Two men have influenced my life. Their birthdays follow each other. Mu husband's is on August 14th and my Pa's on August 15th, of course they were born 38 years apart. There is another thing they share, something I did not really ask for: cancer! Maybe this is the cross that I was destined to bear. But in the last weeks when every bit of me has been on edge, when every nerve raw and exposed, when each of my senses have been but to the harshest test and when my travels down memory lane have taken unknown detours, I have come to one realisation: every cloud, however dark and threatening has a silver lining or as Pa would say only God knows the Big Picture of your life, you get stuck in dark corners not knowing what awaits you at the bend. So instead of moaning and wallowing in self pity, I need to figure out why the crab struck again.
Yes Pa's cancer was a difficult reality to accept, however pious or Cartesian one tried to be. Ma has succumbed to the beat just a few months earlier and there it came lurking again. Today I see the big picture. It all began on a hot day in May in 1949 when a not so young bride asked her not so young rotund husband for a promise. The groom was quite besotted with his new bride and accepted to honour the promise without knowing what it was. Poor man! What Kamala wanted that day was a promise that she would die before him and travel her last journey in her bridal gear. I am sure pa must have felt the weight of this promise he had no control on but the Big Picture had already been created and the promise was kept. A cancer took her away when she was barely 70. But before she left, she extracted a promise from me and I too gave it to her without a thought. She asked me to look after Pa till his last breath and never leave me again. At that time it all seemed eminently feasible. Ranjan was posted in Delhi and my daughters were both studying. I had a job I liked and all seemed on track. But then disaster struck. Ranjan got posted to Paris, a city ideally suited for a family imbibed in French culture. But there was a promise to keep. Papa was in perfect health and I was in a quandary not knowing how I would keep the promise made to my mother on her death bed.
Pa, the Big Picture believer simply told me to leave it to God, who ever that God was. I would have given him a mouthful were it not my father! But he was right as always and the crab was again spot on. He died in 29 days and freed me from a promise I could not have broken.
I spend many hours in the dead of the white nights that have been my fate these past weeks and wondered what the Big Picture could be this time as the BP is always meant to be blessed. And then it struck me. This time the beast had surreptitiously crept into our lives to bring us together in the most unexpected yet closest way. Every thing had to be put on hold. It was just the two of us battling to save our love. There were no excuses: bet it pwhy or golf! God was giving us the time to share all we had never shared, say all the things left unsaid, clear all the issues if there were any and be there just for each other. All else was on hold! Maybe it was also a promise that needed to be redeemed, the one we made on our wedding day and that somehow got lost along the way as we chased empty dreams or simply fought the battles of life lost sight of the essential.
In 4 sleepies (this is Agastya's way of counting time and means the number of nights) Agastya and his family will be gone for a long long time. There will just be the two us and the strict regimen that Mr Hodgkin's has imposed on us. In between there will be tender moments, reminiscences, laugher and maybe also the tears that need to be shed. We will walk gently towards the day when we resume our old life after bidding a final farewell to the lymphoma - let us called it by its name - who came with a purpose and was part of the Big Picture.
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