Love of a lifetime

AFTER a two-hour-long chat at a Chembur flat early this August when I rose to leave, R.G.K, hesitated, then handed over a thin volume to me. "It is not much of a book," he said. "But it comes from the heart." R.G.K. was R. Gopal Krishna, former senior assistant editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India. For 28 years, he was the intellectual blood bank of the magazine. Now past 80, he had settled down in Cochin and had come to Mumbai to meet old friends. Four days after our meeting, R.G.K fell ill and passed away in a local hospital.

I was not a close friend of R.G.K and though colleagues in the Times of India group for over ten years, our paths had seldom crossed. But I was a great admirer of his erudition and scholarly articles in the Weekly. His profiles of personalities who made news which appeared in the Weekly and later in the Times' Sunday magazine section were brilliant.

I reached home and glanced at the book he had given me. Titled A Love Story it also carried the author's "Reflections on Life and Death". Must be a scholarly treatise on life and death, I thought to myself, because I could not imagine R.G.K authoring a love story. His aloofness and inability to suffer fools were well known. "I was a withdrawn character, full of vague anxieties; there was the shadow of melancholy always on my face. I did not know how to live in the world," he admitted in his book. R.G.K's former Weekly colleague and at present, editorial director of the Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day, Bachi Karkaria, observed in her weekly column, "R.G.K's desk was so positioned that he was the first person to whom visitors to the Weekly could direct their queries. He would refuse to answer, and one day, we arrived at work to see he had put up a board on his table saying, 'This man is a deaf- mute'."

How could anyone expect love and romance from such a man? But as I flipped through the pages of A Love Story, I found myself breathing fast, my pulse raced and often my eyes moistened. My God, this man was a true romantic who had been passionately, desperately in love with his wife of 47 years, Lakshmi. The book was a tribute to her, a collection of fond reminiscences which also revealed his bitter despair at her death last year.

I finished the 150-page book at one sitting. How easy it is for us to misjudge people! This was a revolutionary book in the sense that it revolved around an aged man's love and passion for his wife. We Indians are reluctant to reveal our most intimate feelings of love and passion, particularly after reaching a certain stage in our lives. A couple, once in their fifties (or even earlier), are expected to focus their attention on charity, God and doing good work. Have we ever heard of elderly gentlemen looking deep into the eyes of their wives and muttering, "You look divine, my darling, I love you so much." This kind of "exhibitionism" is supposed to be the monopoly of youth or cinema stars. Who knows, even the wives may object! "Porume, enna idhu paithyam madhiri. Indha vaisule, Krishna Rama enru chhollikame ... Kozhandaigal partha siripal" (What is this madness! At this age you should think of Rama and Krishna; If the children see us, they will laugh)!

R.G.K, I am sure, was not one for public exhibition of the love he felt for his wife. He must have been a traditional husband and yet the book is a treatise on wedded love which kept on blossoming. He was an unwilling bridegroom, forced into matrimony by his sister and brother-in-law. Writing about their wedding night, R.G.K tried to remember all the love stories and poems he had read which he wanted to convey to his wife. After an initial silence which lasted almost an hour, the couple began to talk about various topics, and ended up talking all through the night! The husband came to know that his bride knew Sanskrit and told her stories by Kalidasa and from the Ramayana.

Yes, the couple did enjoy a honeymoon. Tongue firmly in cheek, R.G.K explained, "We spent our honeymoon in Matunga and Thana where we set up our home. We went with a cloth bag to buy ash gourd and French beans and it was our honeymoon. We toiled together to carry buckets of water upstairs in our home and that was our honeymoon. We were worried how we could make ends meet and that was our honeymoon!"

If that was the "ridiculous" part in the book, there are enough "sublime" passages. R.G.K writes about the sarees his wife wore. "I see you flitting across the screen of my mind in a thousand sarees, designed in a thousand ways and dyed in a thousand different shades. Indeed all the colours in my life were provided by you. You appeared flamboyant in some colours and glowing in some others. You were indeed an overture to the air, to the sun, to the stars, to the unseen gods and goddesses."

R.G.K loved carnatic music and Lakshmi brought more music into his life. She was his favourite raga, Anandabhairavi. He remembered every song she taught to her students who came to learn music. But love also implied the capacity for suffering. Lakshmi suffered from acute diabetes, yet attended to all her husband's needs. Often he was angry with himself for not being able to give her a better life. "I was an ill-paid journalist. You could not live in style in a big flat with posh sofas. You could not drive around in a car. You could not even enjoy a happy holiday in a hill station." But their love for each other, music and the constant presence of children (not their own, the couple did not have any children) made up for the lack of these comforts.

The details of Lakshmi's death and R.G.K's reactions made me reach for my handkerchief. As she lay ill in the hospital, the universe was suddenly full of evil omens. He observed a peculiar dark spot on the fiery yellow beak of a mynah, a regular visitor. It was monsoon time but the sky was seldom overcast and the unnatural brightness frightened him. He was shocked that death came as a sunbeam to claim her. Hadn't he promised his wife in all seriousness that if "anything" should happen to her, he would go in pursuit of Yama and retrieve her life from him as a male counterpart of Savitri?

Soon it was all over. "She has stopped breathing," announced the doctor. R.G.K was upset when one of the relatives wanted to have her nose ring removed. "The material objects associated with a dead person assume greater importance than the person," he lamented. The body was home at last and got ready for the cremation. "I wanted to hold her face in my hands, feel her body, feel its glow. But I was shy, surrounded as I was with friends and relatives. I wanted to hold her body in my lap and weep, weep and weep for an eternity. But again, I felt inhibited. I remained like a log of wood bound by the ropes of dignified social behaviour."

Was he a loyal husband, R.G.K asked himself. "Were I a loyal husband I would have allowed myself to be consumed by the same fire that rubbed my wife to ashes. I ask myself why is it that no husband is known to have ascended the funeral pyre of his wife? There would have been nothing more beautiful for me than such a union in death, the two of us perishing in the same sacrificial fire. But one needs courage for such an act, courage springing from love."

He was not convinced by arguments that life must go on and that everyone had to die. "I wonder why it should. Can I brush away the 47 years of life with my wife as if they were not a reality and start 'afresh'? They are sewn into my skin, nailed to my mind so to speak, stored lovingly into my consciousness.

To be brave, does it mean to live down these years, to destroy their content with the acid of forgetfulness. These 47 years were not like the footage of a movie that one can forget after seeing it projected on the screen."

It is a difficult question to answer. This story is about a love which made everything beautiful, which grew into something indefinable and beautiful and ennobling - and acquired a purity like gold purged of all blemishes.

V. GANGADHAR

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