Nanaji

15 Oct 2006 Share on:

It has been a little over a month since Nanaji left us.

Time does what it always does: it keeps moving, even when we wish it would pause for one more conversation, one more cup of tea, one more quiet moment in the same room. What stays behind are memories. And some memories don’t behave like ordinary ones. They don’t fade politely. They don’t ask permission. They remain.

The last time I spoke to him was over the phone in June, when I was in Mysore. He wasn’t well. His breathing was heavy, and it was hard to catch every word. I remember straining to understand him, not just because the call was faint, but because the reality of his weakness felt unreal. He had fallen a few days earlier and hurt himself. I kept telling myself he’d recover. I kept bargaining with the universe the way we all do: this can’t be the final version of the story.

There’s one regret that still sits with me, quiet but stubborn: I wasn’t there for his cremation. Grief has many shapes. Some are tears. Some are silence. Some are a single sentence that keeps returning when you least expect it.

Nanaji was sharp. There was an intelligence in him that didn’t need to announce itself. Even looking at him in his later years, you could imagine the younger man: more handsome, maybe, but definitely carrying the same presence. The same unmistakable personhood. I can’t perfectly name what I feel when I think of him now. Love, admiration, nostalgia, guilt, gratitude, all tangled together like old threads in a drawer.

But I know this much: I liked him. A lot.

And maybe that’s the simplest truth that deserves to be said, without dressing it up.

I don’t want to write too much about him, because words can start pretending they’re enough.

Still, I’ll say this plainly.

Nanaji was great.