This book is purely internal — the distillation of life in the alembic of solitude; a sort of memoir by Vijai who wrote down notes and which have been compiled by Manjulika after the former died of cancer. The book has Vijai’s childhood reminiscences, emotional raptures, intellectual passions and preoccupations, “The poetic lines which had retained their penetrative magic, the potent images, all these had their say,” in his life. Manjulika says that Vijai’s search was metaphysical, a search for freedom — the passion that informed his life.
Padmanabh was born in Delhi to P.P. Pillai and Lakshmi Menon. Though the family’s roots lay in Kerala, as an economist, diplomat and international civil servant, Vijai’s father took his son at an early age to Paris and New York. Back in India, he educated his son in Delhi and so Vijai joined the Indian Foreign Service with every intention of leaving — which he did on his return from his first posting at Beijing. Here he finds himself at the centre of an international incident during the Cultural Revolution. He is arrested on trumped up charges of spying, roughed up by Red Guards and deported by the Chinese government.
The following eight years of living abroad during which he gets married, are passed in England as a farm labourer, in the USA for obtaining his doctorate in History and M. Phil. in Library Science. He returns to Delhi and experiences the break up of his marriage, the successive death of his parents and the termination of his career — a condition of ‘absolute vulnerability’ as he writes in a letter to his mother and which holds out to him the chance of metamorphosis into ’supreme invulnerability’. He once says, “Metaphysical freedom is, it seems to me, a walled garden and it is only the impossibilities of life which, in pushing you mercilessly against it, give you some chance of getting in… rooting (you) finally in a place of stillness.”
He spends the last years of his life as “a pensioner of the universe” marking his secluded days with rigours and rewards of housekeeping, cooking and gardening, yoga and mediation, and in the company of his objects, books, music and a small circle of close friends.
Beginning his narrative by paying a tribute to his parents, Vijai is really voicing his appreciation of his mother who could live with his father for so long when both were very different personalities. Padmanabh says to his mother, “Your humiliations were many and frequent. In me, this bred, regard you, a great pity and love but also a sense of mortification and shame that you allowed yourself to suffer such subjection to your own frailties.” In a very acerbic language, he continues, “Like atoms mutually repelling, no victim can really stand another, seeing in him the loathsome spectacle of his own fall, his own craven state,” and so towards his father he has “an amalgam of hatred and admiration towards you (mother), one of kinship and scorn.”
Describing the death of his father, Vijai says, that once when he sat hunched before a cup of tea, when his father, P.P. Pillai, came and placed his hand upon his shoulder, light as a feathered wingtip, to say, “Son, everything comes. Everything goes. No regrets.” These were the last words of a father who lived in his own world.
This book of memoirs is haunting, very aggressive but silently subdued and full of pathos but very painful to read.
(Seagull Books Pvt Ltd, 26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta-700017.)
