Opinion My good friend Gautam

The epicentre of this group was a man of small build, with wide eyes and a pointed beard. His hostel room — known by all as “1/31 International” — was where everyone gathered. That “everyone” also included anyone who did not know where to go. That is where writers and artists from other towns of Punjab stayed for days or weeks as they came visiting Chandigarh. That room was full of books and ideas and smoke from constantly lit cigarettes.

That man died the other day, all alone in a rented flat in Delhi. The news spread quickly. Everyone from those olden days began to call one another over phone. Facebook posts carried his pictures and glowing tributes. But nobody seemed to know how he died and when.

I have been struggling these last couple of days to make some sense of the life, and death, of that man, my friend, Satya P Gautam. He had recently retired as a professor of philosophy from JNU. He had earlier taught at Panjab University and served as the vice-chancellor of a university in western Uttar Pradesh. Loved by students, respected by peers, he was a man of considerable professional accomplishment. He had published and travelled widely.

In the last few years, he would often call me, as I discovered he did almost every other friend. These were inordinately long calls. His voiced somewhat slurred, he would recall the old days of camaraderie. He had an exceptionally vivid memory of things once experienced and lived. He had started writing poetry and read out those poems. He would tell me how he valued our friendship even though we had had our differences, jealousies and quarrels. He would say, we must get together, rekindle our friendships. I would tell him to return to Chandigarh, now that he had retired. I told him that Chandigarh is where he belonged. I told him of how his old friends, some of whom were still alive and around, too would want him to return.

He would often agree to return “soon”. At other times, he said he would go back to his ancestral home in Punjab. Every now and then, he talked of his compulsions to stay back in Delhi, for he still had some research students and their theses were not yet completed, or how he must help the university department he had founded and shaped stay the course.

In the end, he died without having made up his mind.

I think that, both in his life and death, Gautam was not just a man but a mirror, a concave mirror that gathered and reflected the restless energies of a period that dissipated over time.

The 1970s were a mélange of the hopes generated by a progressive nationalism and Nehruvian optimism on the one hand, and frustration with how little had been delivered on the promises. With the waning of the Naxal movement, it was also the period of sober reassessment of radical methods of social change. The nation stood at a crossroads. We all stood at a crossroads. It was a period of restlessness, experimentation and even a certain recklessness.

It was not yet a period of disillusionment, cynicism or opportunistic careerism.
The experimentation lay in what we thought and did as a microcosm of our times. We broke taboos and lived unconventional lives. Gautam, born to a Punjabi Brahmin family, deliberately sported a long beard but no moustache, and delighted in being taken for a Muslim. Being a Muslim was not yet anathema. A heterosexual man, he regaled us with stories of how he and our poet friend, Amitoj, were seen as gays by confused girl friends. He would often pick up a bag and disappear for days, and never reveal on his return where he had been.

Those times changed. Many in the group who did not or could not adapt to the change fell silent or began to die from strange afflictions and diseases. But many also went on to make successful careers. Gautam was one of them, I am another.

In his death, a part of me has died, even though his dilemmas remain mine for as long as I remain alive.