My Last Autobiography

At ninety-four, a retired engineer decides to begin again write his third and, as he insists, final autobiography. Not because anything remarkable has happened to him, but precisely because nothing does. 

His world has shrunk to a single room: two caretakers who fuss over him; his son, the doctor who once promised care, now scolds him and treats him as another patient to be managed. His days too pass in small, stubborn rhythms: a morning pooja, a quarrel, the scent of jasmine and perfume, the memory of a lost earring. And yet, the old man writes or rather, talks to himself with energy, humour, irritation, and flashes of startling tenderness. He writes not to record history but to fill the silence of a life slowly slipping into invisibility. What begins as a rambling account of routines and recollections turns into something deeper a fierce and ironic confrontation with the idea of decline itself. 

Rajendra Banahatti’s portrait of a man outliving his usefulness is unsparing and profoundly humane. With wry wit and unflinching honesty, he captures the strange dignity of growing old in a world that has stopped listening. In Jerry Pinto’s graceful, lucid translation, this last act of self-narration becomes a meditation on memory, time, and the stubborn persistence of the self the voice of a man who will not go quietly, because his story is not yet done.