THE LAST EMPEROR

THE LAST EMPEROR


He looked at the ceiling from his bed in the I.C U. He was totally bewildered and defenceless as soon as he was tucked in to the room with the diagnosis of heart attack.He was not a weak minded or meek sort of person.On the contrary he was a fiercely independent and strong willed man oozing tons of authority and power where ever he went. But age was catching him fast and the thousandth moon was not that far off.He ruled a kingdom of around twenty families with unquestioned authority and was a thorough dictator and his subjects shivered when he passed their way .But he was kind hearted though he never displayed any emotions other than rage .Smiling, he considered,a weakness of heart ,and he had forgotten that long ago . He was arrogance personified and consertive to the core.He was highly principled and fiercely protected his subjects that they couldn’t live with or without him .He was absolutely merciless with his enemies and decimated them with his tongue.He knew no fear and he never remembered the last time when he had bend his head to a human being leave alone god .All this was packed in a 40 k g and 5.2 frame .Heil,Hitler!
Now he was in a precarious position thousands of kms from his empire in a godforsaken place and that too in an I.C.U. WITH NOBODY TO COMMAND RATHER AT THE MERCY OF EVERY DICK AND HARRY. He was totally defenceless like a new born baby.Every hole in his body was invased by a tube and even his nostrils were covered by a mask through which flowed prana from a cylinder.Around him lay six other victims some moaning,some with sterturous breathing ,some totally silent with sedatives.The smell of death was omnipresent.The holy angels passed around in white skirts pricking needles all around The cardiac monitors emitting strange graphs and whirred .Yama and chithra gupta were keft at bay by the modern medicine at its best.
The scene just outside the icu was more interesting.The worried relatives sat in a bench near the icu gazing eagerly at the nurses and the doctors who hurriedly went in and out holding the six lives in their hands and pockets.Each time the icu door opened a white skirt would appear and dole out a long narrow sheet of paper and say” get this immediately ‘At this command the relative gallops off to the medical counter,shells out a few hundred rupee notes and runs back to the icu to hand over the sanjeevini injections to the sister who without a word hurries in to the icu , places the drugs in the table tray and goes back to her magazine for the latest THIS week for you . and dozes off
The chief god I mean the cardiologist would arrive sharply at around 10 a.m. surrounded by his harem of long white coats and skirts who followed him like black cats.His arrival was preceeded by a big burly orderlie with a ringing bell driving out all human presence in the vicinity.Even Yama and his godlings fled from the scene on hearing the bells. The chief would enter the I.C.U. and threw a benevolent glance at his victims and with his both hands behind his back he gave his victims their once in a life time chance of being with their god for a few moments.To some he gave them a chance to hold his hands to someone more fortunate he gave a pat on their shoulders.He listened to their hearts with a steth so intensively that the patient could feel their heart being examined inside out and the clots silently dissolving in the coronaries at his piercing gaze.They felt immortalized and thankfully shelled out 200bucks for each of his godly visits . which lasted about thirty minutes in the icu.The drama outside the icu was more amusing as the chief dog met the eager relatives outside for that days briefings which took more time than the rounds.The doc carefully measured each word that poured forth from his divine mouth.The words most commonly spelt out were “his condition at present is stable for the time being.we have to observe him for nother two days to assess his progress,his heart is failing but god is great,he may need further tests which may be a little costly,have you informed all his relatives though he may survive inspite of my best efforts,so and so like an astrologer or a meterology forecast. After the verbal diarrhoea he disappears giving the bystanders enough time to discuss the intricacies of the doc statements which leaves them in utter confusion .
Let us come back to our hero.He had aged nother five yrs in one single day and behaved like seventy yrs back,Gone was his confidence , his command , and lay drowned in self pity.His hopes for returning to his empire was fast dwindling and he saw death in its purity and shuddered for the first time in his lifeWhen his moaning became louder the nurse administered a tranquiliser and the old man fell half asleep and the time rolled back to his fifties when he was at his peak in the golden era of the GUPTAS
The empire was not built overnight nor did he inherit it as a birth right,rather he was banished from his home in his twenties for showing dissent to the monarch.It was this independent nature that made him toil from dawn to dusk which helped him build the present empire brick by brick.WORK WORK AND AGAIN WORK WAS his only mantra.He was good in accounts work and rose slowly and steadily. In this mad struggle for survival he lost sight of his famly of five children.In his total devotion to work and duty he had no time for expressing his love to his children whom he groomed as slaves.Moovies, music, sports and silly talk were totally banned.Enjoyments,merry making and even loud peels of laughter were met with a fierce gaze. .It was an undeclared emergency and fear was the key..The future emperors and princes just couldn’t cope up and there was no way of communication with the despot.Love and emotions they learned from other families.Meanwhile the empire grew and the emperor in his quest for making a living had already lost his I\LIFE.Nobody knew what he enjoyed during those tumultuous thirty years of existence other than work.Some claimed he was a master of ceremonies,not in the literal sense,but he definitely enjoyed conducting ceremonies of all sorts like marriages ,deaths, poonals and what not and he was eagerly sought after by his relatives for the same,which he conducted sincerely and thoroughly with unheard of meticulousness.He was also much sought after for his skills in marriage alliances, legal disputes,partitions and the like.Every body needed him for solving their problems and he obliged them,not because he loved them but more often he loved the authority temporarily vested upon him.Thus he became THEemperor.
To come back to the family, their problems and disputes were never addressed with the same intensity.The eldest prince who had inherited all the negative traits of his father fled and started to form his own mini kingdom in a far of land and became a pseudo rebel. The Emperoror who had nursed great dreams for his inheritors felt bitter and had the first failure in battle .He had accumulated so much but he now doubted whether it was worthwhile since he had lost almost 90% of his life in the bargain.He could love nobody and nobody loved him in turn .Now as age was catching up he needed love and peace of mind and his authority which was his trademark was also in question.The youngest prince was his last hope since he loved him and obeyed his commands implicitly. He seemed to be the correct choice for the throne.He highly mistrusted his eldest one since he openly defied him and was also independent like himself ,but unlike him he had eccentric views about family and relationships which he could never digest.He seemed to be too aloof.The second son he considered too emotional hence incompetent.All these things weighed heavily on his mind when he undertook that distant journey which landed him in the I.C.U.and at the mercy of the cardiologist and his sons and as he feared the worst his eldest son was on the way .He prayed for the first time in his life”oh, god save me from this hell and from my seemantha puthran ////’The Lord smiled”Your worst is not over.You are at present in the clutches of kandaka SANI///’

