Notes from a Funeral Angad Johar
Manmohan Rai Johar, retired fighter pilot and avid golf player, grandfather, leaped onto his barely functioning steel bicycle—rusty knobs and wobbly screws, much akin to his own joints—one December morning, never to come back home …
… and I could already see her, History, smoking an old bidi, standing in
the corner behind his desk, and she was laughing at the all too probable repetition of that other day seventy years ago, that day when ancestors unbeknownst to me hurriedly packed up memory in an old, leaky suitcase, and when …
… and that desk, old and mahogany, had, over the years, become a
reflection of him, as withered pieces of his soul inevitably leaked from all
the orifices of his ageing body, with the cracks in its varnish reflecting the wrinkles on his sagging skin and scattered inkblots rearranged to mirror
its discolorations, and on the very desk where he kept that photograph of Montgomery, a non-place, phantom town …
… ah, the inkblots! I wonder what words they would have been if
they weren’t flicked off of his Russian fountain pen during his many uncontrollable fits of shaking anxiety…
… I’m anxious, tugging at the tufts of my whitening hair, a premature
curse, as my bedridden grandmother wails in mourning, surrounded by her old friends in flowy white salwars, like a confluence of lilies…
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