I will miss the hospital enormously: the sitting around and talking and so many little things, like the delicate floral teacups; the door to my room which squeaks an extract from a Bach Cello Suite; Rupchand’s humour and his wife’s beauty; the view from the roof above the kitchen onto drunken Ramubhai’s field. This man, in a great spirit of generosity, donated land to Vikas Samiti years ago to build their hospital after an earlier site had fallen through. His primary weakness is the bottle, and every night he comes drunkenly into the hospital roaring that he owns the land and that we are all his servants. Aditya assures me with surprising depth of feeling that Ramubhai is a kind man and will do anything for the employees of the hospital, looking upon them as his children. He always wears the same dirty white dhoti that seems to match his wrinkled old skin and short but dishevelled white hair. When I meet him in the day he clasps my hand and greets me warmly but inarticulately, with something in his manner suggesting a man stranded in the wreckage of his life, clutching at anything that moves through it.
One incident stands out in my mind as a little summary of Kojawara life: Rupchand, Aditya and I were sitting talking one evening and it suddenly occurred to me to ask where Devji, the cook, slept. In the kitchen, they told me, and Aditya took me to have a look through the gauze window onto the kitchen door. There, sure enough, was Devji sleeping. “Shhh!”, I said, not wanting to wake him up. But this was in vain because Rupchand now came along with a torch and shone it fully on Devji’s sleeping face, declaiming “Devji!” loudly, upon which Devji woke up, beaming delightedly at the interruption.
My last visit to Maal today was rather ordinary. In some ways it was little more than a formality as there was no more serious research to be done - merely a few outstanding pieces of information of the i-dotting, t-crossing kind. My main motivation was sentiment - a wish to say goodbye. It was extremely sad, therefore, to miss Amratlal, who had gone to Kherwara for the day, and my adieux to the rest of his family were extra warm, bulked out by surrogate goodbyes that were really for him. Happily, all my other closest friends and acquaintances were on hand for tearful farewells, including Dolat Ram, the teachers and of course Suraj, whose unique charm and amused pathos I shall miss exceedingly.
Saying goodbye to a special place is always difficult as it does not reciprocate, and there is a conflict between the self-applied psychological pressure to drink in the scene one last time and the accompanying feeling of self-consciousness when one does so. The result, for me at least, can be tortuous: a somewhat contrived pause on the threshold of departure, continually destabilised by the rationale inner voice urging me to get a move on and leave. Maal, in this respect, has the advantage of being on top of a hill so that very soon the sight of it is obscured by trees on a gradient, and looking back is not possible. In truth I felt no strong emotion on leaving, and as I sweated my way down the dirt track I had to keep reminding myself to think suitably poetic thoughts. When Suraj asked me whether I would come back I told him that I would see him in ten years. With luck I shall be able to surprise him and accompany Dilip, or a colleague, who will need to make a trip to the forest in order to complete some of the more technical parts of the microplan.
Between Maal and Wanibore
Next Post - Friday 24th November 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Thursday 24th November 2011)
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