Sharads Sunday Sojourns (wk#128): DEATH: A TROUBLESOME MISFORTUNE OR A BARE NECESSITY? “Laazim tha ke dekho mera raasta koi din aur / tanha gaye kyun? Ab raho tanha koi din aur...” Mirza Ghalib. How does it feel when the family doctor, who has rushed down to the house to see someone who was bed-ridden or suffering from a long-standing illness slowly comes out of the room, with a blank face that retorts all the queries with pessimism, disapproval and sombreness? We know that’s the end of the road. That’s a vacation and journey to another world (if it does exist). That’s pretty universal. That’s death! The only permanent thing in this world is change...and fatality! However abysmal does it may sound, just like a perennial phenomenon, demise or bereavement has his own cycle, own timing and own profile. In our neighbourhood, amongst our kith and kin, friends and well-wishers, we know a handful of tormented souls who have and are fighting to come to terms with the passing away of their near and dear ones; who have stirred their souls for that unanswered question many times, and yet have got no satisfactory answer. But they never got defeated. They are special to me, for a simple reason, they know the art of countering and facing the inevitable, not maybe gleefully, but with a heart which though fragile, can yet be mended! In the history of human civilization, between death and life, there flows a stream, a small ‘peaceful’ river of disintegration and remorse. No man or woman has ever been able to trespass that and continue a normal life. If you consider it, losing our guardians to whom we were so close hurts disproportionately and passionately, no matter how many times you have thought about it, about the universality of demise, that one point where mortal intrusion ends and probably divine intervention takes over. But that also has a specific timeframe. If accidentally death do knocks the door and starts peeping through the window much before that, you are shaky. You curse the almighty, the system, and virtually everything. Rightly so. Why do we need a support system? To counter the separation or to combat the process that your loved one has been forcefully withdrawn? At least I don’t know the answer. In this unusually extensive boulevard of never ending grief, probably recollection can tell us how many more miles need to be travelled in the desert before you may encounters an oasis! Just like the water rises at the top in an Indian preparation of pulses, the same happens when the sudden shock takes a backseat and remembrance takes the centrestage. The remembrance of being in love, being able to love and being well. And as it goes with the old adage that time heals everything, the extreme heartache eventually resembles the vast extension of ‘coral reefs’ beneath the Indian Ocean! This remembrance then poses to be that highly anticipated glow from the lighthouse, which has always guided the troubled navigators losing their way. Woody Allen once said, “It’s not that I don’t like death. I just don’t wanna be there when it happens!” I guess that sums it up all.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 01:50:04 +0000