My journey

The following popular Hindi song (Lyricist: Sahir Ludhiyanvi; Singer: Kishore Kumar; Music: Sachin Dev Burman; Film: Munimji) meaningfully captures the essence of the universal experience of all mankind. The lyrics is as follows: -

jeevan ke safar mein rahi (We are travelers on life's path)

milte hain bhichad jaane ko (We meet only to be separated)

aur de jaate hain yaadein (And to create memories)

tanhaayi mein tadpaane ko (So that we can agonize in our loneliness)

Now I am in the middle of my seventh decade of life’s journey. I often remember people I met in the past. Since I have lived in various communities in different cities, and countries on different continents, I met innumerable people during my long journey; some became very close like family members and others were mere casual friends; some are alive, and some are dead. I had a culturally diverse array of several colleagues at my extremely different workplaces; and many more I met during my extensive travels around the world. These meetings ranged from a few minutes to few hours and at times grew into friendship that lasted for days, months and even years. Most people were lost the moment we separated and said goodbye, as they say, ‘out of sight is out of mind’; few others became friends for a while and fewer became long lasting friends. Even now I remember several people and events that had made some impact on my life. Although I have forgotten a lot of people, yet several remain in my memory.

The most significant and everlasting memory is of Manisha, a charming and beautiful young Indo-Trinidadian girl, whose memory will remain with me for as long as I live. She unexpectedly had come into my life and joined my journey for over five years. This journey suddenly ended when she all of a sudden died when she was merely twenty-five.

It took me several months to accept that Manisha has left me permanently for her new home somewhere in the heavens and no matter how much I cry, tear my hair apart and break my head against a wall she will never come back to me. Her memories are all I have, and I must move on in my life and succeed. Wherever Manisha is now, she too would hate to see me fail, no matter how difficult and traumatized I feel about losing her; I must move on. The sane and very positive and at times highly philosophical advice given to me by my parents and my grandmothers (nani and dadi) came in handy. Letters from Trinidad by her brother and uncle provided me with the much emotional healing that I needed at that time. Gradually my mind’s temperature cooled, stress reduced, and the brain felt a bit normal.

There was another side to my personality; my ambition was to rise in the academic world, do something significant for my science, earn a name and fame, travel around the world and experience different cultures of this wonderful and extremely diverse world. These were my deep-seated desires, and I was determined to work hard to achieve them.

A little over eight months after Manisha’s demise, I eventually got married to Sushma on December 7th, 1976. My strong urge to succeed coupled with my beautiful wife and two adorable children Anshuman and Anita helped me to initiate a new life. I got myself submerged into my jobs, both with the oil industry and university teaching, and I developed a habit of accepting new positions and resigning old ones. Success came my way and I worked sincerely and hard at my jobs. In this process we as a family traveled to different countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Sushma turned out to be a great support to me and never questioned my moves from one country to another, although this was at times hard on her. She remained busy in taking care of the daily family chores and took good care of me and our children. My children were never left alone, whenever they came home from school; they always found a welcoming and smiling mother with freshly cooked food for them. I too was happy with myself, my family, and my work. But despite all the good news I share here, there were hard times as well especially when Sushma used to get seriously ill. Periodically she suffered from bouts of depression, and she needed hospitalization. During 1980s she became acutely diabetic and developed a hyperthyroid condition too. She had been suffering from health-related issues from the very beginning since we were married.

In 1995 we decided to immigrate to Canada and finally settled down in the beautiful Canadian capital city of Ottawa. My experience as a professional geologist in Canada has not been very positive because I could not find a suitable job for me here. Since I did not want to leave my academic life, I decided to do another Ph.D. at Carleton University because that paid me some money for the bare sustenance of my family. I could have earned significantly more if I had accepted a job in the retail sector which was available, but I decided not to. I had a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) funded post-doctoral research position for a while and taught off and on at Carleton and Concordia Universities, but there was nothing long-term. I accepted a very good job as a research scientist and professor at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) and spent very productive but lonely five years in Saudi Arabia. I left that very well-paying job because Sushma wanted me to come home. In 2013-2014 I worked as a senior palynologist and biostratigrapher with the Sirte Oil Company (formerly EXXON Libya) in Libya. This was my last job.

By the grace of God, both Anshuman and Anita did very well at their studies and turned to be top notch students. They won several prizes and awards during their school and college years. There was a positive sibling rivalry between them. Both completed their education, got jobs they wanted and got married. Anshuman lives in Ottawa, Canada with his wife Smita and their daughter Shreya and son Arjun. Anita lives with her husband Paresh and their daughter Diya and son Kavi in Seattle, USA. I am ever grateful to God for his blessings on all of us especially on my children. I pray for them every day.

In December 2001, Sushma went to Lucknow, India, and at her brother’s home where she slipped in the bathroom and broke her backbone a few months later (in April 2002). She has been physically disabled since then. I had to spend a lot of my life’s savings to save her life. She was in Lucknow for almost two and a half years moving from one hospital to the other. Finally, I managed to bring her back to Canada and since then she has been living at Laurier Manor Extendicare on Montreal Road, a nursing home in Ottawa. Since April 2002, our lives have been anything but normal. My solitary life without the company of my wife has been extremely hard on me.

