Letter to Salman Rushdie (Part 4)

Me: Sidh Daniel Losa Mendiratta
And yet, my mother died six years ago, in January 1999. So, I’ve come to the conclusion that the finding of this box (some of my mother’s colleagues had “warned” me about it…about the novel started in the sixties, then interrupted, and later concluded – or not) is a symbol of the end of a cycle of mourning. And, more important than that, it’s her most important legacy to this world.

When my mother became ill, naturally I tried to be a better son and to dedicate as much of my time and affection to her as a twenty year-old boy studying architecture in Coimbra could. So, in September 1998, I changed schools and came to Porto to be by her side.

Countless times I tried to recall the last time I saw her, two days before she died. She was heavily medicated with morphine and didn’t open her eyes. I held her hand for some time…and thought: “I want to remember always how she looks right now, so thin, without hair, and I want to take a photograph of her just like this”. But her last agonizing days were not photographically recorded and I think she might have preferred it that way. Nor was I by her side when she took her last breath…
In between August 1998 and January 1999, my mother went to live in my grandmother’s house, where it would be easier for the maid and nurse to assist her. By then, my grandmother was already showing signs of Alzheimer and also she didn’t take it too well that she was not the centre of attentions in her own house anymore. There were a lot of misunderstandings between the two and the last opportunity to heal the old wounds was lost. This chance was also missed by my sister, who had had some fierce fights with my mother in her own rebellious student days. Why was forgiveness between the three generations not achieved?
(…the grave settles no quarrels.)

I remember my mother telling me, on one of those last days, how the happiest day in her life was when I was born. We both cried then. Tears that were binding.

By now, I have finished my architecture course. What took nine and a half years and dragged from 1995 until 2005 ended with a merit distinction and flying colours that would have made my mother proud. I also stopped having the recurrent dream in which my mother appears miraculously cured from her illness and our daily family life resumes once again, as if the illness itself had been nothing but a bad dream. So often I woke from this dream overfilled with joy…and it took me a couple of dilacerating minutes each morning to crash back into reality…

In August 2001, I arrived in Goa to get away from all this and to start “coming home” to my Indian self. I studied there for one year and travelled through India (I had been twice to India before, but never to Goa). In September 2003 again I took flight to the tropical east and again I stayed in Goa just under a year. Now, I’m naturally trying to go back. I hope to be there in October 2005.
In travelling this way, I feel a bit more Indo-Portuguese…

Mr. Rushdie, I hope you have found at least one passage of one of these characters interesting. They are my family and I have to come to terms with them. Only in doing so, I can start to put them somehow behind me in order to make space to create my own “family story” and to start creating my own traditions.

Thanking you kindly for your time,

O Jaipuriano

(End)