A CASE STUDY

Whenever a ‘ case’ is to be presented [ a sort of analysis of the patients history,symptoms signs and arriving at a provisional diagnosis],call Hariharan,my professor used to boast off me in the clinics.,long times back,when my so called grey matter functioned in its prime.Using the very same tools I have tried to analyse one peculiar rather queer family from Kollam for the last so many years with out much results.I have had the opportunity to observe many families with very close ties,but this particular one baffles me and my limited mind cannot just comprehend the sheer absurdity of the plasma physics of this relationship..The main obstacle to this study stems from the fact that the researcher is also a part of this family ,hence there is every chance of bias and ego clouding his analysis and hence he has to become or pretend to be an outsider,the so called ‘sakshi’ to weigh the case.
One of the established and convicted fact that is alleged against this family by all observers is that it’s a NOSTALGIC Family in the sense that it lives in the PAST.Another common charge levelled against it is that when two or more members of the family meet they start bragging and none can dare to close their mouths, when they fly back to Kollam through their tongues irritating the new entrants to their family or for that matter any third person. Its this unique aspect that is being the project that I am entrusted with for my Phd and my project has turned out to be inconclusive.Yet some major observations have been put forth and worth investigating. further.

I have taken the pains to be with the Family for about 10 yrs and residing with the same at Kollam in their Tharavadu house near Lakshminada observing it at close quarters just like some of the modern fiction writers.What struck me was the positive charge or the ambience emanating from that extra ordinary house a so called nest offering refuge to one and all .The second feature was the grihanathan a 55 yr old bald headed white dhoti clad benign yet tall for a cloth trader with mesmerizing eyes, one Ramaswami Iyer alias Chamu mama ,the great APPA and a family of three daughters and two sons to be precise and a toddler doing the clown act..The most signifying absence that any out sider could smell was the absence of the grihanatha the great AMMA[uvvammai]who left early leaving the whole family in the hands of Appa.It is this fact which I presume to be the most important factor in the further evolution of the family which made it Nostalgic.

Many in the family wont agree with me for putting forth such a hypothesis but I strongly feel that had she lived for nother 20 odd years this family would have been like any other family.,since what I have heard about her makes me believe that she would have been a strict disciplinarian ..So when Appa had to play both the roles,he could n’t ,since all he could give was total love and little or no discipline. With the result that all the children were left totally free to mould their lives and the galatta kootam was born about 50yrs back and there was get together everyday.Since there was no mother and Appa waslate coming home from his shop all the five ,mainly four,since the eldest daughter was married away to Cochin, clung together and supported each other and made merry,though they didn’t exploit their unfounded freedom and still grew up to be mature mainly because of the unconditional love of their father and his great confidence in his children..

But one of its side effects was this penchant for talking and these talks converted to story telling and even enacting scene by scene of any movie or books each one has seen or read late in to the nights until Appa came and called out “Konthe thoongaliya”.Then the session used to conclude singing the national anthem. These were the preludes to the get together.Another salient feature was their love for the children who were their centre of attraction .If you can listen closely , that house still reverberates with the laugher and cries though seldom , of around 8 or 9 toddlers all born and brought up not by the elders but by these teenaged two girls supplemented by the younger two brothers and they became mini fathers and mothers in their teens ofcourse under the great banyan tree of Appa . and soon the origin of the clan began when two generations bonded from their births. Now that time grew them all and soon they had their families to look after.But the initial attachments with their siblings as well as their children who played,pissed and bathed in their hands couldn’t be erased that easily.So what I am trying to convey is that suppose the MOTHER was there ,such a sort of relationship cannot be dreamt off and another possibility is that there would have been more rifts in between the brothers and sisters because of the universal partiality of the Mother how ever much you may disagree with me in this point . The family had to clung together both in times of crisis and in celebration or to perish.So infact it was a sort of survival instinct aided by the great compassion as practiced by the GUARDIAN ANGEL that the family came to the fore and NOSTALGIA was the only way to acknowledge their FAITH in HIM..

Let me rest my case and the judgement is yours.

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