My uncle Balwant

I have known Uncle Balwant (my father’s elder brother) since my childhood days in Bathinda. His occasional visits and long letters from exotic-sounding places in foreign countries during the 1950s and 1960s were special events as he brought to the family a whole new world —much larger and exciting — peopled by artistic and literary names, compared to what our small-town life of Bathinda offered.

Later, as a college student when I stayed with him in his cosy little Connaught Place house, he would take me for walk on Janpath where he subtly taught me to find beauty in common people. Like the Rajasthani and Gujarati women vendors who, squatted on the ground and using their seductive smiles, cheerfully bargained and sold embroidered bedcovers and colourfully printed tablecloths and scarves to fashionable customers.

Uncle Balwant was also, I truly feel, my first teacher in photography. During his short visits to Bathinda while I was growing up, he took family portraits with his double-lens Rolleiflex camera. These simple, straight-forward portraits were close-ups and intense with the presence of the person photographed. These made a lasting impression on me, and when I took up photography many years later, I found myself trying to emulate the way he had made those family portraits.

After I moved to New York in 1985, I was glad and to have my chance to host him as my guest. Although he had an emotional connection with the villages of Punjab, Uncle Balwant was essentially a city man. He loved New York and would come there every weekend during his teaching assignments as Visiting Professor of Indian Theatre in prestigious colleges like Vassar and Mount Holyoke, not far from the city. It was also during these visits that my relationship with him became more intimate as he shared with me his feelings and thoughts about life like a friend.

Among various forms of human relationship, friendship and romantic love in my view were the most important to him. But he sought human warmth in every encounter with people, even with a person he was meeting for the first time. Often he would hold your hand in intimacy, and you could not but feel the extraordinary warmth of his palms and be touched by his interest in you.

Uncle Balwant is known, some might say he is notorious, for his autobiographical novels and other writings on the theme of love and sex. Tales of passion, crime and revenge, whether in life or in literature, indeed interested him deeply.

In his conversation, he often quoted lines and whole paragraphs from his favourite authors such as Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, Strindberg, Chekhov, Maupassant and not least Saadat Hassan Manto. These authors inspired him to look into the human heart, including his own, mercilessly and write about tragedy as the inevitable outcome of our uncontrollable passions and desires.

Personally, I remember him most for his humility, warmth and extraordinary acts of generosity. Once I visited India with a woman friend, and in Delhi uncle Balwant let us stay in his tiny one-bedroom house in complete privacy while he shifted for two or three days to the house of one of his friends.

I will close with what were essentially his last words to me on the subject of love. In 2002, I visited him in Mumbai where he, having suffered from Alzheimer’s, was being taken care of by his son and my cousin Manu. His mind and memory mostly gone at this point, he still had flashes of clarity during which he re-emerged for a little while with his characteristic wit and wisdom and was his old charming self. During this visit, I could not wait to share with him the news that for the first time after losing my dear wife Marina to cancer in 1998, I had met and fallen in love with a beautiful woman. His eyes lit up instantly on hearing the news. He was visibly moved as he embraced me and said, “You are in love again, that is good, because without love, life is dry.”