Doubly blessed

Flipping through the newspaper on Ugadi day, my eyes fell on an obituary, in which certain people and a place, distant though familiar, stared at me compellingly. Although more than four decades had passed with no contact whatsoever, it was on a whim that I decided to go to this funeral come what may.

Arriving at Kalpalli crematorium that afternoon, I enquired with one of the mourners as to where Kalpana was. She pointed to a diminutive frame, with strands of grey in her hair, clad in a pure white sari draped in Kodava style, and a white shawl covering her shoulders. Was this the same Kalpana Kuttaiah that I knew when we were little?

Over the past 40-odd years she had become a haze in my mind’s eye. Walking up to her I found myself choked for words, before stuttering: “I don’t know if you’ll remember me… the time we all went to school together all the way to Ammathi? A few of us families had formed a car pool… your mother drove a blue Ambassador, my dad a black one, and Tilak’s was a jeep…? This morning when I saw her obituary, I told myself that I had to be here today.”

This fleeting emotional encounter took me travelling back in time to my early existence on a coffee estate in Pollibetta, south Coorg, one of a dozen postings in my father’s long career as a banker. With the crates that moved with us every couple of years in a rootless kind of life, were also trunk loads of memories — of people, places and events.
While the luggage needed to be unpacked, the memories did not and got stashed away, pigeon-holed into happy or sad ones.

Memories usually remain dormant like a volcano until life springs up some thunderbolt moments when they suddenly come startlingly alive. When life throws us a second chance, it comes with choice as an optional add-on. Not wanting to leave room for regret, I was glad to have used the option to reopen a favourite page from my dusty, dog-eared book of happy childhood memories. The passage of time seemed irrelevant in that moment as Kalpana — who’s settled abroad — and I hugged each other tight and wept our hearts out even as she extracted a promise from me to stay in touch.

Visibly moved by such an unexpected blast from the past, she in turn had overwhelmed me by tightly clasping my hands into her own before bending down to kiss them, saying in an impassioned voice: “I know my mother has sent you like a blessing to me!” Deeply appreciative of her heartfelt sentiment that day, it was actually I who came away feeling doubly blessed.