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The Call from the other side.......

By Prakash Subbarao

This is the story about a person who was brought up in the lap of luxury, who chose to walk away from his lavish lifestyle and become an honest and humble government servant.

It is a (mostly) true story about a person who never wavered from the righteous path all his life.

He was a brilliant man. He possessed a brain which could be stuffed with all kinds of information and yet possess an immense recall.  They say that he could read an article once and then quote it in its entirety without looking at it. He recited passages verbatim from Shakespeare and from the Bhagavad Gita and from Nietzsche.

His name was S.H. Subbarao. He was the son on a very distinguished civil servant. His father had served the Maharaja of Mysore with great honesty and integrity and was a personal friend of Sir M. Visvesvaraya and Sir Mirza Ismail.

When he was in his teens, there was already a palatial bungalow in Basavanagudi in Bangalore, filled with his "joint family" - cousins and aunts and uncles.

There was also the family horse,  which his father rode every evening and which he too learnt how to ride. And there was his favourite car, the Desoto, which his father owned and used to go to work in. Soon, with the connivance of the driver, Subbarao had learned driving. When his father was away, on tour, he would fill the car to capacity with all his cousins and take them for long drives.

On cold evenings, when out for a walk, he was known to spontaneously remove his coat and given it to beggars sitting on the pavement and shivering in the cold. If anyone asked about his coat, he would just say that he had lost it.

Soon the idyllic student days were over and Subbarao chose government service.

Flying held a fascination for him and so he gravitated to the Civil Aviation Department. He even learned to fly and could generally be found in the evenings, after work, in the air, in a Flying Club Pushpak.

He had made up his mind early in life that he would not marry. However, when his mother  told him about a young teenage girl who had lost both parents, he realized that she was suggesting a marriage alliance and he readily agreed.

He gradually moved up the ranks to become an Aerodrome Officer in Calcutta.

One one occasion an Indian Airlines Fokker friendship F-27 pilot made a mistake while coming in to land. This error could have endangered the lives of the occupants of the aircraft and Subbarao gave the pilot a talking to on the radio. "Come and see me in my office and make out a report" he thundered. The pilot was very contrite and made out a report, as requested, while Subbarao chewed him out. His colleagues at the department tried to dissuade him from taking any disciplinary action because the pilot was well connected politically but such things did not matter to Subbarao. The pilot left, suitably chastened, and possibly due to this event, he and Subbarao became close friends later on. When the Emergency was imposed many years later and Subbarao felt the heat and hostility of colleagues who tried to "fix" him, it was this pilot who came to his aid and made it known that anyone who touched or tried to harm him would face his wrath. The pilot's name was Rajiv Gandhi.

To cut a long story short, Subbarao, after an uneventful service in the Civil Aviation Department, retired and returned to Bangalore. He lived in a modest rented house with his wife and son.

Soon the son got married and moved away. The couple lived all by themselves.

One night Subbarao's wife complained of chest pain. Before he could summon a doctor, she passed away.

That left Subbarao all alone and one could invariably find him, day or night, pouring over his books at home. He took to writing and soon learned how to use a computer. The day's were spent firing off letters to various editors of various newspapers and writing a book on Bollywood which was devoted to actors, actresses and directors of yore who had fallen on hard times in their old age and were suffering considerably. "There is no sex or violence in my book" he used to proudly declare.

I used to be very close to him. One of the reasons could have been that I too love aircraft and aviation. My ambition, when young, was to be a pilot. "They are glorified taxi drivers" my father used to scoff and over-riding my request to be a career pilot, I  was forced to study mechanical engineering (just like my father had done). Once I begged Subbarao to take me up in the air in the Pushpak aircraft he flew every evening. Being a minor, I needed my father's permission. My father flatly refused. He was worried about my safety, he said. This hurt Subbarao a lot and very often, till the time he died, he would refer to this and wish that my father had allowed him to take me on the flight.

Soon his eyesight began failing him and he grew weak. He visited us unexpectedly one morning, in August 2005, and we insisted that he stay and spend the day with us. I had purchased a new digital camera and I kept it running in movie mode as he spoke. "Why are you taking my video?" he joked "I am an old man and will die soon". It was fascinating to see him expounding on a variety of subjects and that evening, after he had left, I carefully labeled the CD and stored it away.

