Till Death Do Us Part ..

(Painting : Death And Life ~ Gustav Klimt, 1916)

Apart from love and sex, this is one of the perennial obsessions of my life : death. The possibility of the death of my beloved ones. And myself. And the absolute certainty of it. The very thought of it stirs up a weird panic deep inside my heart. It starts to beat a little faster. I try to avoid thinking about death. Death of anyone dear and near. Run far away and manoeuvre an adroit slip. Imagine something else. More beautiful. More joyous. More lively. In this game of hide and seek, I win many a times. And with the cunning of reason, I successfully push it down to oblivion. Never allow it to sprout for a long time. Smother it as much as I can. It continues to remain dormant. Until at an unexpected hour, I suddenly hear its howl at my doorstep. Yet again.

One of the adolescent pastimes to stave off my mind from falling into the throes of agony caused by the possible death of a loved one was to conjure up the death of the loved one itself. I used to dramatise within my mind a detailed scenario of the death of my father. In that apparitional spectacle, I will be getting a sudden telephone call from my native to the hostel where I was studying, announcing the cardiac arrest and the consequent passing away of my father. I will then imagine about the mode of transport and the friends who might accompany. I will also imagine who all will be there when I would reach my home, how his body will be laid, and who will be around him. All this will be elaborate and more detailed. But the phantasmic sequence will come to an abrupt halt at this juncture : about how I will react at that point of time after reaching home. That used to be the climactic moment of the play in my mind. I could work out all the details minutely till the moment I reach that finale. However much I tried to conjure up thereafter, it always ended up in a blank. And such episodic flights of fancy will conclude, in reality, by me making an innocent phone call to my home and pretend to modulate my voice to normalcy. The ultimate solace of all this would be to hear the voice of my father at the other end.

Much water had flown down the river of my dreams since then. Gradually I had almost forgotten those mind games which I used to play earlier. The fate lines enshrined in my astrological chart took me to inhabit the Arabian coasts. And I was preparing myself to turn over a new leaf of my little life. Then, out of the blue, came the jolt of my lifetime : the long awaited, almost forgotten telephone bell rang to announce the departure of my father at the dawn of a Thursday. It was followed by a long silence at the other end. All I could hear was the chirping of a sparrow. My father had quietly vanished into the sands of time. And what I had hitherto enacted in my mind's eye got replayed in reality. Even though the colours changed, the contours remained more or less the same. Except the grand finale. I crash-landed straight into the centre of an agonising whirlpool of unfathomable grief and muffled sorrow. My life turned topsy-turvy. Even a whiff of what I subsequently experienced could never be imagined before. That is death. You cannot get prepared to encounter it.

That happened in 2001. And am still struggling to come to terms with it.

This Tuesday morning, I woke up to read an SMS from Venkat Saminathan : Maami passed away last night at 10pm. The timing of the message was around 3 am. I had spoken to Maami only a few days before. It came as a rude shock. Dilip and Suresh spoke to me. I rushed to Chennai immediately. I wanted to be with Ve.Sa. at this hour of immense grief. By the time me and Sengathir reached Ve.Sa.'s house in the afternoon, they had already taken Maami to the crematorium. Her ashes were handed over in a container which confluenced with the waves of the sea at Besant Nagar beach.

Ve.Sa. was sitting in the same verandah of the house where I had bid adieu to Maami last month during my trip to Chennai. Ve.Sa. had come out for an evening with Dilip along with his walking stick to the hotel where I had put up. He was barefooted as he could not wear his sandals because of the fracture he had suffered in his legs. That was the second fall and fracture within a short span of few weeks. He held my shoulders, climbed up the steps of the hotel and came to the room. We discussed till mid-nite over 100 Pipers. In between, he rang up Maami to inform her about his safety and tell her not to worry about him and that he would return little late in the night and she could have her dinner and sleep peacefully. He always talks to her in that tone and tenor : an intimacy which has grown more affable with time. From 1992 when I first met him to 2010.

Now it is the mid-night of yet another Thursday. Three nights have passed by since Maami left Ve.Sa. who is now in his mid-seventies. Ve.Sa. would have probably started to have more intimate conversations with Maami. As I have been having with my father since 2001. Death is a deeply meditative phenomena in one's personal life. It is the most profound experience of sadness of the human soul. An artery emerging from one's heart snaps and the blood keeps drenching the heart. It never stops. One has to undergo the pain with its heightened intensity. There is no escape from it. From there, the doors open up. One can understand life more sincerely and more seriously in death alone. Death is the ultimate Teacher of Life. Life is not the same any more after encountering the death of a loved one.

Do we ever learn anything from it?