The Hindu Business Line : Memories of a Papal visit

My father was a Communist, a Marxist. He converted to communism in the early 1940s when, freshly out of college, he started his career in Mumbai. The Left movement of that era devoured him. But first he had become an atheist. That was while still in college at the St. Joseph's, a strictly run Jesuit college in Tiruchi, Tamil Nadu. He would tell us that having spent five years there as an impressionable young man, faithfully attending catechism classes, daily masses and serving as an alter boy, he had lost faith in God.

His parents were orthodox Syrian Christians. His mother was a pious lady and was aghast that her only son had stopped believing. But she doted on him and he, on his mother. And in her old age, when she asked him why he did not go to church or confess, he would gently explain that he did not need to go to church or to confess, for being pure in heart, word and deed, he did not have any sins.

As a Marxist in Christian Kerala, life was never easy for him or for us, his children. In 1959, when the Church and the Congress joined hands for Liberation Struggle against the democratically elected Communist government in the state, we were ostracised and singled out, and sometimes even abused.We But my father's belief in salvation through Marx remained unshaken. Only his children and family found his loud anti-Church and anti-Christ pronouncements embarrassing amongst family, friends and cousins.

I was the only son of my parents and my grandmother quickly took me under her personal care to prevent any atheist notions creeping into me. I grew up a believer. And early on in my boyhood, she put into my head that to atone for my father's waywardness, I should get a good (read government) job, travel abroad, go to Rome and receive the Pope's blessings for the family. For her, this was the only way to offset the Divine retribution that her son's atheismwould surely bring upon the family.

That then had always been my childhood dream... to go to Rome and seek the Pope's blessings.

For quite different reasons, my father too encouraged me to write for the Civil Services.

I studied hard then, in fact for straight six months in 1977, and did the family proud by joining the IAS. A few years later I was posted as Collector of Ernakulam (Kochi).

Soon after, K. Karunakaran, the then Congress Chief Minister, promptly threw out the Marxist Mayor of Kochi and gave me additional post as Kochi Mayor. That made me, at 30, the youngest City Father in the State.

My visit to Rome did not happen, but in February 1986 Pope John Paul II arrived in Kochi for a full five days.

As the district Collector and Kochi Mayor, it fell on me to coordinate the Papal visit. Besides welcoming the Holy Father at the airport there were several occasions to be close to him and receive his blessings. For the son of an atheist, that was divine indeed.

My father kept aloof during the entire Papal visit. Neither was he asked nor did he seek a VIP enclosure pass to see the Pope at close quarters. I knew better than offer him a pass, because he would have certainly refused it. But a day after Pope John Paul II left the city, I drummed up the courage to show my father some of the many photographs taken with the Pope, particularly one where standing in the middle of three Archbishops, the Pope had put his hand on my forehead with great love and blessed me. My father looked at them, put them aside and walked off into his room. Bourgeois opium, he seemed to say.

But he was back after a short while, clutching an old black-and-white photograph. It was from the early 1960s when he had spent a year in Europe. It was unbelievable... There was my father kneeling piously and contritely before the Holy Father in Rome... and the Pope, Paul VI, with his right hand raised, was blessing my father!

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