NEW YORK – It was almost pitch dark that November 1984 morning in Delhi. I saw John’s silhouette descend the steps of his apartment in Mayur Vihar, in tandem to my own as I walked down from my apartment.
I carried a cricket bat. I tapped it lightly on the narrow road that separated our apartments, in silent camaraderie and commiseration. We were not out for a game. We were at war, besieged. We shivered in the cold; looked warily around for lurking strangers, who could lunge from mist-laden nooks. A palpable fear enveloped our imagination. It was time for our ‘shift’.
Hours ago, a short walk away from the perimeter of our Delhi Development Authority colony, there were horrendous riots. Dozens of people were murdered in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Men, women and children were butchered by crazed mobs; individuals burnt with lit tires around their necks; a gurdwara torched, shops looted. Amongst mounting panic, rumors swirled of violent marauders from large slums that surrounded our middle-class colony gathering to attack; take advantage of the situation, loot apartments, rape women.
John and I, in our early teens then, were among neighbors who formed a Neighborhood Watch to protect ourselves. We became more familiar with the concept of safeguarding our own in close-knit communities when he and I emigrated to America in the late nineties; John went to work for a software company. I left to study for a graduate degree at a university.
Our motley group of children and adults who congregated were not hounded by a mob that morning, or subsequent mornings.
John used to be one of the first to arrive for our shift. Those early mornings as we walked for hours on eerily quiet streets, we would debate animatedly endless topics, seamlessly carrying on conversations initiated some hours earlier, with a wider group of friends. Our bond grew stronger during those riots, even as humanity was traumatized, shattered; people failed and gave up all around us.
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We encountered violence years later, one late evening, as we walked through a desolate stretch, in Mayur Vihar. We saw a man trying to molest a teen girl. A group of us, including John, rushed to her help. We took the man and the victim to the local police station. Cops praised us for what we did. John gave his name as a witness. We never heard back from the station.
John and I were in the ninth grade in high school when we first met in Mayur Vihar, as neighbors, in 1982. Our families were one of the first to move to the colony, within days of each other. It was a virtual ghost town, with rows upon rows of empty apartments and street blocks bereft of streetlights. Sometimes John and I would play with a rubber ball in unoccupied, unlocked apartments – a bare living room turned into a mini squash court. We used our hands to bounce the ball off a wall.
John attended St. Columba’s School; I was in Frank Anthony Public School. We quickly became good friends. We had plenty in common: we both went to a school with a similar culture and exam system. We thought in English. His father and mine worked as junior employees for the same multinational company, in Delhi. They were colleagues and friends before we became neighbors. Our mothers became good friends. We were Malayalees, from Kerala; celebrated Diwali and Christmas with equal fervor and gusto.
Playing soccer, debating domestic and global issues were obsessive passions for John in the 15 years he lived in Mayur Vihar. He was a fanatic about soccer, especially. I loved it too, played and watched it avidly, but for him it was akin to religion. A moment of reckoning came when we both played for our respective school team in an annual Pentangular soccer tournament match, in 1984, in Delhi. I didn’t score a goal, but my school won 2-0, went on to win the championship. I never let John forget that fact; used it mercilessly in conversations to leverage and provoke. He took it with a wry smile.
As more people moved to Mayur Vihar, our circle of friends grew. A group of us called ourselves the Triangular Club, inspired by a triangular shaped park where we spent countless hours playing cricket and football. On recent visits to Mayur Vihar, I noticed the park was still there – verdant, secluded, even as the rush of people and traffic outside it had burgeoned. Once, passing by, I saw a group of adults seated on a patch of grass, playing cards.
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In the eighties and nineties, as dusk set in, and it became hard to see a cricket or soccer ball in a park, a group of us friends, as a ritual, would gather around a puliya – a stone bench at the end of a street.
We would then go from the battle of bat and ball to verbal sparring, jousting. Fervid discussions were on the lines of an Arnab Goswami show. Despite taking contrarian positions, to the point of almost becoming arch enemies, John and I would amicably trudge back home together, depart for our flats as friends. It was a rigmarole we played to perfection.
I considered myself a good debater, but it was tough going against John. It was at times an exasperating experience. He was a voracious reader, with good critical thinking and analytical skills. His pet subject over the years was business and economics.
