Loneliness is the dominant fear that he has, even though he is forgetting everything. The hopelessness that comes when he feels lonely and scared makes him look so pitiable and pathetic that I just want to close my eyes and shut my mind. It kills me.
We often hear him say, ‘Everything is over. There is no one. What will happen?’ When he says this my heart goes out for him. Sometimes we ignore him, sometimes we lie and at times we snap at him, which is the worst.
Vikram tells me that he sometimes pretends or fakes things just to get attention. I have lost count of how many times during recent months he has called me on the phone and pleaded, ‘Main udas hoon, dil nahin lag raha, tu aaa jaa. [I am sad, I am feeling bored, please come].’
Is this the insecurity of childhood coming back or the trauma of being displaced by the dam that haunts him and makes him a nervous wreck, I do not know but it explains why he always wanted people around him. He has felt insecure since his childhood.
I think that Dadoo created a surrogate family to kill his childhood fears and scare of being uprooted. He felt that he never got the love and affection that he should have received during childhood from his parents and near and dear ones. He was an outsider wherever he went and that weighed on him. Even his brother and sister considered him an outsider. This disconnect remained with him throughout and he tried to fill the void by having people around him.
The lonely time that he spent in his formative years made him long for affection and so he started showering affection on others. When he grew up he started to help strangers and tried to win smiles whenever he could.
He helped people financially and emotionally. Probably this was also the reason he helped the underprivileged – the beggars and coolies. He talked to them as if he was a close relation. In his job he was always willing to join hands with his colleagues.
But everyone around him got busy with their own life including his children, who left for their education and then jobs and finally got busy in their own families. This increased his loneliness.
I remember, he would stand in the balcony of our house in Solan and call out to people on the road to come and have a cup of tea. He would meet acquaintances in the market and complain to them that they had stopped coming to his house, he would invite them to have lunch and dinner. Whenever he met our friends he complained about their fathers having forgotten him. He would ask them to tell their parents that he was remembering them.
He would visit all those shops where he used to go for years, and taunt the shopkeepers for not recognizing him. He would call his sister, old colleagues and other near and distant relatives and people from his native village and scold them for not being in touch.
All this had started about six years back. He would sit and brood. Whenever I asked him what he was thinking he would say, ‘Look where I have made this house, so far away from my native place. I am a pardesi [foreigner] here.’ Then he would start remembering old friends, colleagues, acquaintances and relatives and wonder about their whereabouts. We did not see it coming nor did we understand what was happening to him. We either ignored this or snapped at him.
He would call me everyday and say, ‘Keep coming every weekend to meet me, you must come. It gets chirpy when you come. Raunak ho jati hai, aa jaya karo. Why don’t you take leave? You must take long leave and stay with me.’ He called Vikram, Deepak and Mala didi too and repeated the same to them.
And when we went to Solan he would ask us, ‘How many days’ leave have you taken? How long you will stay?’ His face fell when we said that we had come for two or three days! He was saddened and the joy of seeing his children just vanished. He was going into depression slowly and we failed to notice that!