It still seems surreal. The unexpected meeting my friend, Kalpana and I had with Gauri in her office barely a few hours before she was gunned down mercilessly outside her house. What were vibrant moments in which old connections were renewed, new ones forged and fraying memories replenished now seem frozen in pain. Writing this then becomes tentative, if not a personal act of releasing those memories so that they start breathing and come alive to make some collective sense.

Gauri and I were not close friends. We were fellow travellers following each other’s life trajectories who fate brought together at different if tragic moments of mourning.

She was my junior in college way back in 1982 when we were both doing our Mass Communications in Bangalore University. Or so I thought! It was only when we met that fateful day I discovered that she was at that time studying journalism at Central College. While our department for some strange reason was located in the neighbouring UVCE.  She told us, laughing as she did, that she only used to come and constantly hang out in our department, since her boyfriend, who was to later become her husband who even later she was to divorce and become lifetime friends with, was my classmate, Chidanand Rajghatta! All I knew of her then was that she was the daughter of the famous P Lankesh. It was a legacy she seemed to carry rather carelessly, lost as she was in the discovery of her own brave new world.

At that time our ‘department’ was a rather depressing place with its internal rivalries and petty politics. The only redeeming features were inspiring teachers like Leela Rao and friends who have stayed with me for life. Some even after their death. Like Saketh Rajan, the classic rebel who helped me deschool myself after introducing me to authors like Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire and the world of CIEDS Collective and Vimochana, the women’s organisation that was to become my life for the next three decades. He went on to immerse himself in extreme left ideology and went on to tragically pay the price for his idealism with his life after he was killed in a gruesome ‘encounter’ in 2005.

There is also a role he played in keeping Gauri and I connected. After college, Gauri and my paths occasionally converged since we shared a common karma bhoomi —  social activism. She combined her activism with her profession and went on to inherit her father’s legacy, Lankesh Patrike, while I became a deprofessionalised women’s rights activist and part of the Beedi Basavi brigade as my father would disapprovingly call us! I watched her admiringly as she fought the establishment through the newspaper in the fearless way her father had but also went far beyond in terms of addressing issues not only of corruption but also communalism that was increasingly infecting our polity. As part of the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike (The Karnataka Forum for Peace and Harmony) she relentlessly fought and won a case to protect the syncretic traditions of the Baba Budangiri shrine in Chikmagalur which is also home to a Dattatreya temple; a tradition that was sought to be erased by the myopic and bigoted politics of the Sangh Parivar.

I remember a former colleague who had gone to attend a protest organised by the Komu Souharda Vedike, coming back and mentioning how strong and reassuring Gauri was when the Sangh Parivar, accompanied by the police, tried to stop protesters from entering the town.

Over the years one saw her engaging with diverse issues including women and marginalised communities. Shakun, another activist friend, reminded me of the time she came as a chief guest for the annual day celebrated by Sadhana Mahila Sangha, the collective of women in street sex work. Gauri and the women instantly connected and they felt immensely supported by her solidarity and affection. Little wonder that it was Suma, a woman from Sadhana, who called me first that night and wailed, “Amma, Gauriamma has been shot and killed!”

Gauri and I continued to bump into each other at various meetings and protests and telling each other that we should meet and catch up.

Strangely, it was Saketh’s death in 2005 that actually reconnected us. By then as a journalist, she had travelled into the jungles to do an in-depth piece on what drove the Naxal movement after an extensive interview with Saketh. Not just that. As an activist, she had stuck her neck out and started a peace initiative that tried to negotiate for a ceasefire between the Naxals and the state and bring out some of the Naxals willing to give up the gun and step into the mainstream with the help of rehabilitation packages. Tragically, these peace efforts were short-lived and aborted when Saketh was killed and the Naxals retaliated by killing the police in Pavagada.

