A legacy of magnificence

The writer with the late Rati Bartholomew

I've felt quite alone in my grief over the passing of Rati Bartholomew. I was in Dubai, visiting my family, when I read the news on her son, Pablo's Facebook page. I felt a jolt run through my body. I had always imagined I would be there to say good bye when she passed over. All I could do was call Pablo and offer my condolences. "You knew her," he told me. Indeed I did, and uniquely so, since after the stroke that had left one side of her body paralysed, she had chosen a life of relative reclusion. She lived in Gurugram, under the care of Pablo's brother, Robin and sister-in-law, Shallay. I met her at the inception of my relationship with Pablo, back in September 2008. It was an odd thing to be taken to meet someone's mother. She and I hit it off instantly. She was excited to know I was a writer. She offered me an effusive warmth which she only pretended to withdraw on occasions when there were great lapses in my meetings with her, if I had let too much time gather between our visits.

Since I heard the news I have been struggling to reconstruct our shared memories. I was among few people from the world outside her immediate family that she allowed into her everyday mundane. I was always aware it was a gift… she was trusting me with her fragility, letting me in on her body's frailty and its resilience. Our bond grew in sacredness because I was always patient with her as she framed her sentences, her speech irrevocably affected by the stroke. She had moments of relative lucidity, when she strung coherent words, and, more frequently, moments of aphasia, when formulating sentences felt challenging. Through our conversations I learned to listen better, to offer her time and the confidence to begin or complete a thought, to speak slowly but never in any manner that belittled her intelligence or made her seem disabled. Our intimacy grew to the point that when I arrived with Pablo to see her, he and I would play a little game. He would make me wait outside, in the corridor, while he entered her room alone. She would express happiness at seeing him, but would immediately ask for me. Pablo would make some excuse for my alleged absence, which was my cue to enter. Her face would subsequently light up. I would kiss her soft, freckled cheeks and she would clasp my hands. If I hadn't come to see her in a long time she would play a game with me, where she snubbed me for a few minutes until I had appeased her with my apologetic kisses. I often went alone to see her. We would have lunch together and spend the afternoon in each other's company. It was so easy for us to simply be in each other's presence without feeling the need to fill the silences.

Rati continued to live an intellectual life, even if she no longer actively participated in public discourse. Every morning she would make watercolour drawings in a large book, and she sometimes let me see them. Within the pages were shapes and colours resembling people and things, fragments of her still sharp intelligence and imagination. She watched films, read books, magazines, followed every printed review of her son's exhibitions, and followed the lives and careers of her ex-students. For the first few years of our relationship she asked me on each visit how my book was progressing, until one day, in 2016, I finally went over with a published copy. I delighted in giving her a copy of every important publication in which I had been published, or that featured my writing, and she always read each piece diligently, sometimes calling me over the phone to tell me how much she enjoyed it. She was nurturing of me in ways I hadn't imagined I needed.

In her home I had access to all her past selves… there was, in the living room, a painting of her made by a young Biren De, while her own room was studded with photographs made by her husband, Richard, in which he portrayed her in candid moments, reading, sleeping, nursing her children, or draping her sari. I got this sense of someone who had a wild aura about her, who could draw people towards her magnetically, through the lure of her indomitable spirit. I had the privilege, once, of cataloguing her archive of writing on theatre and found, in her files, all her published reviews and op-eds, alongside other paraphernalia, all of it bearing evidence to a life so lustrously lived, a radically inclusive political mind, and a feminist spirit that continually traversed borders in order to seek alliances and solidarities. She was already a legend. For instance, I remember reading Mimlu Sen's brilliant memoir, Baulsphere and seeing Rati's name in the dedication. I remember once meeting Githa Hariharan when she came to meet Rati, who had had an influence on her life, too. One of my most cherished friends in Dhaka, Khushi Kabir, was Rati's friend from their theatre activist days. Another dear friend in Goa, Mario Couto, also knew Rati from their teaching days in Delhi University. I have been so privileged to have inhabited the aura of Rati's feminist glow, to count myself among the many legacies she leaves behind in the form of people.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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