A Kashmiri’s home in the Khasi Hills

Baldev Raj Bhatt had a tape recorder just like this one. Many a weekend morning of mine was spent arranging his audio cassettes on the shelves of the tall rack in the room that he shared with his wife — my nanima, mei-ieid, (maternal) grandmother.

Taal, Mann, Ishq, Ajnabee et al jostled for space with Noor Jehan and Suraiya, and with Biddu, Shaan and Sagarika. Jagjit-Chitra and Kashmiri albums received heavy rotation. This was all in addition to the ever-flowing stream of music from his Philips radios, his constant bedfellows.

It was some time in 1948 that Baldev Raj had found himself in Shillong. He’d been in Burma during the war, a nurse in the British army. After the Japanese surrender, he had meandered over the hills for a while before arriving in this town that, to some degree, reminded him of home.

Home was a village called Hawal, in what is today the South Kashmir district of Pulwama. It would take something special to keep him away from paradise, but the Khasi Hills weren’t half bad. So, he stayed. A few years later, at someone’s prodding, he married Kerilda Lyngdoh.

My mother’s parents were a permanent presence in my life till I left home at 18. Pitaji, as even his grandchildren called him, was the primary reason we spoke Hindi at home and ate mutton every Sunday. Love of music and cinema was also passed on. Even in his seventies, Pitaji caught all the new releases, always getting us chicken chow from Abba Restaurant, or jujubes, or cherries, on his way back home. His jhola never ran out of chocolate bars or candy; no wonder he was surrounded by kids whenever he stepped out.

Pitaji could get pretty filmi himself: he once ran off to Bombay in a fit of anger, trunk in tow. We had no idea where he was, and it was only after a telephone call from a ‘bhai’ a few days later that my father and an uncle could go and bring him back. Another time he got on a bus when he was supposed to be in bed recovering from an illness, and it came down to us, the kids of the household, to spot him in time and explain the situation to the conductor so we could take him back home.

Through Pitaji I felt a connectedness with Kashmir, although letters to him came from everywhere but. Militancy had scattered his siblings and their children across northern India: Jammu, Himachal, Chandigarh, Delhi, Ghaziabad. When Parkinson’s meant that he could no longer write back to them, he dictated to me his replies in English; in later years, on account of his failing eyesight, even the letters to him began arriving in English, so that I could read them out.

But the letters gradually became less frequent and practically petered out by the time I left Shillong. After that, I saw him every few months on visits home, and it was at the end of one such visit, as I landed in Delhi for the start of my second year at B-school, that Dad called me: my goodbye to Pitaji that morning was to be the last.

Baldev Raj Bhatt died ten years ago today. He had become a shadow of his former, vibrant self in the winter of his life, but, in a couple of months, wherever he is, I’m sure he’ll be celebrating his centenary in his signature style — with a glass of Doctor’s Triple Crown brandy and Suraiya on the radio.