The Namesake and Irrfan: Something Precious


Irrfan Khan passed away two days ago. He had been battling the big C for a couple of years. I had studiously been avoiding all 'news' about his health: I wasn't even aware that I was avoiding it till just now. I had the luxury of packing it away and ignoring it; so I did. Till he died, and I went into a spiral of grief that took me by surprise. I had expected to be sad, but I felt ruined. I have taken the best part of the last two days to understand why the death of someone who I didn't know, who was very occasionally a part of my life, affected me like this. My mind landed on March 2007, and The Namesake.

In March 2007, I was in the last semester of my post-graduate degree. My mother had succumbed to cancer six months earlier, after a long and bruising battle. My father had passed away in 2001; in the span of five years, my family was changed forever. Heartsore and weary, I was trying to get used to not being someone's child anymore. University was a refuge but I wasn't dealing with things very well. I started this blog, not realising that it was probably an attempt to cope. It helped, but there was so much turmoil within me that I was sinking in a mix of emotional avoidance and sheer fatigue.

I had read the beloved novel by Jhumpa Lahiri and enjoyed it; I wanted to watch the movie with a sort of idle curiosity. The day started off with a misadventure; my friend B and I went to the theatre and realised that we had missed the show we had booked for; we went back the same evening for another show.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, the story of Ashoke and Ashima wrapped itself around my heart. As two strangers got married, went to foreign shores, fell slowly and tenderly in love, became parents, brought up two kids who grew increasingly unfamiliar to them, and finally parted from each other, death slipped away from my mind and the life before it took its place. The quiet, unobtrusive Ashoke was so similar to my father; it was like watching, beat for beat, the person I had never really seen my father as. The love of a father like mine, not the waves that thundered on the surface but the constant, powerful undercurrent that kept you stable and floating, washed over me from the screen. The barely perceptible hurt, for all children must be thoughtless, brought back the times I must have been cruel, without receiving cruelty in return.

There is a scene in the film where Ashoke explains to his son the reason behind him being nicknamed Gogol; how it represented a moment where life changed, how the name was a way to acknowledge the gift of life. My friend and I bawled through it, without blinking. Losing a parent is a selfish kind of pain; you are mourning the loss of your comfort and refuge. This moment was when I truly understood the dimensions of what was lost, when I mourned the loss of the people my parents had been.

Today, I remember a person who helped me on the long road to recovery without ever meeting me. Over the years, I enjoyed a lot more of his work, his humour and generosity, but as life moved on, I forgot about that evening when about 70 strangers and I wept together at the shared losses that shape our lives. It's personal, the sudden lack of his existence in the world. My eternal gratitude to an artist who was as rare as he was magical, for sprinkling a bit of healing dust in my life when I needed it most. Go in peace, friend.

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