Our group of regular debaters included somebody who was a few years older, later studied at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in Delhi; and is now a prominent professor at a business school of a university in the United States. Another friend from that group is a serving Brigadier in the Indian Army. I later became a journalist in New Delhi. John could debate all of us effortlessly, on different topics. Those vigorous debates helped all of us grow as more confident adults. It was an almost daily ritual through school and college.
John excelled in school. After he graduated from high school, he was part of the first cohort of students who attended St. Stephen’s College’s inaugural bachelors’ degree program in Computer Science. It was a surprise to me. I always thought he would study economics.
That coveted admission also became another standing joke, with which I needled John for years. St. Columba’s was a boys’ only school. During our school days, friends used to jokingly console John, saying his opportunity to meet girls would surely come in college. In a ‘cruel’ and unfathomable act of gender seclusion, St. Stephen’s College made that inaugural three-year Computer Science program only for boys.
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John would display stoic silence and a steady gaze somewhere in the far horizon, admirable of a Buddhist monk, as I would sometimes mention that fact casually in the middle of a rousing discussion on US-Russia relations, or Indian politics. It was a tactic to throw him off-course, and for me to gather my wits.
I confided in John my joys and travails with girls, who came and made an exit as if through a revolving door. John didn’t have a girlfriend. However, he got married just before he left for the US, in 1997. It was an arranged marriage. His wife was a vivacious woman, with a charming smile. They were a perfect pair. She also had celebrity friends. The goofball actor Chunky Panday attended the wedding reception, surrounded by a bevy of glamorous girls.
I took a sabbatical from my then job at The Times of India, left for New York in 1998, a year after John left for the US. We didn’t keep in touch. I next saw John in 2007, in Connecticut. It came about in the strangest way imaginable.
My parents, who lived in Delhi, visited after the birth of my first son. My wife took them shopping one evening, to a mall in Stamford, a few miles away from where we lived. My mother suddenly noticed a familiar face walking nonchalantly through the crowd, window shopping: John.
I was a journalist in New York City, and at work; an hour-long train ride away from home. I couldn’t believe it at first when my wife told me the incredible news. When we were dating, I had told her about John, so she knew how happy I would be to see him. My wife is an alum of BITS Pilani. I had told her John and I, along with another friend, had once planned to attend the annual college festival at Pilani, but it never materialized.
I was able to rush back home. John and I caught up on our lives over wine. We reminisced with great mirth the good old days in Delhi. He dug into my mother’s cooking which he loved. On a work visit, he was staying at a hotel in Stamford. I urged him to spend a day or two with us, but he had work and family commitments: left for his hotel that night. He was traveling early the next day.
Some years later, John and I connected for a night out in New York City, when he came on a work visit. He used to travel frequently and extensively for work. We went for dinner, partied in a couple of clubs. I remember two things clearly from that night which finished in the wee hours of the morning, at a time when we once woke up decades earlier to patrol the streets of Mayur Vihar.
On a cab ride from one club to another, John made a phone call to his two sons. He spoke for a long time to his sons as we crawled in Manhattan’s night traffic. I listened in silence. I’ve never heard a more gentle and loving conversation a father had with his children, in real life, or by actors emoting on a screen. He repeatedly told them how much he missed and loved them. It was apparent that John was a stellar, remarkable father, whose life revolved around his children.
The other thing I remember was at a club, as I got a round of drinks from a crowded bar. John was in an animated discussion in a corner of the room with a bunch of desis who he had just met. Soccer it was. John was in form. I winced, thinking this was going to be a long night. I gave myself a reminder to exit the premises before those hapless lot started to wail or pulled their hair out in frustration because of John’s denunciations and outlandish proclamations. Or worse still, got angry, threw both of us out. It was not a happy thought as the club was situated in a high-rise building, with open terraces.
I last met John on October 19, 2019, in the suburbs of Chicago, at the wedding of a friend from the Triangular Club. John’s house was not too far away from the venue – a Hindu temple. When I met him, he was limping, gingerly walked with the help of another friend. John had indulged in soccer earlier that morning, injured a knee. We talked and laughed through the wedding rituals, though. We made plans to meet up at the reception later that evening. He didn’t show up for the reception or the after party.
John Anthony Chirayath died on January 2, 2025, in Delhi. He was 56 years old.
When a friend broke the news to me via text, I was in a ninth-grade classroom with mostly 14-year-old children. I felt numb, controlled my tears. I was aware through friends that John had been struggling with health-related ailments for more than two years. Later, at home that night, I broke down when I remembered that John and I met when we were that age, in the ninth grade.
