling feet. A streak of light slants diagonally near her.

  S holds out an open book so the light beam falls on it and starts to read loudly.

  S: I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

  I learn by going where I have to go.

  W has walked into the other half of the stage and is standing in the dark listening intently.

  S: We think by feeling. What is there to know?

  I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  W walks into a spotlight and sits down on a stool. She picks up a book and starts reading very softly.

  W: Of those so close beside me, which are you?

  God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

  And learn by going where I have to go.

  Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

  The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  As she is reading, S starts to climb down the ladder slowly. W looks up and then down again. She is pretending to read the book but is watching from the corner of her eye. When S is a rung away from the stage floor, she hesitates, one foot suspended in space. And then quickly scampers up to the top of the platform again.

  W and S (speaking together, though S’s voice is soft and halting in comparison to W): I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  S: I wrote that.

  W puts her book down and turns in the direction of S.

  W: Theodore Roethke wrote it. Look.

  S: I could have written it.

  W (slightly annoyed): Why are you hovering up there?

  S: I am a shadow. I can be wherever I wish to be.

  W: You can be wherever there is light.

  S: Well, I am here … I have always lived here. Even when the lights go out in the night …

  W: You live here, in the library? Is that allowed?

  S: Why not? One never runs out of reading material here, and there is so much to read. Books, books, books.

  There is a long pause as if both of them are waiting for the other to speak. S holds out the book in the beam of light and then dramatically lets go. W jumps at the thud.

  S: And then there’s writing, I have many deadlines to meet.

  W is walking slowly to the ladder. The spotlight follows her.

  W (in a disbelieving tone): A free-floating shadow with a writing career!

  S: You judge too quickly …

  W: My father wrote too. Letters to editors, short articles, a big green diary, but …

  S jumps up on the platform, agitated, and starts to walk back and forth.

  S: But?

  W: I can’t tell you more.

  S: Writing is okay, but living in the library is no fun. Books make terrible beds.

  W: Where did you come from? You must have a home, go home … (now standing beside the ladder, resting a hand on it)

  S: How does it matter? I woke up one day to find I had become a shadow, and I was living here.

  W is now examining the ladder. She slowly climbs the first rung.

  W: And what were you before you turned into a shadow?

  S (stops pacing and stands very still): Why do you ask?

  W (continuing to climb slowly): I mean, what did you do for a living?

  S: I hardly made a living. But I worked very hard.

  W: Worked at what? (still climbing and now midway up the ladder; she lets go of one hand and swings playfully)

  S: I wrote. I went to the library every morning, sat there till the sun went down, writing all the time. Then I came home, boiled some soup, but drank vodka instead and wrote some more … till the end. I wrote even after the end, I wrote …

  W (tentatively): Are you telling me that you died?

  S: Did I? I must have …

  W (starts to climb again): How many books did you write?

  S: Just one, the story of my life. All I knew and imagined and dreamed went into it – a story I kept writing and rewriting. All the things that happened, they faded as soon as I wrote them. And the make-believe stuff started to come true.

  W: Then help me write about my father. Write it as he would write it. And maybe it will shape into a life he hoped for.

  S: If he is dead, let him be …

  W has now reached the top of the platform. She reaches out a hand towards S who does not take it and resolutely turns away. W pauses before withdrawing her outstretched hand and climbs up on the platform. They are now standing back to back, looking out in opposite directions.

  W: Do we write as we remember, or do we remember as we write?


  S: We don’t remember at all. We bead together words, call it a memory. Writers are such cheats. Ask your father.

  W: I hated it when he spoke my life – how can I do the same to him? But you can write about me, and I will tell you about him …

  S: I don’t recommend it. Your life is small, and there is the sea of unknown around it, full of perils. Anything you say can spear someone’s heart, be refuted, denied, damned. You think you are telling the truth, but the truth is a parody. You can never get it right, and I have learnt to forge ahead, to get it wrong. Wrong, but in the right tenor, like crossing between lives. Believe me, being dead is not as complicated as people make it out to be.

  W: So, what is it like? I mean, being dead.

  S: Absolutely wonderful! I feel neither hunger nor sleep nor desire nor pain … (voice trails off in sorrow)

  W: How did you die?

  S: How else? With a leap.

  Brief silence. W slowly starts walking straight ahead to the edge of the platform. S continues to face in the other direction.

  S: Why are you not asking me?

  W: Huh?

  S: You did not ask me why I did it …

  W: Every storyteller has to leap, at some time. I would do it too. Write a leap for me too.

  S: I’m sorry. You have to make your own story. If you can’t … something must be missing …

  W: I have known the pains of growing up, kept the secrets a girl learns to keep, fought to be noticed and played to win. But love …

  S: Giving is more important than taking. If you want something, say no.

  W: You sound like my father.

  S: And my father.

  W: Nothing happened as I had hoped. I promised him the world, and then meandered away …

  S: I remember …

  W: I messed up. He deserves another chance. He had so much to say …

  S: I remember …

  W: I want to forget, start afresh. He will tell his own story again. And again, I will listen … or maybe I am destined to go, just like him …