A Srinivas Rao 2nd May 2016
Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant (the ordinary instant) . You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking
I just returned fitfully from Chennai from the ceremonies where we possibly register our grief, take a last look at his face, possibly live it viscerally, or at the least legitimise our acknowledgement of a relationship that suffers a seeming closure with our presence. We wake up momentarily from our delusion that someone we love will outlive us and might die, reminding ourselves "for whom the bell tolls" making the uneasy truce with death. I lived in my own world which to me is magical. It is a world where even upon seeing Sriram's dead body, i still imagined he would wake up from slumber and smile chuckling "Swami what are you doing here?" as though nothing happened and he was not at all responsible for the huge brouhaha, much to my relief. But the reverie breaks just as certainly as a soap bubble. When someone told me i could get on the hearse and accompany his body i jumped before anyone changed their mind as the single vehicle cortege wended its way in front of the Ayodhya Mandapam where Lord Ram watched bemused as i kept reciting "Sriram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram" silently. A friend called to inform me that he was leaving and whether i was returning and i said "No I am going with Sriram" little realizing its grammatical if not metaphysical problem.
