Tithi, my strong but silent friend, is now still forever

Her trademark smile: 18.6.24

A tribute to my dear friend Tithi (Monjari Barooah) who passed on the 3rd July 2025, after a 14-month struggle with a deadly disease.
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Childhood: a carefree romp that didn’t last

A random account of some events of my childhood... I began to write this piece because I wanted to send it to Teresa Rahman as part of her series on childhood memories in the Thumprint Northeast. But it turned out to be a very therapeutic exercise as well as the news of the horrible aircraft disaster in Ahmedabad came in. It might sound self-indulgent but it kept me from sinking... 

My childhood was mostly happy, and spent mainly at three places, Guwahati, Delhi and Shillong. I was born in Delhi as my mother, Renuka Devi Barkataki, was a young parliamentarian at that time. But whenever my mother needed to go anywhere, since my absentminded and rather impractical father, Munin Barkotoki, could not be trusted with such things, I was left with my aunt, my Jethima, in Shillong, who ran a full house with six kids of her own. The first time I was left there I was barely a few months old – Ma was selected to be part of a parliamentary delegation to the US. She was gone for more than a month.  When she returned, I did not recognize my mother anymore and refused to go back with her. I am told I was put in the care of two very nice kongs, first the very pretty Kong Cross and after her Kong Cheni, but I have no real memory of them. 

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Reckoning with death

Two deaths in the last days have shaken me up. The first was the death of my teacher from Gauhati University Professor B.P. Chetiya and then a day later Biren Datta Sir's baideo. I was not in direct contact with either of them in recent times. They were both ailing for some time. So the deaths were not unexpected. But still these two deaths have affected me in ways that I cannot explain at the moment. Let me try to put the facts down here and try to understand what happened.
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Baas Terwiel on Nirmal Prabha Bordoloi

My Guru in Göttingen, Baas Terwiel's translation of six poems by Nirmalprabha Bordoloi, along with a short Introductory Note. The text that Baas wrote in 1980 to contextualize the poems is a page from the cultural history of Assam and was meant as an introduction to Assam and its rich literature, as well as to the poet Dr. Bordoloi, for foreign readers of that time. The entire text is published below with the six translated poems embedded in it, without any alteration, along with a photo of the Bordoloi family that Baas had taken then. 

A version of this piece appeared in the Thumbprint Magazine:

https://thumbprintmag.in/single_post.php?id=607

[The Assamese originals of the last four poems are also given (thanks to another poet Kushal Dutta). I will be grateful if some reader can give me the originals of the first two.]

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Chatting with Jayantada

Excerpts from my Whatsapp conversations with Jayantadada since the 2020 Covid lockdown. 

Photo taken by Bisheshwar Das in Jayantada's home 'Chandrabhaga' in Tinkonia Bagicha, Cuttack on 9th April 2023, my last meeting with Jayantada.

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Stephan's 75th birthday message

It was a little over four years ago when Stephan and I spent some days trying to write a 75th birthday message that Stephan wanted to send out to his friends. It was also supposed to serve as a kind of farewell letter because he wanted to also announce in that letter that he was in the terminal stages of pancreatic cancer. He wanted to celebrate his platinum birthday in Bremen, but his health did not permit anything more than a small celebration on Saturday, 18th May, 2019 in Volkach. Today he would have celebrated another birthday, if pancreatic cancer had not snatched him away from us on the 26th July 2019, not even three months after his 75th birthday.  Here is the letter he wrote and a few photos from that last birthday celebration. He never got to host the summer garden party that he wanted to organise in Volkach in July that year (that he mentions in the letter).  But we did organise a memorial event in his memory on the 10th August that year in that very garden in Volkach. 

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They don't come any fairer!

I had not finished saying farewell to my lovely friend Srutimala Duara when disaster struck again, and this time took away from us our beloved Deepika Phukan baideo. If the too early departure of a bright, beautiful and vivacious human being that Sruti was has stunned and numbed me, Deepika Baideo's going was perhaps less unexpected but has left me feeling like an orphan, all over again.  And now, as I sit at my desk trying to make sense of these goings, I understand more clearly than ever before our transience in this world we temporarily inhabit. Nobody is a survivor, Sruti had rightly said, for in the end nobody will survive the condition of being alive. 

 But then why is it so hard to say goodbye?

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Too many deaths

There has been too many deaths these last months of people who I was close to -- it began with Neelda's going last October. Then  Nilmoni Phukan khura in January, followed by Srutimala Duara, and Deepika Phukan in February and March... among many others...Some were sick and ailing, some were old and frail, but still...

Why is it so hard to say goodbye?

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Sunflowers will always remind me of you

My tribute to my sister-in-law Inez Maria Ruscheweyh who passed away in Bremen on the 18th April 2022 at the age of 82 years.

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Πeter Neumann is no more...

Peter M. Neumann liked to spell his name with a Π (the Greek letter Pi). He preferred to call himself a plain Mr. and not Dr.  He was a proud recipient of the OBE in 2008 for his contributions to Mathematics. I had started writing this piece on the 16th Dec. 2020 while trying to order by thoughts to send him a birthday greeting for his 80th birthday on the 28th December; but his death on the 18th Dec. from Covid has forced me to turn it into an obit, my homage to the man who I considered to be my father, in the years after the death of my real father. 

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IIT Guwahati and mathematics research

This is a piece I wrote for the Alumni meet of Ph.D. students of the Department of Mathematics of IIT Guwahati to be held in Sept. 2020. More than looking back at my time at IITG from 1995 to 2003, I also reflect on the purpose of research and what I believe is important for research in mathematics in the future. 

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Not wanting to let her go...

On 14^th August 2020 it will be three years since my mother, Renuka Devi Barkataki, left us, suddenly, quietly, without bothering anybody. I had arrived at the hospital straight from the airport that hot summer afternoon in 2017 only to find her hardened mortal remains.  In the midst of the bustle, it had suddenly felt very cold and lonely. That feeling has not gone away. There have also been other major disasters in my life since, but somehow I am still not finished with Ma’s going yet.  That house in Panchabati that used to buzz with activity all the time mourned her for a while, before killing itself. Now it has transformed itself into a bad-tempered, unhappy ghost – shrouded over, musty and dark, waiting silently, to be exorcised.

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