"I want to see a good movie" he said and after perusing my collection settled on "Lawrence Of Arabia". I can still see him in my mind's eye, sitting hunched over my laptop with headphones on, watching the movie intently.

One day we got the news that Subbarao had slipped in the bathroom and broken his hip. He was shifted, in great pain, to a nursing home. He was operated upon the next day and was advised that he would have to spend a week in the nursing home before he could be released.

Subbarao was an independent sort and wished to live alone. However this was now no longer possible. He would need to stay with someone who could take care of him.

His daughter-in-law flatly refused to take him in. She didn't want the old man intruding into the privacy of their home. Her husband stayed silent on this issue. This hurt Subbarao very deeply.

His numerous cousins insisted that he stay with each of them for short durations and that they would take care of him but though he was touched with their generosity, deep in his heart was a pain that wouldn't go away. "God, please take me away from this world" was his daily entreaty. "Let me not give any trouble to others".

Soon the time to "take him home" had come. The attendants lifted him off the hospital bed and on to a stretcher. Subbarao's eyes were closed but tears trickled down the side of his face.

The trip from the hospital to the house of his cousin was a long one which would take several hours. A nurse accompanied Subbarao in the ambulance.

When they reached their destination and were making arrangements to lift him out of the ambulance somebody noticed that he was lying very still. The nurse rushed to take his pulse and then shook her head. "He's dead" she declared.

All this happened a year ago.

One recent evening, it was the 24th February 2007, I recall, at around 11 pm, to be precise, I was going through the spindle in which I had stored my CDs and DVDs when suddenly Subbarao's CD caught my eye. I impulsively inserted it into the computer and spent over an hour immersed in his videos. It felt like he was alive and well and talking to me.

"Why are you taking a video of an old man?" he laughingly asked. "I will be dying soon and will soon be burned in a crematorium and become powder". He went on to talk about a lot of things but kept coming back to the theme of death. "There is a new crematorium coming up near my place" he said. "I am glad that it is so close by. When I die, tell my relatives that they have just 45 minutes to see me and bid me farewell before I get cremated".

The next day, while having dinner, I mentioned to my mother about my having seen Subbarao's video the previous night. She was one of the cousins very close to him and I showed her his movies. She was touched. "I wonder when he passed away" she said and hurried to her diary to check.

"He died on the 24th February" she said with disbelief. "Exactly a year to the day ago".

When we told this amazing bit of information to various people, one learned man felt that Subbarao could be trying to make contact.

"Maybe he wants to come back one last time to see all of you" he opined. "Why don't you have a get together. Invite all your relatives to your house and show them the videos. I am sure that he will turn up there in some form or other to take one last look at all of you."

On the day that we were to have the video we asked the maid servant to also be present, although it was her day off. "I will have to bring my child along" she said. "That's fine" we told her.

We set up the TV and the DVD player in the hall and waited for all the people to turn up. Soon the hall was full of our relatives who were all excited at seeing Subbarao's videos. In the corner of the room the maid servant's son, a small boy of around four years of age, sat playing by himself. He was flying imaginary aircraft with his hand and making aircraft like noises such as . "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ". No one paid him any attention except to ask him every now and then to try and be silent.

Soon the videos were being screened and many people couldn't help but become emotional. A lot of people cried during the presentation and there were a lot of red eyes and sniffling after the show. After a cup of coffee, during which time there was a lot of discussion about the departed Subbarao, the people gradually left.

"Did you see anybody who looked out of place there?" I asked my mother the next day.

"Why do ask?" she enquired.

"The learned Brahmin had said that Subbarao would try and come to see us in some form and I was wondering whether you had spotted anything".

"No" she said. "I didn't see anything or anyone who appeared strange".

I forgot all about this matter till a week later when the maid servant came home in the evening accompanied by a smart looking young girl.

"Who is this girl?" I asked her.

"She's my daughter" she said.

"Why didn't you get your son also?" I asked her.

"Son? I have no son. This is my only child" she replied.

"Then who was the boy with you the other day when we saw the videos?" I asked.

"Boy? What boy? I came alone that day" she replied.

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