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Bilaspur.’
    Dadoo did his B.Ed after that and he was selected to go on deputation to Nigeria. He had to stay there for ten years. Unfortunately we had to leave Mala didi and Vikram in India because of their education. Mala didi was in eighth standard, studying in a Hindi medium school, so could not have shifted to the new educational system in Nigeria. Vikram was also put in a boarding school in Shimla so that both had each other’s company. Initially Deepak and I accompanied Mamma and Dadoo to Africa. Vikram too came to Nigeria after Mala didi completed her matric and shifted to Solan, where our grandmother came to stay with her.
    Dadoo instead of living miserly and saving money like so many others of his generation, travelled all over Europe, Asia, Africa and America. We used to rent a house in London for a month and he would take us to different countries. We roamed around like gypsies.

9
    Brain works round the clock but when we are healthy we do not appreciate its effort. We take it for granted. It is not a machine, all our ideas and tales of laughter, desire and pain take shape inside the brain. It separates the past from the present in a very meaningful manner without de-linking the two. It is an always churning and brewing melting pot of sanity that gives us sense of time and meaning to our existence.
    But for Dadoo this churning has stopped. For him there is endless confusion. He is at war with himself, trying to give meaning to things that he had always known but which are so unfamiliar. Everything is slipping before him; slowly, each moment.
    He does not quite remember which day of the week it is. A few months back he used to be focused on Sundays: He’d often ask, ‘Today is Sunday?’ ‘When is Sunday?’ or ‘After how many days is Sunday?’ May be that was his way of keeping track of time. But now even that is disappearing.
    It is true that death erases the entire burden of living. Whatever happens, the thought of death being there at the end provides relief. I agree with him when he says, ‘Enjoy and celebrate life, each one of us will die one day.’ But celebration of life and comfort of death seem so meaningless when I see him ebbing away.

10
    12 May 2010
    I am so surprised. The man who left his home at the age of four, built a house in another part of the state, left India with family to work in an unknown African nation, roamed around the world would be so obsessed to return to his native village.
    In the last few years, he had started talking for hours about Kuljar, his childhood and lament why he built this house in Solan, so far away from home. He felt rootless and displaced. ‘I am an outsider. You will never understand what it means,’ he would say to us.
    ‘I want to go to Kuljar. Sohnya sardara wey, neeli ghodi walya, tain kithe dera la laya, vey sonhnaya sardara vey … [Oh handsome warrior with a blue horse/where have you settled/Oh handsome warrior …]. Kuljar is my watan [native place]. I own large areas of land in Kuljar.’
    I sit and listen as he sings.
    Some things are so deep-rooted, it does not matter where you live all your adult life, in the end you want to return to where you were born. Dadoo repeatedly talks about his village, and contemplates to shift though there is no house to live in. But this does not matter to him as there are always the houses of neighbours, kyonki woh apne log hain [because they are our kin].
    One day I asked him, ‘Dadoo, what made you come back from Nigeria? They had extended your deputation.’
    ‘No one can stay away from parents for long. In Nigeria the relationships were not permanent, my parents were here so I had to come back. I saw several countries, saved money, bought land with that money. Now I don’t know where these lands are or what happened to that money. I have forgotten now. Anyway what do I need money for? Nothing.’
    And then he goes on, ‘Since my father was educated he enrolled me in a school and then college. I was