I could only imagine how devastated Gauri would be. As I was with the death of a friend I disagreed with ideologically but respected deeply, not only for his passionate sense of justice and ethics but also for his poetic sensibilities. Our differences arising from the clash between my then rather naïve and evolving Gandhian, feminist, fluid perspective and his more inflexible, ideological and polemical positions. And so when Gauri and I made the time to meet some months later, while we mourned the death of our common friend, I recalled some of those arguments. Arguments that revolved around violence and non-violence; about means and ends; about the limits of ideologies and the limitlessness of idealism; about scientific rationality and material cultures and about faith and spiritual cultures; about the dominant “masculinist” mode of politics and the marginalised “feminist” processes of transformation.

Little did we know that more than a decade later, Gauri would, in fact, go in the same violent way. Two friends condemned to death, both of who spoke discomforting truths to power but each in their own way. One outside the framework of the Constitution and the law. And the other within. One killed by forces of the state. The other killed by the forces of hate.

We connected yet again when I lost my husband in 2012. When she reached out and we mourned over yet another loss. This time, a personal one. She was as always warm, affectionate and concerned. And this time we spoke more about ourselves and our fragmented, fragile lives.

And then we were back to passing each other at protests and public meetings. The last one at which we hugged and spoke was ironically enough in Town Hall at the #NotInMyName protest against the rising tide of a hate-filled Hindutva politics and the culture of lynching that was targeting the lives and livelihoods of Muslims and Dalit communities. She looked distracted and worried. We once again promised each other that we would meet and catch up.

Little did we know this time that when we did so it would be the last. And this time, the mourning would not be with but for her with so many whose lives she has touched in indelible ways.

That afternoon of September 5, Kalpana and I walked into her office on a chance. Not knowing whether Gauri will be there. Or if she was, whether she would have time to talk.  Kalpana was on a personal mission and she needed Gauri’s help in accessing the old copies of Lankesh Patrike. Gauri greeted us cheerfully and asked us to sit. And then it was as if time stood still. As if we had wrapped ourselves into a little world in which we had nothing to do but talk. And nowhere to go except the past. And she had no newspaper to bring out for the next day.

As Lankesh’s persona and photograph loomed large behind Gauri, we spent the next couple of hours speaking of things big and small; about the lives, loves and idiosyncrasies of the rich and famous, about cinema and stars; about politics and the terrifying days ahead for the country — nothing was left untouched. Including Kalpana’s recent and tragic loss of her husband, updates on my daughter and Gauri’s own fractious family life.  It was like the years between us had dissolved and we made new intangible connections.

Her brown eyes sparkled in the glow of the early evening sun with a strange intensity even as her fingers feverishly sought out the cigarettes she smoked endlessly. She broke her almost endless stream of consciousness talk with, “I am talking too much, aren’t I? I hope I am not boring you!”

In retrospect, it seems that the Gauri we met that day was the simple yet essential woman behind all that she is being called today. Be it Naxal sympathiser, leftist, anti-Hindu, and other more endearing terms used by the inventive cyber warriors who are today running rampage on social media and on TV screens. Or the bold and courageous journalist, fearless woman, anti-establishment, inspirational mentor, mother or sister she was to younger activists by her friends, family, comrades and colleagues.

Yes, we met Gauri, the “unconventional” woman, vital, vibrant, vulnerable. But also surprisingly rooted in her family, faith and freedom; not so much of the personal but the political and public kind. Gauri was also in a mood to let her hair down and so while speaking about the difficulties of sustaining the newspaper in these times of demonetisation and GST and about the state of the nation, we also indulged in good old gossip about friends and political personalities!

She spoke about the differences that she had with her brother. But the simple way in which she spoke, it was neither acrimonious nor ideological even if it was so in reality. She only said that her father would be shattered if he had been alive to see the political choices his son was making. And they had kept their family ties intact, even if at the minimal.

