Remembering Manoj
Angels of Compassion - Dall-E
We lay on the grass of an outcrop above the village of Wan, and surveyed the evening sky.
“I think the clear weather will last”, I ventured.
“ Some of those big clouds look quite wateriferous to me”, said Manoj, his choice of words never restricted by the covers of a dictionary.
The morning dawned clear, and we rolled down the easy slope to a stream at the edge of the forest. Sushil signalled we should stop for a bit, and got a small fire going. Manoj boiled up some water in an aluminium kettle and answered the question held in my face,
“Need to clean out my bag, man.”
Years before Manoj became part of our hillside family, he had been treated for colon cancer. The surgery meant that he was alway tethered to a colostomy bag, which carried his waste fluids. Living in a remote village, a regular supply of fresh bags was not possible, and Manoj had a protocol that seemed to keep infection at bay. Though he was most matter-of-fact about the ritual, I found it too personal, almost intimate, and turned away, framing photographs in my ancient Nikon.
Premi and Poornima washed their faces in the stream, Punit strummed his guitar. When he was done, Manoj tucked the cleansed bag into the waistband of his checked pyjamas, and bounded up the path. For the next five hours, I laboured up the monsoon forest, the soil rich with oak leaves, humus and the dung of cattle that had climbed to pasture. When I finally crested the ridge, Punit looked like he’d been perched all day on his burned-out tree trunk. Manoj was already busy rolling a joint. I shucked off my backpack and slumped to the ground, glad for the rest till the others emerged from the forest.
It was still a fair slog to the gentle meadows of Bedni bugyal, by which time mists had drifted down between us. We found shelter in a shepherd hut, happily spared the effort of putting up tents. Within minutes, the clouds proved to be extremely wateriferous. Crushed against each other, we slept to the sound of driving rain.
I think it was Punit who got up first, opened the narrow log door and yelled, “Trishul!”
We pushed past each other, into the last light of the sun glowing on the fresh snows atop Trishul. The sky turned to deep velvet, pricked by a million pinpoints of light. The snow glowed in adoration. Manoj and Punit got the Old Monk going.
A few monsoons later, dog and son had been put to bed in our stone cottage, while the skies emptied into the forests around us. In response to an urgent knock on the door, I turned on the porch light. “Manoj”, I turned to Premi, who was looking at me from her perch in the bay window. His hair was askew, his checked pyjamas dripped water, and his speech was incoherent. We got him a change, and a hot cup of soup, and gathered that he had left his new home, three hours drive to the north, after a disagreement with his coworkers.
“I know these bloody paths, man, but I stumbled in the dark, and toppled down two terraces.”
It could have been worse, I observed - he was walking without a limp, and there were no visible wounds. I offered him an aspirin, but he said he would be fine. “Do you have any booze, man?” I didn’t, and we clambered up to join Kedar in the loft, tossing Manoj a blanket for the bay window.
Manoj woke up with a throbbing wrist. “I must have fallen on it when I took a toss.” It didn’t appear to be broken, and he refused to take a painkiller. By the afternoon, he was groaning in pain.
“You must take a painkiller”, I persisted.
“I don’t take painkillers - they give me a buzz”.
I guffawed - “Old Monk, beedis, cigarettes, dope…you’ll consume anything that gives you a buzz, but not a painkiller?! If you don’t take a Woveran, I can’t help you.”
By dinnertime, Manoj conceded that these golis have their own ju-ju. But, could we ask Man Bahadur if he could organise some booze. I could not, I put my foot down. Two more days of painkillers, home food, and no booze, and Manoj was ready to head back north.
For the next few years, Manoj bounced around from one development project in Kumaon to another. His writing skills, rooted in a broad and questioning intellect, made him an attractive resource for any organisation needing to write grant proposals and submit project reports. But within months, the alcohol and the charas would dictate wayward routines and delayed submissions, and Manoj would hit the road again. First stop, our forest home in Satoli, where his books were stored in a tin trunk, and I was always game for long nights shooting the breeze in the porch.
“As long as you guys sit outside, and Kedar and I can sleep off…”, Premi found her own peace with the way things stood.
Till she couldn’t, any longer. After about 6 years in the Kumaon, Manoj had run out of places that would have him, and moved into our outhouse, even while we began to spend more time in the city. Everytime we went back to Satoli, the mess that trailed Manoj would have spilled into our living room and kitchen, and in the spring of 2005, I agreed with Premi that it was time he moved on.
For a couple of years, we picked up stray bits of news from Manoj, but then the trail went cold. In late 2018, his old pal Anil wrote a distressed mail to Sushil. Manoj’s cancer had surfaced again, his foot was gangrenous, and he had found temporary shelter in an old age home in Haldwani. But he was going to need medical attention, and Anil was on his way back to his home in the US. Could we help?
