In Memoriam

Memory jumpstarts at the oddest of times. Today in Labour Law class, I thought of my grandfather for no earthly reason whatsoever. And I remembered a story he would always tell me… about a swami and a snake and how the latter eventually became a reformed character… unfortunately, then as now, the world hadn’t much use for a reformed anything, let alone a snake, and so people threw stones at him and beat him with sticks… and when the snake went to the swami to tell him that the swami had it all wrong with his rest-in-peace-thingummy, this chap tells the reptile-wonder that he had told him to stop biting, and not hissing…
Now of course I must have been a rather obtuse kid to have fallen for this tale… remarkably ignorant of poststructural and neocolonial streams of thought, not to say Marxist critiques, deconstructionism or even good ol’ feminist jurisprudence… at all times that this tale got told… and I remember making sure that it did get told quite often… I lapped it up like a camel readying for a two-month-trek into Havana…

But that is not what I thought of today… I thought today of the way grandfather would hiss… technically there were only two places one could logically work the hiss in – the scene where the snake first meets the swami and the place where the swami tells the snake to hiss… but I would desire a constant background refrain of hisses in various pitches… mostly in the wrong places and in the wrong key… a hiss when the swami met the villagers, a hiss when the weather changed, a hiss in the middle of quite, quite different stories… sometimes even while having lunch I’d walk up to him and ask him to hiss… and he would… the something-year old man would hiss in a high or low key for his granddaughter… and before today, I never quite comprehended the sheer sumptuousness of the scene…

Like I said… I must have been a very obtuse kid.