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A good life

My great-uncle Dr Shankar passed away yesterday, at the age of ninety-four. My mother told me over the phone, her voice heavy with grief, that he had died in his sleep, after a very brief illness -- he was in hospital for just one day. When I die, I want to die like him, someone who has had a full life, and then to go "gentle into that good night", not to linger. Anayasena maranam -- death without suffering. You have to be blessed for that.

Great-uncle was a dentist. He was a spry, dapper, fine-boned man with a shock of white hair and a white moustache, whose looks had not changed one bit in the last several decades -- he looked rather like Albert Schweitzer. Astonishingly, up until a week ago, he had been going regularly to his surgery, doling out equal quantities of dentistry and wisdom in that old-fashioned dental office of his, presiding cheerily over ancient foot-pumped drills and other instruments of torture. At his age, it was remarkable that he had the eyesight and the arm-strength to extract teeth.

Great-uncle lived the good life -- he had it all: education, health, family, community. I saw him just a few weeks ago, when I went to Kerala for Onam. I was happy to listen to his tales of politicians and kings and scoundrels who were long gone. For he was witness to an entire age -- he had seen the world change dramatically in the almost-century of his long life. I could have listened to him for hours on end, but we had other social obligations.

I asked if I could take his picture, and he readily agreed, without any false modesty; he combed his hair and put on a gold-bordered neriyathu -- a fine, off-white cotton shawl -- around his shoulders. He said he would like to see the picture if it turned out well. I promised that I would enlarge it if were a good likeness. Alas, I never got around to sending him the photograph. He would have liked it -- he looked good. His skin glowed with good health, and he was glad to see us.

In his old age, great-uncle had become the karanavar -- the patriarch, of his joint family, matrilineal though it is. His family is one of the most famous and richest in the region, one that has had extensive feudal landholdings. Unlike other joint families, such as my mother's, great-uncle's family had held together, and he enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of the family gatherings.

But I remember him best from innumerable warm afternoons when we drove up-country from Trivandrum. We would stop to visit great-uncle before travelling on to my aunt's home in their ancestral village. My sister and I were quiet children, so we would merely sit in the waiting-room of the surgery -- just off a dusty and busy street -- and observe.

My mother and aunt have lousy teeth, and great-uncle would chide them, making those regretful, universal, clucking dentist-sounds regarding their sadly neglected molars and incisors. He himself had only sons, so he was especially fond of his nieces. I could see the genuine warmth with which he would greet each of them, "How are you, my daughter?", putting a paternal arm around their shoulders.

I would listen to him chat with them about their myriad relatives. I liked to play with the moulds of jaws and teeth, made of plaster-of-paris, and I liked the peculiar smell of laughing gas and disinfectant in the surgery and on his hands. I would pore over the old medical journals and look wonderingly at the Parke-Davis series of paintings of ancient physicians -- Charaka, Susruta, Hippocrates, et al -- on his walls.

Great-uncle was a gentle practitioner of the art of dentistry, and he reminded me of another old man, Dr K N Pillai, whom my parents used to take me to when I was a child. He was grave and friendly, and since he had known my grandfather, he loved to chat about him, and about history, my mother's domain. "I missed my calling, I should have been a historian," he would tell her.

Dr Pillai believed in the body's own curative powers, so he seldom interfered with it by injecting you with something or giving you antibiotics. Instead, his ancient 'compounder' would conjure up the most vile-tasting mixtures, full of epsom salt and the most disgusting things you could think of. They worked, too. I have the theory that your body hated their taste so much that it cried "Uncle!" and cured itself rather than subject itself to more of the same! Dr Pillai died a few years ago, at the ripe old age of eighty-five, and he too worked till the very end, curing people.

Dr Pillai and my great-uncle shared a sense of purpose; and that is why they lived such long and productive lives. They both, if I am not mistaken, went to England when they were young, got trained, and came back to Kerala. They were old-fashioned physicians who knew the value of a bed-side manner; I tease my sister, who's also a doctor, that her kind of modern doctors are mere pill-pushers who will be replaced any day now by a computer!

No, great-uncle was certainly no pill-pusher. He was the first properly-trained dentist in those parts, and it became pretty much the norm for all the aspiring dentists in the area to apprentice with him, even when a dental college was established in Trivandrum. Since there were plenty of pan-chewing people in those days who abused their teeth, great-uncle must have been an angel of mercy; he was a popular man.

When I visited great-uncle for the last time, I asked him questions about how things had been in the old days. He talked at length about the Temple Entry Movement, which finally threw open the doors of all temples in Travancore to all Hindus, regardless of caste, in 1936, after a long and bitter struggle. He remembered Sir C P Ramaswamy Iyer, then dewan of Travancore, who gave explicit orders to his policemen that they must bring at least six Pulayas (scheduled caste people) to each temple to ensure that the edict was obeyed.

As great-uncle told it, the Pulayas, agricultural laborers, refused to go to the temple, for two very good reasons: one, they had been told that their eyeballs would burst if they entered the temple grounds; two, they were fairly certain that conservative 'upper-caste' people would kill them. As a prominent person in town, great-uncle offered to lead them to the temple; he assured them that nobody's eyes would explode, including his. And thus the 'lower-castes' came to the temple.

The conservatives stayed away from the temple for a while, but then they too came back; and six decades later, it is hard to imagine that such apartheid existed within living memory. This gentle old man had been there, and he had seen it with his own eyes.

Great-uncle spoke, too, of a prominent Marxist leader who had quite candidly told him why they didn't support prohibition. Said the leader: "If there is no poverty, nobody needs us leftists. Liquor ensures that poverty remains. That me ans job-security for us." Sad but true.

Yes, great-uncle had seen a lot of things in his lifetime.

And he had experienced immense grief. To talk to this cheerful old man, you would never imagine it. Great-uncle had wanted his eldest son to be his heir, to take over his practice after his time. And uncle Sukumar had obliged -- he had become a good dental surgeon, and he had gone to England and become a Fellow of the Royal College of Dental Surgeons, the top qualification in his field.

Then uncle came back to Kerala, and he was engaged to be married. Tragically, just a few weeks before his wedding day, uncle Sukumar had a scooter accident. Although it appeared at first sight to be minor, his spinal cord was damaged.

Uncle Sukumar was paralyzed from the neck down. And this scintillating young man spent the next eighteen months as a quadriplegic, unable to even take basic care of himself, wasting away in his hospital bed in front of his parents' eyes, before he died at the age of perhaps thirty. I remember uncle Sukumar -- I was a small boy then.

A lesser man would have been devastated, but not great-uncle. I believe that this is where his sense of purpose came from -- great-uncle Shankar went to his surgery till the very last week of his life, at the age of ninety-four, because he was doing it for his dead son. He was doing what his son could not do, what his son would have wanted to do.

I said I would like to die like great-uncle Shankar. I correct that. I would also like to live like great-uncle. Unbowed, unvanquished, looking Fate straight in the eye, with quiet dignity in the face of adversity. I too would like to live my life unselfishly, for others, for something greater than myself. I salute that courageous old man. As Shakespeare said, 'Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.'

Rajeev Srinivasan