Category: Remembrance

In a thunderstorm, remembering, no doubt, how thunder and lightning scared him as a child, my dad would make the rounds up and down the landing to see if everyone was alright. Our cat was always afraid, I remember that – she was a fearful thing, a stray who, when we took her in, was shy and scared and hid from us children under the sofa. But that didn’t stop her clawing at our toes as they poked out from the bedclothes in the morning. She was playing a game with them, and was a kitten again when the house was quiet and unthreatening. And she too, a kitten, a cat fell under the umbrella of my dad’s concern when thunderstorms rumbled over the house.

I think later on we were all impressed by what we took to be her dignity: she was ill, but she wouldn’t show her illness. Ill, and when she let herself be lifted up in her last illness, dignity was all that held her body to itself. A cat’s death is not, in the end, very significant. Or it is so just as everything matters, and in these small events is also everything.

I remember her, feet tucked into her body, sitting in the afternoon light that used to come through an upstairs window. Content, and her coat, which looked black, also showed brown patches in the light, and her pupils were slits when she opened her eyes and you could see the traces of the flush of blood that must have once filled the iris of an eye. Perhaps she’d caught the claw of a rival there, for she fiercely defended her territory, watching out from under the car and then slinking forward in her viciousness.

The world of cats overlays ours, or ours theirs; our house was also her house, or what was hers was also ours. Where do they think we go in our cars?, I wonder. And from where do they think we return, as they wait outside to be let in? But their time on earth is shorter than ours, and there have been two cats who have lived and died as I grew, and a third cat now, back there at the house, who survived the death of my father and now must be alone in the long daytime.

When did we discover her favourite game of following lights across the walls and the furniture? When did it become part of the ritual of the day for my dad to tilt a mirror into the morning light as it came into the kitchen and let light dance across the cupboards and the floor? No one could believe that you can train a cat, said dad to us, as it was our secret that our cats (with the exception of the last, but this could be just obstinacy) knew the meaning of the word ‘upstairs.’

‘Upstairs’: that’s what you said as you switched the light off in the lounge and they were to let themselves docilely from the room. Just as dad would say to us children, calmly, I think it’s time you went to bed, and we would go upstairs as he had said. Isn’t this the power of a father, who can say things more gently than a mother, who needs only insinuate where she enforces?

I think we were obedient. I remember lying, more than once, and my dad’s anger at those lies. Didn’t he have an unshakable faith in reason, in rationality? That he would only have to explain in order to persuade, because children too were each gifted with the light of reason? So his calm words, but then he could become angry, too, and all of a sudden. Anger – sudden flares – and the whole house would change.

Of course these changes are part of the weather of family life; it is life offstage, where only a newspaper, the old, big broadsheets, can, held up around you like a fortress, give you peace from everyone else; where a cone of noise and light from the television might open to enfold you and your family; where a trip out in the car can bring you together in a common adventure.

But we would never know quite where he wanted to go; he liked to surprise, and to surprise himself – where was he driving? He had no plans. This was his impulsiveness – to turn up somewhere without plans, looking in vain in Slough for the Diwali celebrations, arriving at Bognor Regis, but without swimming trunks or costumes – he liked to drive, and the world to open to him from the car. Just as he liked it to open on television, watching nature documentaries, and, when we were children, making voices to the let the animals speak. Yes, the natural world should reach him on his terms; there should be a pane of glass between him and what was real, a kind of distance – otherwise where would be the enjoyment?

But he liked, too, the element of risk in driving, and would go too fast down country lanes, a look of excitement in his eyes: were we safe? was he? At those times I wasn’t sure with whom to side – was he right as a man, as a male, to insist on risk? was this part of the life of a man, as we might break out together from the world of women? – or was it the recklessness of machismo, from a vanishing world of what men used to be?

In family life, where little is private, and a small house cannot hold apart four separate worlds, you cannot help but learn of the others’ weaknesses and strangeness: it is all there to see, and when a parent commands – this has always struck me – you also hear the voice in which they command themselves. Spend time with one parent alone for a while and you will understand the integrity of a life, the way it is held together, autonomous and separate from yours, the way a self is bound to itself by the secret demands it whispers to itself. And perhaps, then, you can learn of something like their parents, for perhaps that voice in which they speak is the voice of parents and elders – the older ones who always stand around us.

Five thousand miles from home, we rarely saw my dad with older relatives; he was a man in charge – but then, I remember a visit from an older brother, and now my father was a boy, anxious that everything appear right, and that this brother feel comfortable on his visit to our house. And so, it seems, the brother did – a just man, a calm one, though fast speaking, interrogative, assembling facts and impressions for himself, and in this he was just as my dad, although his younger brother only spoke of his conclusions when asked. And indeed because he felt no great need to talk, and because the rest of us liked to speak, dad was not always asked – but how curious to know that another there perceives what you have seen and heard, and knows it from a perspective that is not your own.

He was quiet, for the most part; he used up his words for the day quickly. And he preferred serious talk – he liked the talk that swirled around serious topics – to discuss this or that intellectual topic, or to laugh at the follies of our new world as he always laughed, knowing that everything was going to pot. Serious talk – but also, and I think this is how it must be for fathers, the happiness of hearing the family in the other room, talking together, even though he might rather be away from them, at a slight distance, with his computer, for example, or reading the paper, or with the television on in the other room, but knowing they are there, the background to his life, as he is the background to theirs.

