TO RAJA...WHO LIVES ON

This day of seventh September, came as a rude shock, the sad news of Raja's death just refuses to sink in...of all people Raja.. I still can’t come to terms with the news. In the course of one’s life one comes across so many people and few leave their mark indelibly on your life. I daresay Raja was one such person. I guess his parents must have had some revelation when he was born to have named him Rajaram. I believe no other name could possibly describe such a person. He was truly Rajaram, a man of immense self respect and honesty. In a world which defines success in terms of your bank balance, position and power he reaffirmed your faith in humanity with his humility and simplicity. He was one person I got pretty close to during our probation days, this bonding getting further reinforced when we were posted together as AAG’s in Nagpur. In my entire life I have never come across any person who was so selfless and ‘giving’. A man who was always there for you when you needed him, always giving and never expecting anything in return. He started his career as a journalist and his knowledge of Marathi literature was incredible. A voracious reader, I can still picture him with a book in his hand lying in his bed in his strange posture, reading, with one hand supporting his book and the other supporting is head (he never used a pillow to support his head while reading) a posture I jokingly called ‘kitabasan’. Though his wrote intermittently after joining the IAAD, his articles that he had published in various journals before joining the service revealed the sharp and incisive intellect of the man, though I subjected him frequently to the torture of reading it aloud and translating it in Hindi for me.
Today the days spent with him have all started coming back to me and a few of them describe the person that he was, they were so Raja like, if I may use that word. Once some of us got embroiled in a brawl and when some guys out there with lathis attacked us, he took all the lathi blows on his forearm to protect one of us with a fractured arm. In the process he suffered major bruises, but when we asked him, ‘Chot zyada laga kya?, he said in his characteristic style, ‘Arre chalta hai yaar..usko lagta toh zyada problem ho jaata’. Ever ready to help, he was always there for you when you needed him. In Nagpur nine of our batch-mates from different services were posted and his house had become a virtual transit guest house for our batch-mates, who stayed at his place for months before they managed to get the accommodation of their own. He loved partying with his close circle of friends and we extracted parties from him at the drop of a hat. Once there was this small table which he had got made in Nagpur and I said, ‘Mein isse tumse kharid raha hoon yaar..yeh lo 150 rupaiya’. He said, ‘Theek hai’, De diya tumko'. I shot back, ‘Ab 150 rupiya kama liye ho, party do’, and he laughed and said, ‘Theek hai yaar, party karte hein’..and so there it was, he virtually gifted me that table.
He had a fantastic sense of humour and devil may care attitude to life. I still remember the first day when he bought his mobike and so we started on this drive around Nagpur..lo and behold we were jumping one red light after the other..I said ‘Marwayoge kya, red light kahe jump kar rahe ho?’, he said, ‘Yaar batao, iska brake kaise lagta hai?’, before any disaster could strike, we managed to locate the brakes we were back sahi salamat. There was never a dull moment when he was around, the songs that both of us sang together distorting their lyrics and tunes drumming the ‘baltis’ and tables, the innumerable arguments about totally nonsensical stuff, the whole night long drinking binges and the hangovers that followed. Next morning the same standard refrain,"S**le fat gayi hai yaar, ab aage se s**la daru choona nahin hai yaar", a promise which was never meant to be kept...I can go on and on..
Post Nagpur we kept in touch, calling each other off and on. Chatting with him, time just flew. The last chat that I had with him was a couple of months back and I could never foresee that it would be the last chat we would have.
Today Raja, if you are out there somewhere, ‘THANKS’ for everything, something which I should have said long ago, but better late than never…I am again distorting a filmy dialogue (like we did so often), “Raja mara nahin…Raja marte nahin”