Yet Untitled 049 - Ground Control to Major Dad
A playbook for calling dad from afar to comfort his friend who has just passed
Greetings, dearest Yet Untitler,
I hope you are well!
My father lost his best friend - Bunty uncle - last week, who had been ailing for three years. My father wasn’t around to mourn him. He himself has been gone for two and a half years now. I couldn’t ignore the obvious thought - perhaps the two friends would be united again, albeit on another plane of existence.
Bunty uncle and dad were both united in their misanthropy. Their grumbling resonated to a level of camaraderie. They both built their own castles in the wilderness where they sought refuge from all that irritated them about the world. Death would have been a great subject for them to bond over, perhaps via grumbling.
I really mourned their separation. My dad had very few friends, and Bunty uncle was foremost among them. Dad had passed suddenly, by which time, Bunty uncle was bedridden and incapable of expressing his sorrow, else he would have surely rushed to see his friend off into whatever lay thereafter.
Now, both of them were in a new state being, unencumbered by their corporeal forms. I couldn’t help wishing for them to be together again.
But what could i do to bring the two friends back together? It started as a rhetorical question, but it lingered. Soon it became…
…a playbook.
a. Looking
The first question was, where to find the two grumblers before attempting to reunite them? I wondered - where would dad be at this time?
Dad was a man of astronomy. Many years ago, he bust his ankle showing my brother and my cousin the stars. It was up in the mountains, in a dark place conducive to stargazing - he had been so absorbed in looking at the night sky that he stepped off a ledge and landed wrong, painfully wrong. Power outages from my childhood were always seen as opportunities for stargazing. A decently powerful telescope rested -covered with a discarded bed cloth - in a back room. I have indelible memories of carrying that white optic tube upstairs to the terrace and seeing the rings of Saturn through it.
The reason I’m telling you all this is to answer the question - where I thought I’d find dad at the time of Bunty uncle’s death? It made sense that the man’s spirit would be in deep space, checking out nebulae.
b. Calling out
I called out to dad - “Come back. Your friend needs you. You’ve been on the other side for two years now. He’s probably floundering in the dark somewhere just now. He needs your experience. He needs his friend.”
But how does one call someone back from so far away? Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ started playing in my head; to be precise - a haunting version of the song as sung by the schoolchildren of The Langley School Music Project came to me:
I experienced a sudden moment of loneliness. ‘Space Oddity’ is an anthem of loneliness, and when it’s sung by these innocent childlike voices, I find myself transformed into a hapless child myself, looking here, there and everywhere for a lost parent.
But I had to put this feeling aside and come back to Bunty uncle - who needed his friend.
I recalled a Tibetan chant that my friend Vikramjit (who I wrote about in YU 12: Of Umbrellas and Exploding Hedgehogs) had introduced me to a long time ago. Remixed by an esoteric French music producer, this rendition of the chant, to me, represented the possibility of a prayer that could traverse any conceivable distance, even the vastness of space.
c. Reflection
After this, I thought of my mother.
I recalled my days of studying abroad, when my mother used to call me, almost telepathically, when I had a cold. Also, the sense of triumph in her voice when she knew that her intuition had hit home was something else! The thought be damned that she was a continent away.
I thought of the Buddhist monk Nichiren, who was known to write letters of encouragement to his disciples while on exile on faraway Sado island. The majority of his disciples were a perilous week-long journey away, covering both land and sea, in Kamakura.
What I love about these letters - collectively known as the Gosho (trans: ‘honourable writings’) is that, in them, distances come across as nothing to Nichiren. He always talks about the universe to his disciples as if it was as accessible as his back yard. He’d talk about the firmament reflected in a pool of water and how it connected him in that moment to the disciple who could gaze at the same firmament in a water body next to them. It’s the immediacy that always astounds me in the Gosho - Nichiren’s conviction that he and his disciple are connected in that very moment. The timeline of letter writing - the gap between sending and receiving - makes this even more interesting. For Nichiren, there seems to be no distinction between past, present and future: the moment of connection between him and his disciple remains constant and undiminished from the moment Nichiren felt it while writing his letter, to the moment that the disciple felt it upon reading Nichiren’s letter.
All this, to me, sounds truly wonderful!
And after all this talk about letters, here is a shameless plug:
d. Calling again!
A bit inspired by mom, a bit by Nichiren, a bit by the efforts of the esoteric French music producer, I renewed my call to dad who might have been touring a distant galaxy, cashing in on a new confidence I felt about him being close and far at the same time.
I picture Bunty and him, sitting somewhere on a green hillside in the garden of a house that they both have built. The place looks a bit like Wuthering Heights and a bit like the Hagia Sofia. They are arguing about each others’ architectural choices, and the conversation walks the thin line between amicable and insolent. Bunty uncle gets up to check on the shalgam meat - his lifelong speciality - he’s left simmering in his kitchen while dad shakes off the stardust from his hair.
Thank you for listening!
PS…
If any of this resonated, please do comment or write back. It always feels great hearing from you.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of film music, from a film about two people reaching out to each other from across eternity.