This was his role in the great continuity of family life. A quiet role, perhaps. But there to listen, to offer quiet judgement: a kind of rock, as a father must be. From him must judgement come. From him the balanced opinion, the other side, and that amidst the swirl of family life. And didn’t that give his quietness a kind of life? There was another person in the room of whom one must take account. A quietness that commanded, because of his seriousness, because of his sense that children should never speak ill of adults – and because of that judiciousness that would never let him hear another condemned in speech.

My mum and her friends would sometimes talk in the kitchen, or in the dining room. But sometimes it was in the living room they spoke, and my dad would read the paper, listening, and carried along by the conversation, even if he did not join in. He would form a judgement, that he would speak only when asked. And there would be our first cat on his lap, or our second on the quilt mum was assembling, and sometimes the third, though she preferred to sit up on the warm amplifier instead to watch us all, only coming over at nine o’clock for the ritual giving of Iams and then to lie soppily on the sofa to be stroked, the white fur of her throat and belly open to us to touch.

He liked our cats, despite himself; they fell under his protection. Was he to judge them, too? He spoke to them as he spoke to us as children, with snatches of Danish, which we never understood, sometimes imitating them phonetically, amusing him. Yes, cats were a kind of child, but they were also other, the alien in the house, another perspective, drawing into their liquid eyes what happens around them and living it in their terms, and sometimes asking to be spoken to, as they bask in the attention of everyone in the room.

Of course a cat can understand that a baby is young and needs to be protected, and even cats can indulge the young letting them be more boisterous and loud, and holding back their claws. But a cat, I think, can sense sickness, and I remember how they avoided my dad after his operations. What could they smell? Did they know of their own mortality through his? Only later did they come to him again (two cats from different times – we never kept more than one. Dad wouldn’t allow us to get two kittens, as we always wanted. A pair of kittens – who could resist? – but he resisted.)

To be sick – to endure the long downward curve of your life, as the earth turns into darkness from light – what was it to live with evening always before you, the fading of light, and then night? ‘I’ve had my three score years and ten’ he said, turning 70. But many years of sickness, many years of not being able to walk long distances, and the cold which prevented him from walking at all.

I think it was in his country, or at least in his family, that death was not something of which to speak. I think he said once to me – I was a teenager, but still the oldest son – that he wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Ganges. A curious comment to hear from a nonbeliever: but there it was: the Ganges that the puranas say flows from Shiva’s matted locks, he catching the goddess-river as she fell from heaven. The river-cousin of that other which dried up, stranding the earliest of civilisations in old India, whom archeologists seem to want to date farther and farther back.

The desire to have been first, the earliest, before Greece, before Europe – it marked by dad as it has done many Indians. And the sense of Hinduism as the broadest and most tolerant of religions – as a monotheism, and that first of all which welcomed other faiths, which included everyone and never proselytised. A monotheism, a religion, but also a way of life, a great culture, that bore in its streaming – like the Ganges itself, or the other, more ancient river, saints and metaphysicians, lives of whom we would learn in the comics he would bring for us back from India.

But he did not like to speak of death. When my mum’s close friend died, too young, and of a drawn out illness, he confided to mum that he didn’t have the words to speak. What was there to say? He had known death; his last sister, his beloved Sita, died in 1981. There were other sisters, and a young brother who had died years before. But death was marked and mourned in a different way over there, in the old country. And perhaps here it is rituals that must grieve for us, and that is what is given by religion. Didn’t he warn the husband of that close friend that he must not give up his faith? ‘I don’t why I told him that. I don’t believe in any of it’, he said, but there is a belief before belief, a living of the great trials of life through ritual and where the rite is more eloquent than we can be.

Cats, of course, are creatures of ritual. They live by rites, of their own devising, just as children demand that parts of the day be repeated. Rites – that harden from habits, from expectations. It is nine o’clock now (the same time, winter or summer), and time for Iams. It is ten o’clock and time to lie belly up on the sofa, luxuriant. And now it is twelve and time to hear ‘upstairs’ and to go out into the darkness – but it is true, our latest cat always affects not to hear this call, and protests at the injustice of being shooed out of the room. And their rites become ours, and the day is organised by how it is lived by a cat.

Another life, another view of the world – they watch us from somewhere else, from a world more distant than any human one. But they are our cousins nevertheless; they are like us, and our worlds can intersect, the world of cats upon the world of humans, and the other way round. They need us in some ways, and in others, we need them.

I cannot speak of my dad’s last years as though they were different from the ones which went before. There was no long descent into old age; his face was unlined, his hair no greyer than mine; he was slim – perhaps too slim, moderating his intake, carefully, scientifically measuring what he was to eat, wanting to avoid the insulin upon which he would one day become dependent as a diabetic; his legs were thin sticks, but he looked young – ten years younger than his age. Hadn’t we admired him as children, calling him our film star dad? That was our rite. It believed for us, and we believed, as children need to as much as cats.

And there is a last rite to perform, with my dad’s youngest brother standing in for me, the oldest son. One year after the death (but according to the Hindu lunar calendar, nor out solar one), a ritual to let karmic debts be paid back, on behalf of the dead one, who otherwise would be condemned to a ghost’s life on earth. Debts to ancestors, first of all – to one’s elders, to one’s parents, and, I think, to one’s teachers; and then debts to the saints and the temples; and finally, to God, to the one God from whom all comes.

