Yes, nothing was unachievable and everything could wait,/Until one day Time silently stole it all away.
The walls in Robert Garnett Lyngdoh’s house have a collection of paintings, caricatures and portraits. As friends, relatives and well-wishers thronged the house to console the bereaved family on July 29 and as the ambience turned sombre, Robert Garnett Lyngdoh, lovingly called Bob or RG, smiled mischievously from one of the frames. Time could barely steal RG’s exuberance and energy that one could feel even after his death.
A particular painting, undersigned by renowned painter Careen Langstieh, shows a man standing in front of a mesh of roads and bridges. RG’s brother, Herbert Lyngdoh, said he had a vision during his sickness and the painting was made based on his description. In a testimony, RG says when he was under anaesthesia during the first operation after he was diagnosed with cancer, he had a vision. RG saw himself standing in a huge hall, a part of which was full of paintings. A particular painting caught his eyes and he asked the painter what it meant. “It’s your entire life,” he was told. It was God speaking to him, he says in the video.
“I still remember what he told me about the vision,” said Langstieh, who gave life to the vision on canvas. RG says he never lost hope as God was with him.
Despite battling cancer for 12 years, RG never lost his liveliness. In death too, he is remembered as a man whose aura touched everyone and whose energy added life to any gathering. A simple man, a liberal politician and an unforgettable friend, RG was respected for his honesty and integrity as a politician and human being.
As his simplicity was in being so his lucidity in words. RG’s poems are honest and reflections of life. He wanted to be free in death. ‘Cremate me,/Let my being/Explode into the sky’. He saw his sufferings as reincarnation: ‘For the very monster that you think is destroying me/Is really shaping me.’
RG also penned a fiction, Who The Cap Fits, that was published in 2007.
As all remember RG, we remember him through two of his poems from his collection, A Point of View, published by Ariana Family Foundation.
Victo Bar
The claustrophobic cabins,
The graffiti covered partitions,
Enclosing a wooden table
Unpainted, scrubbed ivory clean,
Surrounded by four chairs,
Functionally bare with no pretensions
This contrasted the warm ambiance,
The smoke filled room emitted
The opposite facing column speckers
Punched out the flower music of the day,
As the regulars clinked glasses in salutation
To each others’ health and general welfare
There were no strangers among them,
Just the occasional new entrant waiting to become a friend. How easy were those youthful days
When unadulterated dreams lay waiting to be fulfilled.
The world seemed so huge and hospitable,
Music and philosophy was the common currency in vogue.
Yes, nothing was unachievable and everything could wait,
Until one day Time silently stole it all away.
(Victo Bar was a popular hangout joint in Laitumkhrah that has since been replaced by a multi-storeyed building)
He who lives by the sword
The marketplace is mourning the death of his son,
He could not pay what was asked at the point of a gun.
This mindless killing is no good for any side
What peace do you get when you got to run and hide.
Because he who lives by the sword,
By the sword will die,
That is what the good book says,
So keep away from violence
Settle things in a peaceful way.
Because he who lives
By the sword will die.
You got to earn what you get by the sweat of your brow,
For your own peace of mind don’t try to change that no how,
Blood money, it always cries for revenge,
With an eye, its own eye, it will seek to avenge
Because he who lives by the sword,
By the sword will die,
That is what the good book says,
So keep away from violence
Settle things in a peaceful way.
Because he who lives
By the sword will die.
You know the pen is mightier than the sword,
The price of violence we just cannot afford.
Like thinking animals we can hear what the other man say
And settle our differences in a peaceful way.
Because he who lives by the sword,
By the sword will die,
That is what the good book says,
So keep away from violence
Settle things in a peaceful way.
Because he who lives
By the sword will die.
(This poern was performed as a SONG by Mojo)
(Published with permission from family)
Compiled by Team Sunday Monitor