During the height of Covid, John and I became estranged after several arguments online in a group chat. They were on the same subjects we dwelt upon for decades, but this was not face-to-face talk. We didn’t walk back home amicably, parted as friends. We fought bitterly over political differences, on a smartphone, sitting far away from each other. Rhetoric became sharp, cruel, mean. It was akin to a boxing match with no rules to bar punches under the belt. We didn’t walk back our talk, stopped communicating. It was all a grand game, though, in the debating world we grew up in. I knew when we next met, we would have a good laugh over it.
A highlight of John’s life was the FIFA World Cup 2022, in Qatar, which he attended with his sons. I was happy for John when I heard that. For some people, a lifelong dream would be to attend the Venice Film Festival, Art Basel, Frankfurt Book Fair, Olympics or World Cup cricket. For John, it was to revel in the festivities of the FIFA World Cup, watch as many matches as possible, scream himself hoarse cheering on his favorite team. Then afterwards, disseminate for hours minute details of the match.
Recently, some friends revealed John’s life started to unravel a couple of years or so ago when his marriage broke apart, a business he started after leaving his job at a top software company, struggled to take off in the Covid aftermath, and serious health ailments struck him soon after that 2022 World Cup. His children were paving their own life, away from home.
For more than two years before his death, John stayed mostly with his mother, and younger brother and his family, at a flat in Vasundhara Enclave, in Delhi. He had a loving younger sister who lived with family in Bengaluru. Some of the local Triangular Club friends helped keep his spirits up; strived to bolster him back to good health. John died at that home.
The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writing of mortality, said: “By dying young, a man stays young forever in people’s memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his light shines for all time.”
I racked my brains for memories of when John’s presence burned brightly. I recollected the time in our first year of college, on a trip to Surajkund, in Haryana, John reacted dynamically to save a friend’s life. He pulled him from the deep end of a swimming pool to safety, staved off tragedy. That Triangular Club friend, who now lives in Virginia, didn’t know how to swim, had strayed from the shallow area.
On John’s memorial page, an amateur soccer coach from Illinois shared how John helped him once when he fell on the field and broke his collar bone. John, who was also playing, rushed him to a doctor’s office for X-rays and treatment; and later drove him home. He wrote in gratitude: “I’ll be forever grateful for John’s concern and care that day.”
I remembered the time John showed his non-aggressive side – he shared birthday with Mahatma Gandhi – when he and I had gone to attend an annual college festival at a girls’ only campus in Delhi University. I cannot remember if it was Miranda House or Gargi College. I had managed to get passes for the two of us, but there was a crowd outside waiting to get in. One of the guys standing near us suddenly grabbed John’s ticket, whisked it away. Instead of getting incensed, plunging us into a brawl, John said, “Arre yaar” (c’mon friend) in a soft tone to that guy, turned, and walked away. I grudgingly followed suit.
Years later, at an international soccer game at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, John tried to rationalize logically with a guy who wanted to throw fisticuffs when he realized too late that one of us sitting in the row behind him had put a nasty sticky chewing gum on his seat. He was standing up frequently, obscuring the view.
The 15 years spent with John in Mayur Vihar blended in with some of the best days of my life. There are other incandescent memories: sharing my first cigarette with him in 11th grade, and then some more through the years, rubbing eucalyptus leaves on hands to mask the smell of smoke before we got home; gorging on kebabs and jalebis at street stalls and restaurants; playing cards and carrom on weekends; gathering to watch World Cup matches on TV; trips to watch late night films at cinema halls; celebrating festivals and birthdays.
John’s life was not extraordinary. He was a common man, with his share of goodness, frailties and flaws. Like most people, he aspired to a better future. He went overseas, worked hard, raised a family, helped his children the best he could. He failed at some critical junctures in life, where others have more success.
Most people like me remember John, though, for his affable personality, easy smile and a golden heart. I’m grateful he made life more engaging, invigorating, for me.
It was hard to watch John ‘s funeral video. Family and friends bade him a tearful farewell with prayers, eulogies. John looked serene, in a calm repose, lying in his coffin; as if taking a nap at half-time. As the writer Isaac Asimov philosophized: “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
John bhai, I’ll visit you soon, at the Burari Christian Cemetery in Delhi, where you’re resting in peace. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard your voice emanate from earth, drawl your favorite opening gambit in an argument: “Ok, guru, here’s my two cents.”
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of India Overseas Report)