And note the order – God comes last, but no doubt he comes first, too, as he gives ancestors and saints, and as perhaps he gives everything and knows everything, even the smallest event – the death of a cat, its life, and what we thought as children, being driven along on a family trip. Or perhaps there is no God and only the sense behind all of the importance of those events only we know who have known family life.

Small events, significant-insignificant, that let the corners of the world be brought to light. They live in our shadows, cats, but we live in theirs. In India, they are scrawny and barely fed; children are warned against them as they are warned against rats. But then people, too are scrawny and barely fed, and that is worse – poverty on all sides, and that is the shadow that overwhelms all.

The sense of that shadow reached us all in our house. Poverty, injustice, colonialisms and racisms, and the sense that the life of the rich rides upon the life of the poor. But another sense – that the Sarasvati river of legend flows still, in the Ganges, in India and all Indians, that other civilisation, that other source of civilisation, with our ancestors, with temples and saints – and weren’t we, our family, descended from a saint? – and then the God in whom none of us believed, placeholder for that belief before belief that is family life and from which we live, for all that we take its great continuity for granted.

Perhaps we know it only when it is broken, as it comes apart. Perhaps it is clear only then, when my mum’s close friend no longer visits, when there is no one sitting at the computer when I go home to visit; when the chair in the lounge is not occupied by him, and the television is not showing the Ashes or the football, or even the wrestling, which he used to watch, Big Daddy crushing Giant Haystacks.

I think men like to imagine they can lift themselves from family life, or that it is what is to be taken for granted before real life begins. Only later, much later do they remember that life, and want to return to it. I think it is invisible to them, the milieu they think belongs to women and children: the space of the home is only what gives unto the life of the world, and it is out there they must prove themselves, knowing their strength by what they defeat.

I think it is only when they are old and have room for weakness that they want to return. Old, and weakly knowing they are borne back ceaselessly into the continuity that is what they are made of and always were, and all debts must first be paid to that. Of what are we made? With what must we begin, and end? Perhaps to die is also to return.

Appropriate, then, that he died on a visit to India one year ago tomorrow, and the night before his medical treatment was to begin. Died at a stroke there where he was home, and having been sent off from here – I’ve seen pictures, he looked glad, young, smiling with a child’s smile – very ill, but with the hope of that treatment. And perhaps the hope that gives itself on the return to what you knew then, when you were young – knew without knowing it, believed without believing in it: family life.

And meanwhile, over here, there is a cat that looks to have a mirror tilted in the morning when the sun comes into the kitchen. A cat for whom, one might think, anyone will do, for whom one is just like another. But I know she has mourned and her ritual is a part of mourning. Doesn’t a cat, too, believe? Hers, I think, is a religion of lights, and who knows what those lights are for her as they move across the floor and cupboards. And who are we that play with her, she who is the part of the weave of continuity? Perhaps it is that she weaves us back, that is she is a living part of what our life was made, back then when we lived together. 

After a while, the surprising closeness of the dead one. Here, quite close, but not here. Here, but removed, as though under water, or made into another body – but still close. Almost integrated into life. The Ancestor, who is close as other ancestoral spirits might be close (but I did not know them, the others). And close – in me. As though I was witnessed from within myself. As though another saw me, and it was your seeing, dead one.

So do I see myself, with your seeing in me. Sight? But that is not the word. A way of speaking, of thinking, of being. That speaks in my speech, thinks with my thoughts, and is as I am. Quiet but there, as you were in life. Odd that it is that you seem comfortable there, on the other side. Not like Hamlet’s father. No haunting, only a gentle, I am here. Or a fainter, here. But who is there?

Work stress, work bullying, as unpleasant as it has ever been. Wouldn’t I have phoned dad to tell him about, not long ago? Not to complain, but to laugh – to agree on the folly of the world. Bitter comedy, but there was sharing in that laughter – we laughed together; it confirmed what we knew: the world is a vale of tears, but folly, all of human foolishness, is funny. And now? I can’t ring him, and must admit to myself that it was not only to laugh with him that I used to phone him. Wasn’t his an authority from which I reconfirmed my strength?

Efficacy: why is it that I like to feel efficacious? Because when my strength is required it flatters me that I am strong. This afternoon, in the gym, I felt the bile rise when I was bench pressing weights. Felt a kind of sickness: vile world! And then, showering, my nose began to bleed. As I soaked up the blood, later, with balls of toilet paper, I thought: there is no one’s strength but my own, now, on which I can draw. My own strength, and no one to laugh with at the folly of the world.

Strange that you can mourn in advance for the one who will die. Mourning: when I found, while he was alive, the postcard to me addressed, daddy, I was already in mourning. For whom? For the child I was? For the child whose father would call himself by that word and not, dad, as he would call himself later? He found it absurd, that change of names. Absurd – that what he was to me was to receive a new name. He shared this with others who had come from overseas and for whom English was not his first language.

There it was, the signed postcard: daddy. Was it him I mourned, already – he in relation to me? The relationship had changed; when I found the postcard, I was already grown up. Yes, grown up, but not grown up enough – had I not returned there, to the family house, when I should have been too old to return? How old was I? I do not want to remember. But then, it is customary in India to live, as a bachelor, with your family. And that’s what I was – a bachelor. We were in the house, together, just as we were when I was a child.