She spoke of a famous Kannada artist who she admired for making it in the industry without any godfather and usually was unafraid of speaking her mind. Until she joined the BJP and began holding forth in public on the Adarsh Bharatiya Nari who was first under the protection of her father, then husband and then the son. “I picked up the phone and pulled her up asking her what the hell she thought she was doing speaking the way she did especially since she had made her own independent life choices. She weakly responded saying that she only said these things since the public wanted to hear them!”

Gauri obviously never feared to raise the uncomfortable question – be it with family, friend or foe. For she raised it with no deeper agenda other than that defined by her conscience, which is why she continued to be friends with those she continued to quarrel with over the differing positions they held.

She condemned the politics and policies of the Prime Minister and party in power holding them responsible and accountable for the rising tide of fascism and intolerance in the country. But she also raised questions of her own comrades and colleagues in social and political movements. About the factions, dissensions and differences within and the delusions of the text book revolution they thought was on its way.

She critiqued her own community of Lingayats berating them from moving so far away from their own moorings of their own faith that they had ended up back within the folds of those very discriminatory structures of a caste based Brahminical Hinduism that Basavanna had once rejected.

She spoke sharply aware of her own privileges. Of being her father’s daughter. Of her name and her class. She embraced it all but wore it lightly. As she did her ideology. For she was also organically and unselfconsciously her own woman while being rooted in her own personhood. However flawed. However contradictory. For her, it was an ethical way to live not only an inflexible ideological choice to make. And in doing so she articulated her own brand of an uncompromising, committed and compassionate humanism that obviously informed her politics. One sentence from our conversation continues to reverberate. “You know I am totally committed to non-violence.”

But it was obviously not easy to be her own woman in the largely masculine context she inhabited. Be it professional or ideological.

She spoke about the way she had to put her foot down to take certain decisions in her work space even as she was accused by her colleagues of being undemocratic. Perhaps something that her father, the patriarch could take for granted.

She spoke of living free and autonomous of a man in her life. When the same actress she had pulled up for her regressive views on women asked her to marry and settle down, she laughed and told her, “I am already settled. You don’t need a man to settle down!” It was this uncompromising attitude to autonomy and freedom that also pushed her to reject of any kind of protection or surveillance. When her friends told her to seek police protection she laughed it off saying, “I am living free without the protection of a husband. Do you want me to acquire another ‘husband’ in the guise of a policeman who will be monitoring my every movement?”

Finally, it seems Gauri paid the ultimate price for being a woman who dared not only to speak truth to power but also dared to speak of freedom. Both in the personal and political realms.

The troubling question is not only who killed Gauri. But what killed her. The ones who killed her were obviously those contracted to do so and the government must undoubtedly catch them and bring them to justice. If they have the political will and intent to do so and send out a strong message that such brutal violence to silence independent voices will not be tolerated. But what killed her was the vile politics of intolerance and patriarchal authoritarianism that today not only dominates our politics but also insidiously dwells within ourselves, our families, our cultures and institutions. And in the longer run unless we also identify and exorcise those processes, politics and structures that nurture this pernicious culture there will be tragically more Gauris we will have to mourn.

As we wrestle with our individual and collective pain and reflect on what her murder means for the future of democracy and dissent in this country, my eyes are drawn to today’s Bangalore Mirror. There is a small report which says that in her last day of work in the office, her colleagues said she was relaxed and even joyous. That she had some old college mates who visited her and that they could hear sounds of laughter from inside. And then I remember what Gauri said as we were leaving, “I have never been so relaxed in a long time. It has been so lovely to just sit and chat with two women friends.” She added with a naughty glint in her sparkling eyes, “My colleagues will be wondering what we are speaking about!”

Thank you, Gauri, for letting us into your office and your life in your very last moments. Thank you for that last conversation which it seems encapsulated all of your life’s myriad moments and life’s passions.

Yes, the heavens wept the night you were killed. But the next morning the sun struggled through the clouds telling us that “you cannot keep a good woman down”. You will continue to inspire and we will continue to hope and to speak.

And that is a promise.