The End -- An Obituary

(Ill never look-in to your eyes... again)


When my call was disconnected after four rings, I knew…-- he was being burnt. ‘Burning’ suddenly seemed a wrong choice of word, a milder and covetable prospect than ‘Being heated to ashes’. It’s this thing with electric incinerators… they reek disrespect, vainness and a melancholy that Poe describes as ‘lacking the poetic element of sadness’; it’s terrible.

I would have had a chance to see him for the last time, even though dead, had I been lazy as usual. But today, I got up at 5 o clock to catch a train to my home town without further deferring. But it frightens me that I don’t regret it; I somehow don’t mind it either way.

So here I am, sitting in the moonless dusk on the ‘daba’ of my house - that I have come back to in eager anticipation of a miraculous reviving rest; the city sapped me again - between the tank and the parapet wall, trying to shoo the invisible mosquitoes feasting on my feet. And I’m trying, to visualize how my friend was feeling inside the ‘heater’ that very moment. Afterwards, someone said that it was terribly hot 10 feet away from the mouth of the heater!

Suresh and I were never great friends; we just spent a lot of time together. It is difficult to find any similarity in any aspects that make up the persons that we are. Things between us ranged from gigantically passive ‘difference of opinions’ to being pissed off. But the thing is, he features in most of the good times and eventful times I had over the recent years. He was a friend of a friend; but even though it was not obvious, I could discern that he had a certain corner for me; we shared a certain ‘understood’ proximity within the group of friends. The group always met because we had nothing much to do and the conversations were always superficial (unless terribly drunk, when they would get super-personal). The superficiality was probably because nobody wanted to create a sissy atmosphere; everybody sought relationships in complex processes that under-ran these superficial conversations.

Suresh was no ‘Great Hero’. He was just an other guy, trying to get on with his life. But there was definitely something in him that sets him apart, a distinctive trait. I wouldn’t go into trying to figure out what it is, but just suffice to say that he was 33, unmarried, not firmly employed, ex-president of state-wide fans association of his favorite filmstar, yielded cricketer-wannabe (friends say he had considerable wicket keeping skills), unsatisfied and had a history of alcohol rehabilitation apart from a prolonged estranged relationship with his father that ended recently.

As my moribund speakers now sing ‘Life goes on within you and without you’ in an elegiac tone, I find myself wondering what, if there is anything, is it that, which flows within you and without you. It’s bad, because there was no logic in the sequence of things that made up this person’s ‘Life’. He dared to experiment paying high prices at each step, and finally when it seemed like the experimental phase was over and he was beginning to build on the inferences, death cut him short. It is not fair when you are made to learn the rules of a game yourself and not allowed to play when the game starts. Therefore I fret if there is anything that really runs within us and without us and gives meaning to everything. He longed much for so much… I seriously think all that was his rightful due.

In all possibility, this is going to be a defining incident of my life of considerable impact. I lived in him substantially, and that part of me is dead now.

I haven’t cried a single tear all day; even when my friend told me on the phone that, apparently, one of the last things Suresh inquired after was a couple of us friends. I felt guilty about it and subsequently shunned it; anything guilt-induced would be dis-respectful. I know, it is going to come back to me…. In waves; one fine morning I’m gonna stop wiping my bike and think that this person is not going to start his scrupulous scooter today in Mettuguda and go all the way along Chilkalguda, Musheerabad, RTC X roads, Narayanguda and reach Malakpet right on time; some evening I would stop and think that those evenings when he would call me up and suggest a drink are infact over. It would gradually get into me that the fact that I don’t meet this guy much now-a-day is not because we might have gotten busy with our stuff, but cus he is dead.

Now that I’ve seen death at a certain close range, now that death doesn’t appear so far, now that death is much of a neighbor than a distant friend, now that death is a practical possibility and also a stupidity that can scoop out the meaning from my life in an insane jiffy, I run my mind through something I considered many times earlier also—to take a chance when it comes to you, do when you still can, and not to pack wonderful things in ‘tomorrow’ cus tomorrow is always death’s property. I know tomorrow is still going to be the same; in some future point, I'm going to again remember that I forgot such things . I’m still going to say to myself that I should have run to Her at the very first idea, knowing that I wouldn’t do it if it was ‘NOW’.