In the house – because it was too expensive to live elsewhere, because I’d fallen off the edge of a contract. Months would pass, and soon there would be a contract again, but in the meantime? Invisible, these struggles where the child become adult is too old for the family house but too young for the world. A life not begun, or hardly begun – a life interrupted, but for how long? But wasn’t that where we got to know one another as adults, each facing one another across life, I facing forwards, and you, hoping I would find my way into life?

In the evenings, I worked in the room that was now mine. I wrote. And in the day? I cycled out, and sometimes, when she was down, I went out with my girlfriend into the woods. Difficult times. Life like a trail that had stopped abruptly in the woods. One evening, by the lake, there was mist as though rising up from its surface. Extraordinary, and only us to see it. I kept that memory, but did she? We split up soon enough. Soon after that – nothing; oblivion, another trail run to nowhere.

He kept quiet about all of this, dad. He listened without judgement. What did he expect would happen? He kept quiet. Asked, he would have spoken with insight. Perhaps I asked him. Meanwhile, life had stopped in the woods, to which I would go every day. Mediocre woods, a lake that was more a pool, a muddy path. Where was I? Nowhere in particular. And life? Going nowhere. Look up in the woods: the broad sky. Then cycle home, go to my room; work.

I found the postcard before I moved back to the North. I found it; I mourned. He was upset I was moving. Then he understood. I was to go; a year later, one job, and a few months later, another, and I found myself here, further north. The woods – I remember them. The path that led nowhere – I remember that. And the relationship that ran to nowhere?

Him. Behind and before all this. The context, ever-present, then as when I was a child? Or was he falling into the past? Was it that falling that I mourned when I found the postcard?

I saw them so recently, the three surviving brothers, their smiles, the shapes of their profiles. They are old, but they are young, young in their smiling. The oldest brother walks me up the stairs and says, can you sit on the floor, and when I say yes, we sit cross legged on the bedroom floor and go through the suitcases that my father left when he died. Here we are, an old man and younger one, on the site of that patch of land in what was called Madras where the family lived in an old building that was demolished so that the present one could rise, four-storeyed, many-balconied in its place.

How is it that the dead do not die all at once – that the deceased is also alive in our memories, but also in that forgetting which leaves a gap in our remembering, a loss irrecuperable and necessary if the dead one is not to be forgotten; a necessary forgetting, and one intertwined with memory, accompanying it? I remember by way of them, the three brothers, but also in the others – in their sons, in their daughters, and in the sons and daughters of the dead sisters and the dead brothers. By way of them – by way of their faces and their smiles, above all their smiles. But I also forget – if forgetting is the name for that hole in memory by which the memory of the dead is to be kept alive.

Irrecuperable loss. Mourning without cease – henceforward that will also be part of what I am. But are you not there, too, dead one? Are you not there, witness, the one who watches in me? Are you not there – dead one who survives in me; alterity of the dead? When I think of you, the other that is the you in me also thinks. He watches, the other in me, the dead one. I am alive, this is true, but with me I also bear the dead. Alive – but with me, the dead one, who keeps watch within me.

When I asked myself that night – when the question was asked in me as I crossed the Byker bridge – I knew what you would have wanted: a cool head, a practical mind. And so it was. Strange hours passed. I went to collect my bike, and then to meet R.M. at the station. It was already late – I had left a party when I heard, then I heard. Back here in the flat I made R.M. something to eat. The next day, we woke early and biked to the station and then down south and biked across London and then the train to the west and we biked from the station to the house. A cool head, a practical mind.

And now? It is as though I have been tuned to perform the most solemn raga. As though I was the instrument itself – or rather, the raga, as it denotes a framework that is not to be played, but played within. So is my loss what attunes my living. A steady sadness that accompanies everything; I can only play on these notes, not others; this is the raga that I live.

What is nihilism? Forgetting which does not live, which is not of the gap which resists the other’s incorporation. What is it, nihilism? The destruction of memory, the destruction of that propitious forgetting by which the dead bring themselves to us and live in us. Do not forget that forgetting. But what choice is there? It already keeps watch; already it is there, on the brothers’ faces and on the faces of their sons and daughter and the other sons and daughters. And wasn’t it there, too, in Madras, which is now called Chennai? We were there. A week ago, we were there.

On Chennai beach, the tsunami struck. 800 died that morning. But there are still people on the beach, that night as we walk along it, still sellers of shells and snacks; still a few out wading in the water. A few hundreds yards of sand to the sea. The bay of Bengal, which stretches along the east coast of India. My cousin speaks: not far from here is where they carried what remained of his body, my father. Carried out, ashes and remnants of bone, into the water. And he speaks, my cousin, of the thirteen days after death, and of the rituals that will endure the soul of the departed reaches the other shore. So, I am sure, did it reach there. Above us, the wide night – some stars are visible. Rishis, says my cousin. They are Rishis of our family; they watch over us. As he, too will watch over us. But I know, then, that he watches, too, within me.

Watches, and what do I see in this city? My cousin stroll downs to the beach some lunchtimes, he says. It is his Chennai, this city; he is happy here – it has everything, he tells us as we walk back to the car from the beach. Everything; it is all here. He had picked up my father from the airport; he seemed fine then, some trouble walking, but he was safely delivered to the flat in which he would say. But then … the details are known to us. But we are told again, and in my cousin’s voice, they acquire a new significance. He was there, my cousin; he speaks, simply and directly, of what happened. He was there, and we relive it through him as we drive through Chennai.

