I am putting down these sentences after translating the last word of this book, Memories of a Father. The day has not dawned yet and it is raining. I rang up Mr. K. G. Sankarapillai, the friend, guide and teacher who entrusted me with this job, to say I have finished. I was crying like a baby. It was such a painful journey. I was in the woods as I travelled through this book word by word: a wilderness of cruelty, killing, tenderness, kindness and love—a wilderness where all sorts of animals make their homes; the wilderness we call our world.
Professor Eachara Varier, who wrote this book, is not only a teacher but a poet and a fighter too. He was a teacher of language who took young students into the clouds of poetry, and taught them not only to get immersed in the poetry of life but also to fight the darkness around them. Every fighter is a poet too, he reminded us. As Dylan Thomas has put it, one should not go gentle into that good night; one should rage, rage against the dying of the light. The rage is on since the Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong, with the cooperation of Jananeethi, in Trichur, Kerala, decided to bring out this saga of struggle in English. For this we must be grateful to Mr. Basil Fernando and Dr. Philip Setunga of the Asian Human Rights Commission, as well as Professor K. G. Sankarapillai and Fr. George Pulikkuthiyil of Jananeethi.
I now know what a struggle it was to make man more than an animal, to retrieve all that is human in this species. But I also know now that this wilderness is controlled and ruled by animals: the carnivorous ones. Blood is in their mouths; vengeance cannot tame them. Will this strange struggle of tolerance and forgiveness finally do it? I don’t know; but the struggle should continue in some form or another. Every humane quality should be retrieved and preserved for generations to come, for purer water and cleaner air, a clearer sky, stars and moon, for our rain and rivers, for everything around us.
I was caught inbetween the father and the son, or rather, my father and my son. Did my father wait for me like this? Will my son go away like this? My father, the late Sri Premji, acted in the role of this father in the much-acclaimed film Piravi. In my journey through this book he was with me, telling me how painful it was to act out the role of a father who lost his son, but went on waiting for him. My dear father walked along with me into this wilderness, holding my hand. At the end of it, here I am looking back to see whether my son is still there or not. I now know that no sun sets. There is life even after death. Memories are the branches where the dead nest.
It is raining. I too am drenched. The rain cleanses everything, but scars of old wounds remain; they cannot be washed off that easily. Because of these scars, the struggle should continue, to recreate us as more beautiful people.
The day has not dawned yet. It is still raining.
Neelan,
Trivandrum,
October 23, 2003
