MY
GRANDFATHER’S GENE
-
Saptarshi Basu
Man
is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible
for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning
―
Jean-Paul Sartre
TORMENTED
SOULS
The nature of mankind has a striking similarity in one respect
– that we all love to destroy what we had once loved. Bitterly and madly. How
could you better explain the hindu-muslim riot as fallout of the partition. Innocent
people, irrespective of their religion had continued peacefully for thousands
of years. How come the nature of relationship was painfully dissected on the
table of Bengal’s soil on a single day?
My grandmother never had any answer to it. My grandfather
whom I had never met was forced to leave everything and search for a new home.
Home indeed is a peculiar word. The love, the patience, the effort and the time
invested building it up might be all destroyed in a single second. And then, as
Rudyard Kipling has famously said in his ‘IF’ poem –
And
risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And
lose, and start again at your beginnings
And
never breathe a word about your loss
I wonder if my grandfather had the endeavor of risking
anything. Or did have anything to risk at all. The complexities of Gandhian
politics were quite tough for his docile mind, I believe. And so, when the
great deluge began, though there was no Noah, only millions of hapless people
wandering for a new home. Home indeed is a peculiar word.
It was that time that the wander-bug had bitten my ancestor.
For I had heard scintillating stories from my Granma that my grandfather
absconded for his family life quite often. After he had set up something called
‘home’ in west Bengal, preferably Kolkata.
Marcel Proust once said ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes, but in having new eyes’. Perhaps, the great deluge had offered him, I mean my
grandfather a boundless ‘new eye’.
With the advent of my youth, which is a form of chemical
madness as per F. Scott Fitzgerald I had been bitten by that same wander-bug.
Somewhere, deep inside my hearts of heart I believe it was in my grandfather’s gene.
The pangs of being a writer came much later accompanied by the usual remorse of
nothingness and solitude. As Gogol once said in his Dead Souls –
and
that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown! This
contemporary judgment does not recognize; and will turn it all into a reproach
and abuse of the unrecognized writer; with no sharing, no response, no
sympathy, like a familyless wayfarer, he will be left alone in the middle of
the road. Grim is his path, and bitterly he will feel his solitude.
-
TO BE
CONTINUED ( this is a copyrighted material)
About the Author:
Saptarshi Basu is the writer of AUTUMN IN MY HEART (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009D6PJTY)
published last December by Times Group.