Oblivion: unto that were you delivered, ashes lowered into the Bay of Bengal. To be scattered in water, that was your wish. Why that, water? Why the vastness of the ocean? Along the coast, driving to Mahabs, we see crosses, markers of the Christian dead of the tsunami. Thousands died, all along the coast. The Indians asked for no foreign aid. Asked for no aid, but provided of themselves, and we see the thatched resettlement villages on the long drive. Thousands dead! So many dead! All the dead taken by the sea whose great crashing waves we see at the Shore Temple at Mahabs. How fierce those waves, from the Bay of Bengal.

The brothers carried the body into the ocean. Carried it out into the same sea from which the tsunami came. Catastrophe, benediction, brought by the same waves. And the sea is all of life, and death – it is the cosmos that rolls in and away in the waves on the sand, just as it is the cosmos we see above the orange glare of the streetlights of Chennai. It plays, the cosmos, we know that. It is a divine sport – lila, it is called, or leela (the spelling of my sister’s name). The divine sport, which can also be capricious, cruel. But it is the matrix of all things; from that, all things are given and all things return.

Given, yes, but as they are given, can you not detect the great departing wave, the darkness which sinks back through all things? Does it not leave its trace thus, in all the things, the trucks and rickshaws, the new construction sites and advertising hoardings of new Chennai? Departing – but also, too, coming forward, reaching us by way of things – by way of their play in the granite statuette from Mahabs my sister and brother in law bargained for, and in the CDs which I bought in Chennai and Delhi. Given – but also in the smiles, the brothers’ smiles, and in the play of resemblance between us all. The cloud-shaped nose, the dimpled mouth – don’t these, too, witness the play of leela?

The Bay of Bengal is a name for all oceans, and the oceans for the cosmos, and that for the giving-witholding of leela, by which we live and we will die.

1. Before he became ill, he would play cricket for the company in the playing field on the other side of the canal from our house. I remember him very smart and handsome in his cricket whites. As a child, you want your father to be a champion. When we played rounders on our picnics, he could be counted upon to hit the tennis ball in a great, high arc with his bat.

2. Once, when I went to meet him from work on my bike, he raced me the half mile to our house, running all the way in his suit with a briefcase in his hand. And I remember, too, the time we tried to make a kite from balsa wood and brown wrapping paper. It didn’t fly; the wind didn’t take it as it did, years later, the bought kite that sailed what seemed a mile into the sky until there was no twine left on our spool. Then there was the paper plane he used to make us, much better with its complexly folded nose than our simple darts, in command of its movement, moving dignifiedly through the air.

3. When he came home from business trips overseas, he would bring us gifts, and we would wait as he ate and changed his clothes to be given these gifts, although the rule was we were never to be greedy, and never to show our impatience.

What had he brought us? For mum, perfume from duty free and fabrics, and for us, the children? Black market tapes: a cassette of David Bowie songs called Golden Years, Ultravox’s Vienna, a compilation of songs by the Beatles, but never Roxy Music, which I always asked for. Never Roxy Music, whose name I liked. He brought us Thriller, and the pirates had added creepy sound effects between the tracks, and Wham’s Fantastic!, with a whole other band playing Wham-like tracks on the B side.   

After one trip, he brought us a soft toy. We felt a mixture of appreciation and disappointment. He’d gone to the trouble of finding a soft toy for us; we appreciated the effort. But the toy itself? A mother goose with a bonnet, suitable only to be hung in a pram. A mother goose – but we were children, and we wanted our toys, too, to be children. True, we had a family of sausage dogs, knitted by my grandmother, with a mummy and a daddy, with an older brother and a rapscallion uncle, but its centrepiece was always the ‘youngest’ dog, or at least the smallest one. But a mother goose? At that moment, I felt sorry for him, because he hadn’t understood why this toy was the wrong toy.  Sorry for him, and even tender, for a man who didn’t know what toy to buy, although he wanted to buy us a toy. Was I older than him, who was older than me? Was I wiser than he was in the way of toys? In that moment I was older than my father: yes, that was why I felt tender.

4. Soon, it would happen that the company for which he worked lost their bids, and he no longer went on those foreign trips. They took him from his office and put in him in the new open plan office. We knew from our visits that he had an office of his own, with a secretary just down the hall. He ate in the second of the three canteens – the first was for technicians and secretaries, the next one for engineers and salesmen, and the third for managers. One of his colleagues would reach out to shake hands with us and place a wrapped sweet in our hands – what a treat! But now, our dad had been moved from his own office, with its high ceiling and wide, white walls, into an open-plan office, his desk facing a filing cabinet.

5. On Fridays, he would come home with beer on his breath. He’d been to the office club, and was now jolly, despite the long drive home through traffic. A pint, two pints – he was jolly, and when he came home in the summer, we said to each other, he looks like a film star, with his aviator shades and his shirtsleeves, and his blazer over his shoulder. I would go to open the door for him, the film star who had come home to us.

6. Your face is spicy, my sister would say of his stubble. He rubs his jaw and cheek. Do you think I should grow a beard? And we both say: no!

