Vakkan, a retired school teacher, was the most devout Catholic Christian in our neighbourhood. Strangely, he now lies buried under a rubber tree in his backyard. Normally, he should have been buried in his parish churchyard. The inscrutable ways of god or a quirk of fate! It so happened that the son he was living with was a hard-core rationalist for whom god was a puking anathema.
On the bright side, the son took good care of his bed-ridden father for three years until his death with priestly fervour. When it came to the burial, he was not ready to give in a wee bit to the whims of his relatives who insisted on burying the deceased in the churchyard. Thus, our ‘Vakkan Sir’ rests in peace under a rubber tree. No bells tolled. No prayers said. No requiems celebrated. Nothing! A picture-perfect rational ‘execution’.
Ironically, there is another household whose head now lives in a poor home. A handsome widower, he owns several acres of rubber plantation and has three well-to-do sons. It is true that this person was given to drinking. Frankly, he was not a hell-raiser who scared the wits out of you but the hilarious kind who got more cheerful and clairvoyant after a few drinks. The sanctimonious sons, incorrigibly complacent about an assured spot in heaven’s hallowed Hall of Fame, were deprecatingly at odds with him for ruining family honour.
All our earnest efforts to prevail upon the stubborn sons to cut their dad some slack came a cropper. They remorselessly gave up on their old man and he was shown the door. Heartbroken, he sought refuge in a poor home. Forsaken and forlorn, he now languishes there with stoic resignation like a discarded museum antique. That tragic cartoon character of destiny is now rotting in memory’s elegiac dream world. Another version of honour killing, eh? He says he is entitled to sue his sons for maintenance but he won’t do it for fear of jeopardising the family honour. Either way, the family honour is at stake. Word on the street is that he, still spry at 80, has bequeathed his body to a medical college for academic purposes, thus absolving his children of the burden of his funeral — a parting gift from a father to his children.
Nowadays old parents are like abandoned furniture at home, aren’t they? Those who matter don’t mind. Those whose minds don’t matter. Do we realise how many lullabies they have sung for us to sleep tight? How many nights they have stayed up without sleeping a wink keeping a vigil at our bedside? How many sacrifices they have made so that we could have a better standing in life? They sacrificed their today for our tomorrow. Now that twilight has descended on their lives, steps wavering and spirits flagging, they are treated like trash. We can’t choose our parents, can we? The truth is that every human relationship now is pitiably defined in terms of quid pro quo. Insensitivity has become the insignia of the present era.