This slender book, barely 54 pages long, is a son’s tribute and reflection upon the death of his famous father, Aditya Prakash, the modernist architect who worked with Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh. Vikramaditya Prakash, the author, is an architect, architectural historian, and professor at the University of Washington. In terms of genre, the narrative blends memoir, fiction, reflection, an assessment of Aditya Prakash’s impact on his family, city, and country, and is a work that grapples with loss and the logistics of death and dying. It is profoundly moving while employing a minimalist narrative approach that manages to capture a depth of emotion. While the author uses a narrator (an autobiographical presence) to structure the work, the focus is less on the narrator and more on his subject—a multi-talented man who was a distinguished architect, artist, academic, actor, intellectual and artist.
The narrative focuses on a few days in 2008 when the author/narrator was visiting India to do research for a book. At the end of the trip, he visits his parents in Chandigarh for a couple of days. His parents meet him and the airport and his father announces that he is leaving the following day with his theater group to perform in a play in Mumbai. On their only day together, the father walks his son through his studio ( a converted garage) and shows him his latest art projects and the box in which he stores important papers. This design studio is the archive of his work and his current passions. Little do father and son know that the Modernist (as the narrator refers to his father) will die the next day on his train journey to Mumbai in a small town, Ratlam. Having introduced us to the importance of the Modernist’s work in the early chapters, the narrative now focuses on the suddenness of the news, how mother and son react to this loss, the many phone calls that are made to siblings, uncles and aunts, friends, and the architecture community. Vikramaditya Prakash takes us through the logistics of death—how to bring a body home, how to preserve it on ice, the bureaucratic necessities of certifying a death, the planning of a cremation. Death in modern India is complicated for a cosmopolitan middle class when the family is scattered across the globe, and the son is discombobulated by both grief and cultural dissonance. Family and friends step in to help organize the details and quietly support the bereaved. Juxtaposed with the bureaucratic details are the narration of Hindu rituals of death including the preparation of the body, the chanting of the Bhagavad Gita and the Gayatri mantra, the cremation ceremonies, and the vast number of people who come to honor the man who shaped Chandigarh.
As an architect and scholar, Vikramaditya Prakash gives the reader a lesson in modernism and architecture. As a son, he honors his father and expresses a profound love for a man who shaped his life. This little gem of a book is a wonderful and moving read.
Vikramaditya Prakash will read at Elliot Bay Books on July 31 at 7:00 PM
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