7. Every year, the Christmas party at the club. One night, as we were coming home down a hill, he let go of my pushchair. I felt something of the same panic when, twenty years later, I was learning to drive, and he wanted me to reverse into the busiest of roads. Curious, this desire for risk, for risking himself and risking others. He would drive too fast, and mum would protest. But he liked to go fast and he liked risk, and I think he liked letting go of that pushchair, even as I, picking up my mum’s worry, panicked as I felt it gather speed.

8. He had a way of smiling at mishaps. When something bad happened – nothing really terrible – he would smile, as if to say, how could it have been any different? what did you expect? I’ve caught it from him, that smile. When my friend fell off his bike, I smiled in that way. It made my friend angry. But by that smile that day I knew I was like my father.

9. Once, on a picnic, when a group of us children were allowed to run around as we pleased, I hurt myself and separated myself from the others, crying. I was away from the playground, and there he was, on the path. We walked together, he holding my hand. How old was I then? 9? 10? Too old to cry at such a light injury, no doubt. But we went along the path, and this time he didn’t smile at my mishap. I appreciated his quietness. Why was he walking alone, away from the other adults? Why did he know what to do, that day, as a father? But he knew.

A few weeks ago, before he died, I read Sarraute’s Childhood, and wrote a few notes on memories I would like to write about one day. Holland Park, I wrote, and underlined those words. Yes, Holland Park – that’s where it had taken place, that’s where I had cried and we had walked, he and I. We came across Holland Park while walking in London, R.M. and I: the Commonweath Institute, the adventure playground; it was as it had been, 25 years before.

How is that time passes? How is it that it passes, time, when everything, all these events seem held simultaneously in my memory? That’s what I thought as we walked, R.M. and I. She was disappointed – you call this a park?, she said in her American accent. She was particularly unimpressed by the Japanese garden: is this it? Is this all there is?

I wondered which was the palimpsest: the day of the picnic, or our new day, with its fresh autumnal air. I wondered at the events which overlay one another in that same space. Today, in deep winter, it is already night at four o’clock, and I have lost hold on time. Who will remember these things when I am gone? But I’m not sure I’m remembering anything. The events seem to remember themselves.

He is a man of routine, rising at 9.30 and watching morning television in a dressing gown with a bowl of cereal. Then, at 12.00, he has more cereal, again carefully put together according to nutritional guidelines. He is diabetic; above all, he wants to avoid injecting insulin. By careful control of his diet, this may be possible. But now he is slim, even thin, his legs are brown sticks. Thin, but with an iron will, eating his museli, which he puts together from ingredients he keeps in separate packets in a tub in the kitchen. Dried figs and pumpkin seeds; flakes of brain and powdered wheatgerm. That’s 12.00. Then, television until the 1.00 news – the end of This Morning or Vanessa or whatever else is on, and the BBC news, which runs until 1.30, until the weather and then local news reports.

Then he leaves the television on for me while he goes upstairs to get ready. Neighbours, he knows I want to watch Neighbours, and perhaps he thinks I should watch it, just as, earlier, he used to leave The Word on on Friday nights and, still earlier, the radio programme with Arnold the dog in the mornings. Never mind what I say, he thinks I should watch and listen to such things. In the morning, he pushes the tabloid section of the Guardian to me. I should read it, the tabloid section. It is for me to read. On Fridays, I read the review section. I look forward to that, reading as I drink coffee. But at 1.30, I watch Neighbours, and he goes upstairs to get ready for the world. Then at 2.00, we can go to town.

Do you want to go to town? Do you want to go to the university? Ok, he’ll give me a lift. My bike is in the shed, rusting. My bike’s in the shed, the wheel buckled. He’ll give me a lift, and we’ll go to town or he’ll drop me at the university. 2.00: the day is half gone, but nothing begins until 2.00. 2.00: what is there of the day, what is left? Never mind, this is where it begins; it’s when things start. From 2.00 to 5.30, when my mum gets home, that is the time of day for action. For a time, he does volunteer work, my dad. For a time, having taught himself about computers, having learnt about databases, helps out at the volunteer centre. He helps out there and as the treasurer of a charity, maintaining databases and records. That’s the afternoon; that’s when things happen in the day.

For my part, I go to the library or to the unemployment office. I go to the library, where they sometimes give me old copies of the TLS for free, or I go to the unemployment office and the temping agencies. Any work? No work. It’s the recession; there’s no work here. So I borrow books, and borrow books about books. I read the Writers at Work series. I read biographies and critical studies. Sometimes, for a pound, I borrow a CD. I talk to dad on the way home, telling him of my plans. I’m to do a TEFL course in October, but first I’ll have to get a Career Development Loan. Then, when I’ve done the course and am working a few hours here and there, I tell him I want to get funding for further study. Then, meeting him near the university library, where I can get in unnoticed though I am not a student, I will tell him as we drive home of my plans. There is funding about, I tell him.

For his part, he does not understand a world in which a degree is not enough to get you a job. He watches me fill out application forms for graduate training schemes and then sees me open rejection letters. And when I find work – a week here, a few days there – he is amazed that his son is opening and closing umbrellas to check the printing of a company logo, or entering data into on-screen boxes, rather than embarking on a career. What has happened? What happened? It’s the recession, I tell him. And the expansion of higher education. The recession and the great expansion, which means there are many more of us looking for work. What use is a non-vocational degree? He thought any degree would do, but he was wrong; things had changed. But he sees I have plans and is confident in my plans. He knows I have plans, and even when they go wrong, like my attempt to find work in Greece, he is reassured by the force of those plans and my planning.

