How Are You?
The colonial education and cultural hangover trigger an automatic reply
“I am fine, thanks for asking. How are you doing?”
And not even bothering to register the reply.
I have been living now in the Czech Republic for the past 8 years and counting.
The Czechs are more pragmatic; they do not have a standard reply.
Their replies vary from good, ok, not so bad to na picu.
The last one is not easily translatable, but it can loosely be translated to mean “up shit creek” and is rarely used in polite or proper conversations. It is used between people who are familiar and comfortable with each other.
One of my friends pointed out this difference to me; he said that the Czechs take the inquiry seriously, not as just a formal conversation opener, and hence reply honestly as to how they feel.
“Sir, where is the treat?” and he replied “I retreat”
This was my first recollection of getting introduced to wordplay. (After I looked up retreat in the dictionary)
This was from my first cousin who said this about 40 years ago!
The same first cousin who went on to become my father in law.
The absurd procreating abilities of menfolk of those generations made your first cousin becoming your father in law, possible.
His wit was legendary as well as quick, but unlike Khushwant Singh, with no malice in it.
He would walk by, grab the newspaper from one of his family members (who happened to be reading it at that moment) with a nonchalant “This is in English, what are you doing with it?” and settle down. He must have been the only person in our entire family tree to spend more than an hour on the editorial page. Most of us skimmed the headlines and jumped straight to the sports page.
He was a voracious reader. He read any book that was available. As a result, his knowledge base was at times scary.
I once saw him solving problems from Mathematics by Manjit Singh!
He read books on homeopathy and administered medication on self, avoiding a visit to the doctor. This is not meant to be a recommendation, just a biographical fact.
He read textbooks of his grandchildren when he visited us during summer, to escape the brutal unrelenting heat of Madras.
On 12th of January this year, he had lunch with his brother, ripped apart manifestos of every single political party, positioned himself in front of the TV, drank his coffee, was giving his own parallel commentary to a screaming Arnab Goswami, tried to stand up, fell and promptly died.
He died the way he had lived; without troubling anyone.
I will miss him terribly.
At the age of 54, I am used to the meaning of the word loss in my personal life.
Getting used to it does not prepare you to withstand the trauma that accompanies every loss.
And the sickening scythe of Death had never been wielded so early in the years before.
Here you are making your stupid new year resolutions, plans, and other such mundane things when Mr. Death slowly creeps up behind you and knock you cold.
Good news by habit is a loner.
Tragedies come in numbers.
The capacity of humans to complicate their lives is infinite.
We know that to love is a terrible thing. To quote Neil Gaiman
Or, as penned down by Mohsin Ahmed even more eloquently
“to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you”
That is exactly what unfolded few months down the line.
I could not protect that one being who was devoted, always quiet, unconditional in his love, never demanding, always obliging.
His life had only one purpose. Our happiness.
He ate when we fed him.
He slept when we allowed him to.
He came out when we went out.
He climbed mountains when the bug bit us.
Stayed with strangers when we needed to travel and could not take him along.
Spent the whole day at home when we went out.
Played in the garden when we allowed him.
He had no fixed routine. Whatever we wished, he accommodated.
He did everything that was convenient for us.
And we could not save him.
My mother once asked me “Does he bark?”
She was used to the bedlam and the din that emanated when the household came into possession of a dog.
This guy was so quiet, that my mother remarked “I thought only cars do not use their horn over here in Europe, even dogs are so quiet”
And he made no sound when he left us!
The doctor spoke no English and the assistant, our unofficial translator, said
“We will put him on infusion, his liver failed”
I, the ever-intelligent, the one who so conveniently always understood what I wanted to, not what was said, explained to my wife
“It is the language problem, what they mean I think is that his liver is bad”
And so, he suffered.
Stoically.
He was pumped with steroids, antibiotics, and saline every day for 15 days.
He kept losing his weight, was getting all skin and bones, could not even climb onto the bed.
When I returned home in the evenings, it was his lazing around time. He acknowledged my arrival with just a rhythmic wagging of his tail, not bothering to get up from his comfortable position or from his favorite corner.
Now he did because he was too weak to get up and this broke my heart.
His demands were less than nothing.
The only time he demanded anything was, when he was in the playing mood, to come with a ball or toy in his mouth, nudge us to engage into playing with him. We had to playfully tug and try to extricate the ball out of his grip, a task that was next to impossible, he often loosened his grip to make us feel less useless, throw the ball that he would bring back and the routine would go on forever, if we had allowed it to, as his energy levels were endless.
But we were idiots.
We had more important things to do.
We were reading, or entertaining guests, or watching television and a thousand other things that made up our lives and we played with him only for a while. We can find close to a thousand ways to keep us occupied, few more to deserve our attention and routine is always boring to a human. After a few minutes of this meaningless play (meaningless to us), we stopped entertaining him.
When he persisted, we used to reprimand him, and the ever-obedient soul would hang around for a while, hoping for slightly better consideration and then slowly return to his corners with the ball lying on the floor in front of him, with a resigned, albeit not an angry or disappointed, look on his countenance.
And when we, the selfish conscious-less humans, felt like diverting our attention back to him, for want of anything better to do, he sprang to life, with not a hint of malice.
How I wish he would come back!
I am now ready to play with him till my arms dropped off.
Isn’t it the eternal human equation? That we are always wise only when it is too late.
I can’t travel back in time and undo the insensitive things that I did.
It is only when we lose the most important things in our lives, irretrievably, that we look back, wiser with the passage of time, and realize we were such fools.
It was thus befitting and poignant that he left us on the 1st of April.
Forgive me, Scooby!
In a span of just 79 days, two unfillable voids came to occupy my life.
Two lives well lived, never hurting another person, never causing discontent, never been spoken of badly, ended abruptly.
One peacefully and one after short but intense suffering.
It is no surprise that I am more likely to answer na picu if someone were to ask me – how are you?
