Jiggery-pokery

 

My middle uncle was mamma's boy and a bundle of nerves. He was also a klepto born as much from curiosity as from insecurity.

When our paternal aunt used to visit Kolkata she brought along soaps, beverages, chips, chocolates, and the likes to distribute to her in-laws and for her personal use. 

Many soaps, creams and lotions, perfumes, coins, and such things went missing. They were eventually found behind an old radiogram kept as a showpiece of our drawing-room. 

He couldn't resist the urge to steal items for the sake of stealing, not because he needs or want the items.

Sometimes things of no value from pieces of jewelry, to knick-knacks, but he never used them. The funniest thing is that even cold drink bottle caps were found in his room! 

Megan Fox, Farah Fawcett, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Winona Ryder are among the celebrities who suffer from kleptomania.

People with kleptomania often have other mental disorders as well. The most common are depression, anxiety, eating disorders but his parents or siblings didn't understand and never took him to a doctor. The child is a responsibility. Thought and character are one, and as a character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state. Shouting and punishing don't help, love, understanding, and support do.

He was a beefy man who had a bald crown. No one was very pleased with him because he loitered about, without any purpose in life and he clung to the lamest of reasons for doing nothing giving the sorriest of excuses to give a meaning or to justify his existence. 

He was fooled around with disreputable friends, talked high but never put his words to the effect. 

I heard that Grandpa sent him to various renowned schools in and around Kolkata, but he ran away or eloped classes by making shameless fabricated excuses like “sister had died”. 

Grandpa considered him the problem child, but I must say here that he was mistaken. Instead of understanding his diseased mind and treating him properly, everyone neglected him. 

The cliché that someone making up shameless false excuses is a bad person is very inaccurate. He was very kind to me and when I was little, I used to lie beside him in his room after lunch and he used to tell stories of 'Frog Prince’ and ‘Cinderella’, ’Rapunzel” and all until Mum called me. It was back then that I was introduced to the world of fantastic stories. He wasn't any Einstein or Nehru, but he had a simple mind and since he was a bachelor, he told his friends and almost every shopkeeper in the Gariahat market that if he ever had children, they would be like me and my brother. 

He had kidney disease. His youngest brother, the foxy one of the family, after the death of Grandpa, took him to a filthy nursing home in a very poor locality and got a radical nephrectomy done. His entire kidney was taken out but he withstood it. 

The stratagem was foiled because fate stood by my middle uncle to squelch out the carefully planned method to shove him out of his way. 

When multiple tumors were detected which compressed and displaced vital vessels and I needed a liver transplant, as the news of my catastrophic illness reached him, he hammered on our door and asked seriously with wrinkled brows,

“Mou has been struck with a serious illness and doctors have given her only six weeks! Her treatment involves a lot of money is it true?” Mou is my pet name. My mother nodded in acquiescence. He stormed out saying in his loud voice “When her grandpa has left so much why should she suffer? I'll be talking to her grandma right now.”

We felt a little relieved, although a feeling of trepidation hung in the air. We still couldn't feel the laugh and have a cheery mood because of the malaise hanging in the air. Yet some amount of confidence the half-baked impact of his words had certainly given. 

The next day, early in the morning we had an interview with NDTV for a bit of fundraising and awareness of the rare disease. In those days I was perhaps the first case of such a peculiar disease diagnosed in India. When we were setting out for the place where the interview was supposed to be held with Dr. Shibajyoti Ghosh the doorbell rang violently. It was my paternal aunt who came and informed us that my middle uncle had a stroke last night and to admit him to a nursing home they asked for some money from my father. Tears came to my father's eyes, he did not have money to save his daughter's life and they were asking money from him to save his brother! His siblings always occupied a fond spot in his heart, and he gave them the money. 

We viscerally felt something was wrong, something nasty and unpleasant was going on. I squirmed uneasily. After we returned from the interview my father took the address of the nursing home and went to see how his brother was doing. 

He was aghast at the spectacle of his brother gasping with two pipes of oxygen thrust inside his nostrils in a maternity nursing home.No other action was taken to revive him. He didn't survive this time. He was blinked out of existence and even now, several years hence it is unsettling to think about the way he was thrust into eternal annihilation. I must say here that my middle uncle got his obsequies from a jar of ten-rupee coins which he had collected over the years. It was found in his room when my paternal aunt started looking for stuff he had gathered over the years but in my father’s case, even the simplest obsequies were not planned by fate. 

A few neighbors had to defray the burning and sprinkling of his ashes in the Yamuna river.

 Perhaps if my middle uncle was alive, I wouldn't have to see these days of unremitting misery. Sometimes I am susceptible to thinking about possibilities and sometimes I think like mulling over what-ifs and could-have-beens.

Later from the maids who worked with them, we got to know that my middle uncle had a stroke at around ten o'clock at night and he was kept thus until the next day when his bladder and bowels gave way. My father mused 

“And then he was put in a maternity nursing home and they are not equipped to deal with a cardiac patient!” 

Why didn't they tell him? His office had tie-ups with few good hospitals in Kolkata; he could have saved him or at least tried to do so. After he passed away the dead body wasn't brought to the house but was taken straight to the crematorium. My father wondered, 

 “Was it a cunning plan to shove him out of the way? But why? So that he doesn't insist that the inheritance is given to my daughter for her treatment?”

So calm, so happy was my time

There is no pardon for his heedless sin

Where is miraculous extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

With belief, ambition, and attempt, I shall win!

He admired the sweetness, how full of joy till the doom!!!

Death blasted all. Death suddenly overthrew

His heedless vice knew no bounds

Present, Past, and future he knew

His calmness after he slew still astounds

He thought he was being crafty as a fox in the way he had been skimming money from what dadu left, but Karma caught up with him eventually.

Foxes and openly criminals of a prestigious family gain wealth by activities like every manner of swindling, forgery, larceny, robbery, thievery, trickery, jiggery-pokery, hanky-panky, plundering, looting, sacking, misappropriation, spoliation and embezzlement.