What else I am doing? Copying out things I had written longhand onto the computer. Using the computer when he is not using it to copy out what I had written in notebooks and journals. I copy out my notes in the mornings, in the early evenings, when he is not using the computer. And I make new notes; I copy phrases and paragraphs from the books I am reading. He, dad, watches the television and reads the paper and reads about computers and I copy out notes and make more notes.

He, unemployed, lives alongside me, who am also unemployed. The air is stale and fetid, and we are unemployed. The windows cannot be opened – he feels the cold – and we are unemployed. But the house is nearly paid for, he is reassured by that. The house is nearly paid for and the credit cards paid off, he knows that. There is no problem surviving, he knows that, he who comes from a family who were poor and had difficulty surviving. There’s no problem; the house is standing, and although he is in ill-health, his diabetes is under control and his operation was a partial success; there is no immediate danger.

Poverty is far away; the family in India are doing well just as we are doing well. The next generation – his nephews and nieces, are doing well, and are scattered all across the globe. The next generation, all of whom are graduates, are doing well, he knows that. His unemployment does not bother him. My unemployment – it will be temporary, he knows that. I am an organised person, he can see that. I have plans, he can see that. I work hard, even though I am unemployed, he sees that. And so in communication with his family, he says, Lars is looking for work. We have a recession here, and he is looking for work.

We are both unemployed, but perhaps unemployment saved him, he who was in poor health, from an early death. Perhaps by unemployment would he enjoy a few more years. But he does not speak of this, he who would never complain. He does not share his anxieties with us. He does not speak of himself, for he is from a family who do not speak in that way. He is retired, not unemployed. Retired early, and this is the hand dealt to him. Early retired, and in poor health, and instead of playing golf, he is at home. At home in the mornings and later, when he stops working at the Volunteer Centre, in the afternoons, too. Listening to Indian classical music on his computer and, later, when he had gone out to India to sort out their microphones and webcams, chatting to his brothers through the internet. Now India is close to him again. Now Madras, which is called Chennai, is close to him.

I leave for the North and for further study, but he is there, and the house, in the day, is his kingdom. I leave for study and for work, but the house is around him. In the early evening, he clears up the kitchen and hoovers. In the later evening, he cooks South Indian food for himself, making samba from samba powder. Then, television again, documentaries, and the computer. Then he will sit down and listen to mum tell him about her day, and the television will be there, and the computer in the other room.

That night I spoke on the phone to my father, who knows a great deal about Indian classical music. On the phone to my father, who knows about Indian classical music and specifically Carnatic classical music, the music of South India. Speaking with my father, who knows all about Indian classical music and in particular South Indian Classical music, I tell him I would like to speak about Indian classical music at a conference to which I have been invited.

It is August; I am stranded at a station in Yorkshire; I have phoned up my father, just as I had phoned him a few months before when I was stranded at an airport in Cardiff. This time, unlike the time before, I tell him of my invitation, and ask him what he thinks. I know I know much less than he about Indian classical music, but I wonder whether he might help me. I ask him for this, his help. They don’ t expect me to be an expert on Indian classical music, I tell him, but it would be interesting, I think, for me to say a little about Indian classical music. And perhaps you can help me, I suggest to him, thinking to myself: today, in the early evening, stranded in this station in Yorkshire, I’ve had a bright idea.

I thought: this will be nice for dad as it will be nice for me; I can learn more about Indian classical music, and specifically the music of South India, from him, and he will enjoy the fact that my interest is not casual, and I want to do more than occasionally attend Indian classical music concerts with him. We used to attend for a few weeks in a row. Concerts on the South Bank, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and then sometimes concerts in a private house, concerts in a living room. Sometimes North Indian classical music, sometimes South Indian classical music. One or the other, and sometimes, if there were several performers, South Indian and North Indian classical music in one concert.

North Indian classical music strives for effects, I said to him once. It’s too romantic, I said to him once, too expressive. I prefer South Indian classical music, I said, because it is less about self-expression. It’s more austere, I said, and every raga is not made to come to a swooning climax, I said. I prefer South Indian classical music, I said, because there’s more of an idea, when it comes to a concert, of a programme of music. With North Indian classical music, I said, every raga has got to be pleasing; the audience cry out, that is expected, but in the end it is too romantic, too expressive, I said. With South Indian classical music, I said, there is more austerity.

Late Beethoven compared to early Beethoven. Bach compared to Mozart. More austerity, I said, less self-expression. And more of a sense of an entire programme – with a starter, a main course and a pudding, I said, and he agreed, my dad, although it was he who would hum along to the music and would sway his head to the music. Although he was the one who would be carried away by the music, surprising for a man who appeared so self-controlled. He agreed – it was quite true, he thought – but he was the one carried away by music and who would weep as he listened. How was it that he who never wept would weep when he heard music? He wept – and he would speak of himself weeping. Later, he would say – it moves me to tears, emphasis on tears. He was surprised as I was – why was he – of all people – moved to tears. But there he was, moved to tears. By South Indian classical music, but also by North Indian classical music.

South India, North India – did I know the difference? Once, on the way to the South Bank, coming over the pedestrian walkway from Waterloo, I had said, they’re South Indian, referring to a group of men and women walking ahead of us. Can you tell because of the way they tie their saris?, dad asked. But that wasn’t why I could tell. I had just said it: they’re South Indian, without knowing why. Oh those South Indian girls, said dad on another occasion, who never said things of that kind.