Of course. I wrote to a friend, “Manoj’s was a life of deep enquiry and of endless adventure. That it was doomed to a tragic end, we all knew.”
Premi visited him in Haldwani a few days later, and wrote, “He was very brave and positive the whole time, joking away and making light of his situation. But, when I left, he had big tears silently rolling down his cheeks and said I was like an angel who had dropped from heaven.”
We consulted an oncologist in Delhi, who advised that chemotherapy held out poor chances of recovery. I volunteered to break the news to Manoj. “If I was in Switzerland, I would ask for euthanasia”, he responded. “I don’t want any treatment.”
His foot, nevertheless, had to be amputated. It felt like an act of butchery to me, with his end so near, but every doctor we spoke to said the inflammation of the veins could travel rapidly upward, while the cancer might spread slowly. Manoj submitted manfully, and when I saw him next, he was walking around his hospital room with a cane.
Manoj wanted to spend his last days in the mountains, and we began to make arrangements for an attendant to watch over him as he occupied our home. But Poornima and Sushil, both doctors, ruled strongly against it. As the days passed, they said, the pain would become increasingly severe, and he would require intensive pain management. And so it came to pass that, on December 8th, we waited for his ambulance to draw up outside Shanti Avedna Ashram, a Delhi cancer hospice run by the Sisters of the Cross.
The quiet sisters had only one question when we had gone to book a bed for him - who would take care of his mortal remains. I said I would.
“No family?”
“He broke ties with his family twenty years ago.”
Manoj settled in immediately, and when I visited him the next day, he looked around and said, “Lying here, I know that compassion has not vanished from the world.”
I was not the person who needed comforting, but Manoj’s words brought a deep sense of peace.
A few days later, the nuns again enquired about his family. His elder brothers were part of the power elite of Lucknow, and I knew his rupture with them had been very final, but still asked Manoj whether I should reach out to them.
“No, Man.” But I knew there was also a younger brother. Like Manoj, he had drifted away from the family, and lived in a temple near Bijnor. When I asked Manoj about him, his eyes softened.
“Should I try to reach out to him?”
Manoj’s face lit up.
We found someone who knew someone, who… and within three days, a soft-spoken man called me,
“My name is Anshuman, and I heard about Manoj-bhai’s condition. I am his cousin from Bijnor, and I would like to come and see him.”
I asked about the younger brother,
“Sorry to tell you, but you know, he was mentally disturbed, and he took his life two years ago.”
I told Anshuman about the hospice, and he said he would come as soon as he could. Just after he hung up, I called him back.
“Don’t tell Manoj about his brother; if he asks, say you have sent him a message.”
That Saturday, Anshuman called me from Manoj’s bedside, and I invited him to lunch on Sunday.
“His elder brother will fly in from Lucknow in the morning, so both bhaiyya and bhabhi will be with me.”
Manoj’s brother didn’t come to lunch. Anshuman said he was completely overwrought by his brother’s condition, and needed to be on his own. The sister-in-law reminisced,
“After he last left home, my son would ask every day why Manoj chacha wasn’t home.” Lunch can wait, she insisted, I want you to tell me everything about Manoj’s last twenty years.
It was a long story, with huge gaps, some of which we had filled in when sitting by Manoj in the hospice. It remained unfinished. The Sisters of the Cross had been calling. An hour after Manoj’s family left, he had slipped away.
The next day, I wrote to Viji, the friend who had guided us to the Sisters of the Cross:
“ His brother's appearance by his bedside an hour before he passed was beyond Bollywood cinema, but took a great load off my shoulders - the act of cremating someone and gathering their ashes is deeply intimate, and I suspect it would have shaken me a bit.”
Anil returned from the US just in time for Manoj’s departure, and wrote of their time together:
“I have driven with him for many tens of thousands of kilometers in India. In Karnataka, MP, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and, of course, in the mountains. Travelling on tiny back roads, staying in shaky hotels in small towns. He was the most fantastic guide, gateway, portal into India for me. History, sociology, geography, economics, politics, comparative religion, trees, agriculture ... all right there on the road in front of us.
“There is a big and important Cathedral in the town of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. We were sitting in there when a mass was going on. When it ended, everyone started lining up to get communion. Our friend says I'm going into the line. I said are you nuts… he said I'm going and went, so I followed, and we stood in line and received the wafer from the priest… Communionised in Santiago de Compostela!
“ I was so desperately wishing to share that memory with him today when the Christian sisters were singing hymns over him in their chapel, before we left for the crematorium.”