A little avenoir with Val Shipley, RIP

If life is like a boat on a river then we spend it like oarsmen always facing backward You can see where youve been but not where youre goingWhat if you could see your memories coming long before you actually reached them What if you could know that a certain moment was the happiest you would ever be Or that a certain face in the crowd would somehow be the one whose blood would save your life 30 years laterOr that the ebullient stranger you traded emails with would be paralysed by a stroke a month later and never walk again Would your conversation have been different if you had known this when you met himTheres a word for the strange wistfulness of revisiting a past moment after you know its future and reliving it in the new light of foreknowledge mdash avenoirAvenoir is what I feel when I remember Valentine Shipley a man I never knew while he lived and met only once for a few hoursThere were several things you would not have guessed if youd just passed him on the street Or bumped into him in a plane as I did For example it would never have crossed your mind that this swarthy man with a goatee was one of Indias legendary rock musicians Or that he loved ghazals so much that hed made an album joyously picking out famous Jagjit Singh songs on his electric guitarYou wouldnt have guessed that his life revolved around his daughter and only child Diva an imp with adoring cocker spaniel eyesOr that one of his lifes dreams was to perform in New York In a Facebook interview on December 20 a week ago he said When this COVID gets over I want to play at Madison Square GardensHe died the next morning aged 55Valentine Shipley was really his name and he was unavoidable not just because he was sitting next to me in the plane headed for Bangkok but also because of an unfettered smile all teeth and goodwill that was impossible to ignore Next to him in the window seat sat his little girl Diva 11 years old back then bunnyrabbit teeth and poodle eyes thrilled by everything that happened around her fatherShipley and I are parallel lines and there is a law that says we should never have met But in life unlike geometry parallel lines sometimes meet in a moment of tangency It turned out that I knew much about his lifes highlights though little about him For example I had heard of the Valentine Van Shipley his uncle known to Bollywood oldtimers as Van Shipley of Raj Kapoors music troupe a riveting violinist and the first Indian to play an electric guitar in BollywoodVan taught Val the love of music that became his lifeblood He was the rhythm guitarist of Parikrama one of Indias legendary rock groups before he joined the equally epochmaking Silk RouteBut in the eulogies to Valentine Shipley the man you see is the laughing affable giant who knew how to reach out to a stranger in a plane and join the dots between their two livesOne of those dots was school Like me he was an alumnus of St Xaviers School New Delhi He completed school in 1983 14 years after I did but in a moment of recognition I knew that his mind must have had the same learned irreverence and audacity to ask impossible and difficult questions that you only learn from a Jesuit priestWhen Bangkok arrived we shook hands and he left with his sparkling daughter and I never saw him or her againI spoke to Diva last week Her father had been feeling uneasy all evening on December 20 When he woke next morning feeling no better and not breathing very well he knew he needed a doctor urgently A friend rushed him over to Sengupta Hospital and Research Institute whose website describes it as an organic entity that offers transparent patientcentric care where every life mattersHowever it appeared Shipley could not be admitted into the hospital where every life matters He is gasping for breath he may have COVID19 the attending physician surmised He might have better luck at Wockhardt Hospital five minutes as the car fliesBy the time they reached the second hospital his heartbeat was a flat line It was over for Valentine ShipleyIn the strange intertwining of his life and mine is a lesson mdash meet each new face with a sense of avenoir We are connected in more ways than we suspect And each one of us is more fragile than we believeHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paper