Tamuly JunG
......
It
is often assumed, may be wrongly, that in order to assert one’s existence,
it is necessary to recount the places in which we are or were entrenched:
the place where we were born, where we grew up, studied, worked and
founded a family. Have we not always been told that to live is to
settle down? Some people may even decide about the place where they
want to die or the very spot where they wish to lie down for their
eternal rest.
It seems so essential to put down one’s roots, and by doing so, acquire a sense of permanence and solidity, a feeling of belonging in a reality that, on the other hand, is so elusive that it always escapes us. But our existence comes to an end. Then, as the French writer Andre Marlaux has put it, ‘Death transforms life into destiny.’ Those who survive try to recall all the ‘whens’ and ‘wheres’ of the deceased, as if this poor recollection of the landmarks of a life could again give some consistency to what once was and is no more.
Writing today about Aroon’s life, retracing his past, is an endeavour to look for him in all these places where he once stayed, and somehow, try to recreate his living presence.
When and where
In 1991, Aroon took his retirement, while Annette taught at the University of Tours (France). But the home base during all those years had been Gerstheim, a small village, 25 kilometres south of Strasbourg, where a house had been built in 1983, a house which was always the meeting point of friends and family members, whenever the Tamulys had a chance to rest a while between their long journeys around the globe. It was also in this same home, in Gerstheim, that Aroon fell sick in 1993 and after five years of ill health, looked after by his wife who had taken early retirement, finally died on 7 October 1998. His ashes were brought back to India to be immersed in the Ganges in Haridwar and the Brahmaputra, in Guwahati, in 1999.
Life winds like a river….
Having thus recounted Aroon’s whereabouts, I have indeed transformed
his life into destiny. But, by doing so, I have sketched a lifeless
map of facts and places to convey nothing of Aroon’s love for life,
his energy, his openness, his curiosity towards places and people,
his perpetual search for knowledge and understanding. How could those
dry and petrified, render the way he was attuned to the places where
he stayed, how they transformed and enriched his own personality and
shaped his existence? His intelligence and warmth, his acute
sense of observation and humour allowed him to shape people’s feelings
and interests and, at the same time transcend them by taking distances
and making allowances.
It is said all civilizations develop on the bank
of rivers. In a similar way, I think that what we are is not only
shaped by our roots in certain places, but is moulded by the rivers
that we come across. Does not life itself wind along like a river? Think
of the fresh spring of childhood when nothing seems to exist but joy,
game and laughter! Then comes the impetuous stream of youth, with
its passions, love and ambitions. Life goes on with its twists and
turns. There are times when one feels the mighty and invigorating
flow of happiness and success, times when we seem to easily control
the flux and tame it according to our will. There are periods when
the course of things seems slow and tedious, times also of desperate
flooding when we are helplessly carried along by forces beyond our
control. Once, some 3 years back walking along the Rhine, Aroon and
myself started reflecting- as we often did- about the passing of life.
We quoted a verse by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘Panta rei’
‘everything flows’ and ‘ you can never take twice a bath in a river
because the water that flows in it, is never the same.’ Little did
we realize that Aroon was soon to join the ultimate flow of life and
death, and that his earthly remains would be scattered partly in the
Ganges, and the Brahmaputra partly in the Rhine, to join the great
oceans.
Beyond all what water symbolizes, beyond all the philosophical thoughts
that it may inspire, I must say that Aroon had a fascination for rivers.
During the last months of his life, although he was extremely weak,
withdrawn and mostly silent, he still liked to speak about all the
rivers he had seen and of which he kept a vivid memory. He told me
about the Dhansiri river and the bend it makes in Golaghat. It was
on the Dhansiri river that Aroon, a small awe-stricken child, in the
dim light of dusk experienced his first religious feelings when he
witnessed the ceremonies of immersion of Mother Durga and Goddess
Kali in the river. He remembered how, as a young schoolboy, he used
to go with his friends to the then newly-built bridge slightly outside
Golaghat. It was so exciting to cross it and wonder at people enjoying
the cool riverbank, doing their laundry or taking a ritual bath. It
was all there, right on the river: the source of life and also the
mysterious sign that there was something beyond and above. Aroon’s
thoughts bought him back also to the Kolong river which separates
Nagaon and Haiborgaon (Assam) where his father was born. Kolong was
not yet polluted at that time and with his friends, he used to take
bath in the river, carefully avoiding the deep and the dangerous middle
of the bed. Later, he said, he felt so sorry to see the river invaded
by ‘meteka’, the aquatic plants that slowly choked the flowing water.
So the river of his youth was already awakening Aroon’s inquisitive
mind to the problem of water pollution that was later in his life
as an oceanographer and limnologist, to become his main center of
interest.
But with the mixed feelings of young age, water appeared both as a
source of fun and good time and as a danger. When crossing the bridge
by train in upper Assam, the tumultuous flow of the Dihang river always
filled Aroon with fear, as if some life threatening force was lurking
in its water. But Aroon was no coward and, always the explorer, he
nearly drowned once in a pond in a remote place where his father stayed
as a forest officer. Thinking back about all the anecdotes that he
recalled, I realize how strange and how strong were Aroon’s bonds
with rivers and waters. As a young man, crossing a bridge over the
Kakajan, between Jorhat and Golaghat in a jeep, he was suddenly ejected
from the vehicle driven by his friend and fell right on a rock in
the middle of the river. He was miraculously saved and could crawl
out of the water, although he remained unconscious for quite a while.
Was there really some evil and destructive force that bought him several
times near death? In his horoscope, the danger coming from water was
clearly mentioned… Much later, in 1968, while on a scientific cruise
on the USN Eltanine, sailing towards Antarctica, Aroon was again about
to loose his life. In the bitter cold of the Antarctic night he had
to go out to take some scientific measurements. He slipped on the
icy upper-deck and fell but could only at the last minute hold on
the rail. Who would have noticed, in the middle of the night, that
a man had fallen overboard in a water so cold that it would have killed
him anyway within minutes?
Brahmaputra, Ganges, Rhine, Orinoco St Lawrence, Mississippi, ‘The
Ole Man River’, Rio Grande, to name but a few, formed like a garland
around which Aroon’s life winded. They taught him the power and beauty
of nature: its gentleness and its violence, the impermanence of things
and the necessity for each of us to not to grasp at things but rather
to let them go.
Rivers had also the magical power of opening the sluice of Aroon’s
poetic talent. Among all the poems he wrote, many of them were dedicated
to rivers. The following verses were written in Tucupita, a small
town in Venezuela, in March 1973. They seem somehow to sum up Aroon’s
rich and wonderful life journey ‘to nowhere and yet to everywhere’.






