I met him once, in a plane headed for Bangkok. I wonder how our conversation might have been different if I'd known I'd be writing his obituary three years later.
Valentine Shipley with his daughter, Diva. Pic/C Y Gopinath
If life is like a boat on a river, then we spend it like oarsmen, always facing backward. You can see where you've been but not where you're going.
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What 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 later?
Or 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 him?
There's 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 — avenoir.
Avenoir is what I feel when I remember Valentine Shipley, a man I never knew while he lived, and met only once, for a few hours.
There were several things you would not have guessed if you'd 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 India's legendary rock musicians. Or that he loved ghazals so much that he'd made an album joyously picking out famous Jagjit Singh songs on his electric guitar.
You wouldn't have guessed that his life revolved around his daughter and only child Diva, an imp with adoring cocker spaniel eyes.
Or that one of his life's 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 Gardens."
He died the next morning, aged 55.
Valentine 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, bunny-rabbit teeth and poodle eyes, thrilled by everything that happened around her father.
Shipley 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 life's highlights though little about him. For example, I had heard of the Valentine Van Shipley, his uncle, known to Bollywood old-timers as Van Shipley of Raj Kapoor's music troupe, a riveting violinist and the first Indian to play an electric guitar in Bollywood.
Van taught Val the love of music that became his lifeblood. He was the rhythm guitarist of Parikrama, one of India's legendary rock groups, before he joined the equally epoch-making Silk Route.
But 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 lives.
One of those dots was school. Like me, he was an alumnus of St Xavier's 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 priest.
When Bangkok arrived, we shook hands and he left with his sparkling daughter, and I never saw him or her again.
I 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 patient-centric care where every life matters".
However, it appeared Shipley could not be admitted into the hospital where every life matters. "He is gasping for breath, he may have COVID-19," the attending physician surmised. He might have better luck at Wockhardt Hospital, five minutes as the car flies.
By the time they reached the second hospital, his heartbeat was a flat line. It was over for Valentine Shipley.
In the strange intertwining of his life and mine is a lesson — 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 believe.
Here, 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 cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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