A station in Yorkshire, early evening. A few hours until the connection. Cross the railway bridge in search of food, cross the bridge in search of something to drink. But I am soon back at the station. And I call up home. Dad answers, his accent heavier and more noticeable on the phone. And I tell him to ring me back. And dad, always slow, rings me back. We speak, I tell him of my invitation and he tells me he’ll send me some documents about Indian classical music. Lately, he’s been teaching himself, he tells me. Just lately, he’s been learning about Western notation and comparing it with Indian notation, South and North. He’ll send me some documents, he says. He’ll prepare them for me.

My father expresses his reservations about Western audiences. They always like the tabla, he says. They always want tabla duels, he says, and disapproves. The audience I’m going to speak to aren’t like that, I tell him. Some of them are trained North Indian classical musicians, I tell him. But he says what he always says, Western audiences always want percussion, and tabla duels. Then he tells me about recent medical research, which shows the beneficial effects of hearing certain ragas. It’s just like it was claimed in the Vedas, he says, and the earliest myths about music.

We speak of the notation of Indian classical music, and different instrumentation. Of course, from the first, Indian classical music was a vocal tradition. First of all, the voice – only later was it adapted for instruments. They started playing on violin in the nineteenth century, he said. And I remember when he spoke of U. Srinivas, the mandolin prodigy. On electric mandolin!, said dad. Of course, Srinivas was from Madras, like dad. From the old city by the sea, in the old South, where they play Carnatic music. Purer, said dad, without Islamic influence. North and South Indian classical music diverged in the fifteenth century, he said, and because of the Islamic influence. Until then, there was one tradition.

One tradition, uniting all of India. One tradition, for all of India. He used to keep a Sanskrit copy of the Bhagavad Gita by his bed. A copy, in Sanskrit, of the Bhagavad Gita, so small you could keep it in your hand. The Bhagavad Gita, which was likewise read across India. The Bhagavad Gita, which I learnt about first of all in the graphic novels dad used to buy for me. Amar Chitka Katha – comics which retold puranas, myths. And in amongst these bloody retellings, where Indra struck the arms of a demon and then struck off his head, or Shiva, in rage set a torrent of demons on his prospective father-in-law, leading to his beheading, before Shiva revived him now with the head of a goat, there were stories of teachers like Sankara (our family guru) who died at 31, Sankara (8th century C.E.) and had foregone the life of a householder to become, at an early age, a wandering sanyasin – and even a one edition retelling of the Bhagavad Gita itself.

How marvellous, I thought, when I first read the Gita! So that’s who Krishna was! That’s who was all along, mischevous, blue-skinned Krishna! That’s who he was, the scourge of the wicked and the husband of a hundred wives! There he was, Krishna, his vast blue body above the surprised Arjuna in the middle of the battlefield. Later, dad would complain about Peter Brook’s production of the Mahabharata: I can’t understand what they’re saying. Beeshma, in the production, was an African, very black and slim, and Krishna, a white man, I’m not sure from where – and the accents were too thick for my dad. I can’t understand them, he said. And the Bhagavad Gita was beside his bed. The Bhagavad Gita, which was but one part of the vast Mahabharata.

He always wanted to die in India, in Madras, that’s what he told my sister, a few weeks earlier. He wanted his remnants scattered in the Ganges, that’s what he told me before his first bypass operation many years ago. And hadn’t he told his friends he wanted to die back there, in Madras? That was where he died. That’s where he died, although he went there not expecting to die. He died in Madras, while not expecting to die there. But it’s where he died, in Madras, all in one go, dying all at once, in Madras. That’s where he died, back in Madras, after a few days with his brothers, all in one go, at single stroke. Death at one stroke in Madras, just before he was to begin a course of treatment. At one stroke, with minimal suffering.

So did a life end. So he died, among his brothers, whom he had left behind to come to the UK. Among them, his brothers, to whom he spoke almost daily through the internet. Whom he saw almost daily on his webcam, his brothers. He died amongst them, his brothers, and his remains were scattered in the Bay of Bengal the next day. Madras, December; just before the concert season. Madras, December, as the concert season was about to begin.

Tomorrow I am to speak at the conference. Tomorrow I will speak as I told my dad I would speak. I have his notes here, ‘Music Notes for Lars I’, and ‘Music Notes for Lars II’; I have his notes, and tomorrow I’m speaking. Not so long ago, just before he was to fly the next morning, I told him I’ve been working too hard to research South Indian classical music as I had intended. The night before he flew, I rang him, and he sounded happy and excited – he was off to India! Back to Madras! And for non-invasive surgery, a remarkable procedure, which he’d read about in The Hindu. To Madras, to his brothers! He asked me when my new book was coming out. I said I’d send it to him when it arrived. I’d send him a few copies, I promised. It should be better than the first book, I said.

Then, not long after, I tried to prepare an obituary. What words should I use? What should I say? He came to the UK in 1956, I write. He worked in Newport, Gwent, I write. He went to study in Birmingham, I write. He moved to London, I write, as a Chartered Electonic Engineer. He had a great love of music, I write. Yes, that’s right – a love of music. He had a great love of music, I write. He was a music lover, I write.