(18.5.1963-4.2.2013)
By Rajesh Sharma
I can visualize him watching his
own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā, this
Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh.
What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the
rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the
five bhoots, making nature go berserk.”
Listening
to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.
“He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a
loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.
Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had
found the thread that connects the extremes.
I met
him some twenty years ago when he arrived to teach in the college where I was
already teaching. That college, in Hoshiarpur, had then a Principal who liked
to take himself very seriously. And he had managed to surround himself with men
and women who competed with one another to sustain their boss’s precarious
endeavours. Maninder, it seems, had been dropped in this theatre of the
ludicrous by some malicious naughty gods. One day as the Principal sat basking
in the sweat-scented congregation of his flattering chamchas and chamchis,
officially designated as a staff meeting, he walked in late, went straight to
the Principal’s side, put both hands on his table, bent a bit low, and began, “Bhāji, the peon told me you wanted to
see me. I am not really late. I was sitting in an empty classroom and had got
it bolted from outside to avoid being disturbed. Yes, why did you call me?”
The
boss’s lips twisted under the unaesthetic imbalance of his recalcitrant moustache. We knew his pride had been wounded: the twisted lips always
indicated the throes of a struggle to put himself into words, in which he
always failed, so that he ended up frothing at the corners of his mouth. How
could a mere teacher, that too on probation, treat him like an ordinary mortal?
Maninder’s fate was sealed. Soon enough, when he booked half a dozen boys for
using unfair means during an examination, the principled Principal persuaded the
college management to terminate his services. He was again on the road.
He had
once given me a book to read. It was titled Oddballs.
I was to gradually discover what a great oddball Maninder himself was.
Years
later I found him again when his story Bhār
was published. I called him. He almost sang with happiness to hear my voice
after all those years. After that we used to talk once or twice a month. More
often it was he who called. And he invariably scolded me for not calling him. I
had to reinvent all the banal excuses at my disposal. He always forgave.
He came
to meet me last year when he was visiting some relations in Patiala city. He
borrowed a scooter and rode through the cruel traffic all the way to my house
which is quite far from the city. “I can’t see clearly in the evenings, but I
pushed on. I had to meet you, Rajesh baba.” He had come to pat me for co-editing
the journal South Asian Ensemble. He loved the way I wrote. He liked that I had not let myself die under the weight
of trivialities. He wanted me to write in English on Punjabi culture. “There is
a world of work waiting to be done. We’ll sit down soon again and I’ll tell you
what you should do,” he spoke with a conviction that was irresistibly
infectious. Had he been in some university, how many people he would have
inspired, driven, even kicked. And they would have been grateful. Some say he
could not get a teaching position in a university because he had a tendency to
kick the wrong people. They are perhaps right. His goodness was irrepressible.
He hit you to do you a good turn. Unfortunately, not many recipients of his
eccentric generosity had a heart as large as he had.
But then he had an incredibly large
heart. He never bore a grudge against anyone, not against life, not even
against the generality the vulgar-minded call ‘the world’. Others felt
that he had never got even a fraction of what should have been ensured to a man
of his caliber. He never complained. Maybe he knew that exile was the price
he had to pay for preserving his creative edge and intellectual integrity. That
may be the reason he never tried to be politically correct.
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