GOOD BYE BUBLU!

Bublu and Tublu

What’s the hardest part of getting older? It’s not aches and wrinkles. Not even close. It is losing friends. But even though we can’t stop any of this from happening, we’re not powerless, we can share our grief and lighten it. Today I lost my childhood friend Bublu. She slept in her bed in Noida last night and slipped into her eternal sleep never to wake again!

Sashwati Das Gupta, as she was known to the world, was an invaluable member of my group of friends from our childhood days. As friends we spent the best days of our life together in Lucknow and then branched out all over the world to earn our livelihood. But our sacred roots kept us connected no matter where we were. Then one day our friend, the fittest among us, and a valiant soldier, Tinku (Col. Supratim Chatterjee), passed away. His parents were still around and it was not only untimely but extremely tragic. And then we lost Dulal (Dipankar Bhowmik), the very best specimen of human being, kind, considerate and always helpful. God needed him more than we did it seems and he left us after a brief illness. And today Bublu is gone.

After doing her schooling from Mount Carmel School and graduation from I.T. College she left home for Kolkata to teach children. She later moved to Kalimpong in North Bengal with her friend Debi, for a new job in a boarding school and later retired to a small flat in Noida. She was not exactly pink in health and needed a walker to get around but her mind was agile and creative as ever.

Our parents were friends and now that only a very few of their generation are around and we too live our own lives in different cities, the social media and the telephone are our only connections.

As we’re approaching the other end of life, the view is so much different from here. We don’t talk about how someday we’ll have to say goodbye. I suspect that’s because we can’t even bear to think about it. Yet, the inevitable sad truth is that time is marching on for all of us whether we like it or not. And we’re getting pushed to the front of the line.

On an intellectual level, I know that death is a very important, though terminal part of life, yet I struggle to reconcile this unfair, if inherent, consequence. In the second half of our lives, we experience more losses. These losses run deep, in part because the relationships are formed over a lifetime. Even though we take on different roles as we move through life, we never lose our initial identity as the “child of” or the “brother/sister of.” And I would include the “friend of.”With aging come the inevitable deaths of those we love. It’s hard but it’s also a time of opportunity to live, love and mourn as fully as we can.

Our childhood friends

I do not know about you, but childhood friends are a part of my family. Our parents came from both West Bengal and East Pakistan and chose Lucknow to be their home. They brought their colours, their flavours, their cuisine, their culture, their dresses, their festivals, their music, their dance and their civilization and even with meager resources at their disposal, established a whole new world! We were members of a large and extended family. In the loss of a childhood friend, I see the gradual disintegration of that world!

I should have been in Noida today to bid my final good bye but the virus scare and the lock-down is forcing us to stay indoors. There is no way her brother Tublu (Tanmay Das Gupta), her sister in law, Indrani and her niece Rim-jhim can make it either as no international flights are landing in Delhi. I guess this is destiny.

Good bye Bublu!!