Thoughts and Prayers, Obituaries and Reflections: Baba Mamu

By Pradeep Rajendran

First published in Among Worlds on January 10, 2025. 

Re-published in Uru Stories on April 10, 2025.

I have a picture of my Uncle (we called him Baba Mamu) with several of us cousins as children surrounding him seated on a carpet; he is seen with his head thrown back, laughing. We’re all occupying space in the picture; we are carefree and comfortable. It reminds me that there was a time when he was loving and gentle rather than someone who was feared and eventually – resented. He passed away on 28th September 2024.

As a young person growing up among many Christian mission organisations across India, it had seemed to me that after his conversion from a traditional to a more charismatic and crusading form of Christianity, there had been a change. He was intimidating in his manner; he sought to correct others forcefully, and when he scolded, he lashed out and was hurtful in the things that he said. I had been a witness to one event where my cousin was inviting him to attend a celebration in a town nearby. But my uncle responded viciously and he snarled that he could not be expected to come anywhere, but if they wanted, they should have to come to him. His voice sliced through the room, replacing the banter with an unforgettable silence. The irony was that my cousin, who was on the receiving end, had driven me a long distance to see Baba Mamu; my cousin had laughed, poked at me, and commented the whole way about the beating I was going to receive when Baba Mamu saw that I had gotten my ears pierced.

Even small children would be scared when Baba Mamu spoke to them and started crying when he tried to pick them up to show love and affection. I remember being horrified, watching him verbally abuse his brothers and sisters, not necessarily with bad language but a disheartening behaviour. I watched him make enemies of his relatives and become suspicious of other mission organisations who he imagined as a threat to the jurisdiction of his mission compound. At least twice, he refused to attend the weddings of his nieces and nephews when he was not a guest speaker, and once, we cousins saw him slap our elder cousin, while my cousin was driving, deeply embarrassing him and confusing those of us who were sitting wide-eyed in the back seats.

He was caught by another cousin sitting on the toilet seat mixing alcohol and water in the lota – the mug everyone used to wash up after sitting on the pot. This was not an incident I saw myself, and I am aware that gossip, hearsay, and alcoholism run rampant in the family. In his youth, it was noted that my uncle was an alcoholic, and he had wreaked havoc on the family. At one point, he even sold the family jewels. The full extent of his problem is not known, and it purportedly ended with his conversion to Christianity. But he continued a lifelong habit of chewing rajnigandha which made him spit streams of red and stain the toilet sink, making life difficult for anyone visiting the toilet after him.

He presided over bible studies at 4 AM and, in his preaching, delivered admonishment and verbally intimidated those who were gathered. Once, a moderator who introduced the speaker after him said, “We have heard the hard and stony message, but from the next speaker, we shall hear the message that is as sweet as honey.”

All this being said, he was known to cry at the sufferings of others, to join people when they were mourning, and to partake in their hardship as it was a cup that had also been passed onto him. He had adopted and helped many orphans and my cousins remember standing in the queues at his orphanage to eat the delicious porridge that was served. After the early death of his own father from cancer, the family had fallen into poverty. One winter night, the cold was such that it would bite into your bones. My uncle broke down a door to make a fire to warm the family. But this story is disputed in the family, and it is difficult to find the truth because many things have been left unspoken, and the hardship is largely untold.

When I heard that he had died, I asked my mother to tell me about her elder brother. We stood together in an Indian sweet shop and ate what had been his favourite sweets, careful as too much of the sweet could make you sick. I wondered whether he had a space to speak about the complex things that he had gone through in his life. Perhaps because of his busyness after he had become a Christian Mission Leader, the hard things remained unspoken. I wondered what would have happened to my family if some of those things had been able to surface, would it have made space for other kinder things to emerge?

As a young missionary leader, he had been travelling with his wife and their first child, a handsome boy – quick to smile, but on that journey, the child died in his mother’s arms. The rule was that if someone died on any train in India, the authorities had to be informed immediately and the body would have to be taken off the train at the nearest station. Co-passengers gently instructed them to keep quiet until they reached their destination so they would not have to disembark at an unknown place at their dark hour. Long hours they must have passed devastated by their grief.