In Memoriam

Jayesh---the very name conjures up the image of a tall, slim youth, dusky in complexion and extremely good-looking. I can never think of him without also remembering the intelligent spark that perenially shone out of his dark eyes….

My association with Jayesh, both direct and indirect, goes back to the days when life had been so much simpler; work had been work, play had been play and never the twain had met! From the vantage point of our balcony, he had been a common enough sight in the 80s. To me, he seemed the eternal scholar, with a satchel-bag hung carelessly over his shoulder and the blue shirt and khaki shorts of his St. John’s uniform!

I was close to his sister and through her I came to know of her brother’s uncommon intellect and outstanding academic achievements. I periodically got hints of his excellent scholastic record, his intelligence, his interesting discourse on a wide range of topics, his total lack of ill-temper and his abundance of bonhomie…He sounded perfect, described so! I gradually stopped being amazed on being told of this paragon…

There are two kinds of travelers. There are those who have to carve out their destiny for themselves and there are others to whom destiny itself beckons. Jayesh was just such a traveler. Before we had time to gather all our facts together, he had cracked the grueling I.I.T. exam, secured a position of merit and entered the haloed portals of the Institute at Kanpur!       

The boys seemed to love him; there was so much admiration in them for him and there was so much goodness in him for all!

A little after his four-year course, he was ready for more… through my brother I came to know that he had qualified the GRE and would now be leaving for the States on  a scholarship! He left India in the Aug. of ’88, and I came to know that he had enrolled himself in a University of New York.

The winter of ’89….it will now be inevitably associated with Jayesh. It was around 11.00 in the morning when the phone rang. It was Jayesh on a month- long vacation home. I invited him over and the offer was accepted with alacrity. I also coaxed him into bringing along all his snaps of his life in the US. In most of the pictures he stood with the picturesque beauty of his natural surroundings as a background. There he was leaning against his car, a shy gleam of owner’s pride in his eyes or working on his computer or talking with his white-bearded professor or out with friends in a roadside bistro! Bemused, when I looked up from the photographs at his lounging figure beside me, I noticed him to be wearing his regular jeans, khadi kurta and kolhapure chappals…I realized that despite the car, the restaurant and all things ‘phoren’, he was essentially the same person that he’d always been….

We talked the hours away. It must’ve taken a lot of ingenuity, even for a person of his phenomenal brain power, to explain the rudiments of his research project to a layman like me but he did so with an utter lack of condescencion and sincerity that fills me with gratitude to this day…

What I’d not been able to do in fourteen years of our acquaintance, I did so in those four hours…I came to know him and I’m eternally grateful to the Almighty to have given me those few precious moments as my last memories of him….

For Jayesh is no more….a truth.as horrible and as unbelievable today as it had been all those years ago! The news of his shocking demise on the dull, dreary evening of June ’94 came as a shattering blow, throwing us all into a darkness of sorrow and tears and unbearable pain….excruciating pain…

Jayesh’s death is not just a great personal loss…it’s a social loss, a loss to the world. It is people like him who make us feel that there is hope at the end of the tunnel…who remind us that in the abyss of lies and cheating and enmity and pain, there is a beacon of truth and friendship and love and fortitude to light the way…I will remember him always as the most perfect human-being I have known….and remember forever that last time I’d seen him….clad simply in a kurta…a smile on his serene face, so heart-breakingingly good-looking and a hand raised in adieu…I had not known it then but I did later…. it had been a final goodbye…..

In the end, perhaps, there is some consolation in remembering Menander, who had cried out in his sorrow, all those centuries ago___’whom the gods love dies young’…..But what  poor consolation when I think of Jayesh as one who gave so much, took so little and indeed, at 28, died so young…..