Now let me get back to Manisha once more. During the last over forty years my life has been hectic, and all the time was spent in taking care of my family and career. During those years sweet memories of Manisha and our loving relationship remained dormant in my heart and mind. Although off and on my wife and I talked about her, and Sushma has always been eager to know more about Manisha and my relationship with her. Sushma has been a very kind-hearted, open-minded, and remarkable personality, and has always been sympathetic not only to Manisha but also to the Ramcharan family and even towards me. Hard to believe, isn’t it? In the meantime, Manisha’s brother and I kept in touch with each other and communicated through letters. Sushma played a good host to the Ramcharans during their two visits to our home in Jamaica. We deeply appreciated the goodwill gesture shown by Manisha’s brother, his wife and mother for their 2003 visit to Sushma in Lucknow when she was fighting for her life. We were extremely pleased when Manisha’s brother, his wife and daughter attended Anita’s wedding ceremony in June 2007, in Toronto. I am sure Manisha is very pleased wherever she is now to see my family’s relationship with her brother.

Now I am in my late sixties, and at this stage of my life I hold an Adjunct Professorship at Carleton University in Ottawa. This is more of a ceremonial position, and it doesn’t pay me any money. I happily live with my son and his family and have enough savings from my jobs in Saudi Arabia and Libya to be financially independent and comfortable. I still travel extensively and enjoy it immensely. Sometimes in late 2012 I decided that I should visit Trinidad once again because I was constantly invited by Manisha’s brother to visit him and Sushma kept reminding me that I should pay a long overdue visit to the Ramcharans in Trinidad.

Finally, I once again landed in Trinidad on January 17, 2013, and stayed with Ramcharan family at their magnificent new home. I was there close to three weeks and during this time I once again visited a lot of those places which I had seen in 1975 in the company of Manisha. Trinidad looked very different and more modern this time because of a lot of new buildings, roads and other positive changes in the cities and towns. Although places like the Maracas beach remain as beautiful as ever and luckily without any change in its natural surroundings. I visited Manisha’s home and spent a few hours there with her mother who still laments, and sheds tears almost daily in the memory of her beloved daughter. I spent some time in the front balcony of the house where Manisha and I had pledged to share our lives together as husband and wife.

But this time Trinidad felt very different because Manisha was not to be seen anywhere although I looked for her everywhere in this island, but she could not be seen anywhere. Finally, I had to visit her at her graveyard on the Crown Street Cemetery in Tacarigua and spent some time there with her brother reminiscing the past. I really had to act strong. I did not want anyone to see tears in my eyes. There I felt a sense of great loss. I wanted to converse in detail with the Ramcharan family about her; but after briefly talking about the last day of her life I felt that everyone here has moved on with their lives and resigned to the fact that she is no more alive. On the contrary after these past decades since she left me, I seem to be getting in a mental state as if Manisha died only yesterday. It seems to me that she has been enjoying a deep thirty-seven-year long slumber in my subconscious mind. The night after my visit to her graveyard I felt that she is restless and is forcing me to remember her and revisit our relationship. In that eagerness I found two photo albums at her Mama’s home with several of her photographs and some of the picture post cards that I had sent her from MSU. Meticulously I scanned all her photographs and stored the images in a pen drive and brought them to Ottawa.

I came back to Ottawa after a one-month long trip to the eastern Caribbean and Fort Lauderdale region of southern Florida in February 2013. By now Manisha is wide awake in my consciousness and I am forced to envision her and her life again. The harder I try to tell myself that I should concentrate on my studies, research, read books and get more involved in my family affairs and try not to remember her, she agitates me even harder. I just can’t take her out of my mind; the more I try the less I succeed and fail to do anything else. I got her three photographs framed, one along with me, and put them in my bedroom on my study table. That brought me some peace of mind. I began to work on the scanned photographs I brought from Trinidad and tried to make them appear better using Microsoft Office Picture Manager because most of them were old and in bad shape, either over or underexposed and some were out of focus. I took out all her letters, other papers, and an album of her photographs. I had kept these documents safe with me all these years. Since I understand the value of ‘writing your heart out’ as a therapy for emotional issues I decided to write a very personal history of my relationship with Manisha and titled it “The pen-pals.” This exercise brought a lot of mental peace to me. Members of my family and her brother read this story and they all were passionately moved. Then one night a thought hit my mind that I did not know anything about Manisha’s early life, her relationship with her siblings and parents, her social life, life in her school with her friends, etc. I had no idea about her life before the Ramcharan family moved into their new spacious home in 1970, her likes and dislikes, her hobbies, etc. I began to wonder how little I knew about a person with whom I had decided to share my life. This idea once again began to agitate me; thus, I decided to write a book on her life exclusively for my own satisfaction and peace of mind. I hope that one day this book would be read by my future generations.