The news from back home in the past few months have been mostly depressing. My father’s illness was sudden and completely unexpected. There were these agonizing hours in the interim between the phone call from my mother when she broke down and my setting foot on Indian soil when I almost thought I had lost him. I admit that his subsequent recovery had almost turned an agnostic into a theist but it has been unsettling to say the least. And just when things were almost getting back to normal, I am hit again with the passing away of a dear uncle from a cancer which almost went undetected.
So many thoughts crowd in to my mind right now that I find it very difficult to write coherently. At some level it shakes some of the fundamentals of my very belief system. In Science, in modern medicine. I know I run the risk of sounding cliched. But sometimes you need to write what comes to your mind at the risk of sounding cliched.
On another level, there is the usual realisation of the fragility of the lives we live, the lives that are so dear to us. What are all our grandiose plans for? “Life is ephemeral, life is a like a drop of morning dew on a leaf” – thus goes a Santhali song translated by my grandfather which I learnt as a kid and I remember only vaguely now. His death was the first I ever really experienced as an adult. I regret now that I never kept that translation with me. Especially now that he is no longer here and that song is lost forever from me.
That is another thought racing through my mind now. Every farewell could potentially be the last. Why part on a bitter note? There may be no second chance. Could one bear to live with such a lifelong regret? I regret not having spent more time with my grandfather when I used to come back from college on vacations, before he passed away. I was too busy with my own life then. Maybe I should have spent an hour with him to write down that song that he had taught me when I was a kid…
It is also inevitable perhaps that all this forces you to reflect on your own life. Perhaps it is through personal reflection that one feels the greatest sorrow in any tragic event. When I was much younger, I always wanted to have children early. I have dreamt of fatherhood like probably very few do at that age. But now, I am almost 31, a broken marriage and living alone thousands of miles away from any place I can legitimately call home. Not exactly what I had planned for myself. But Life had other plans it seems…
All this reminds me of a few lines of Jim’s:
“Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a strange hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve
brought to bed
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws”
- Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
My belief system was first broken, not with death but with life in all it’s unquestionable, undeniable, imposing reality. I’m really fond of Sartre’s writing, though I haven’t read ‘Age of Reason’. He said once in a documentary, regarding his family,”…I never imagined anything, but I made the break anyway.” As for me, I’ve imagined everything possible to be imagined, but couldn’t make the break. I guess I’ve a better understanding of life right now-
“…burdened with social responsibilities you never asked for, with non-intimate relationships on a social level, isolated completely yet expected to perform certain duties or functions. At that point such a person becomes alienated.”
All of this is part of an individual, seperating us from animals and vegetables! Books reveal secrets, but if it is all about history, and people of a particular period, then we better start digging up personalized secrets from our lives.
Death is something that keeps haunting me even when I am asleep-and it rightly goes on to explain the irregular nightmare of me falling/flying…I really have nothing to lose in life (by loss I mean the non materialistic ones) except for my loved ones-but mind it, when I say something like that I don’t in the least sound like the ideal daughter/sister/friend ..I know only too well that I need them more than they need me….so it eventually boils down to my selfish needs, to my predicament of being left behind with memories so vivid and yet so incapable of turning back time… the inevitable can neither be eschewed nor deferred-and I know some day my worst fears are going to come true…..I shudder the moment my rationale clashes with my childish arrogance to cling to my people , with my audacity(blasphemy) of elephantine proportions to question God and His ways…and then I can think no more……
I wanted to post a comment on this because in a way it reminded me that all relationships thrive on expressions, u never know there might be someone just waiting for you to show how much you care ,u take them for granted and they are gone in no time-then you miss them but never without those pangs of guilt and regret.
“Something can be deathless only when it is lifeless”( a line I had memorized in my school days while reading Keats)and as I grow older the quote for me is a reflection of my futile fight against the will of God, a reminder to live in the now, to love my people with all that I have…..