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.
"Thapam" exclaimed baby Harshita when she would finish her little bowl of curd rice (which she believed made her cheeks chubby) which was what she could pronounce, for the Hindi word "khatam" and is a word in the lexicon of both our families to mean finished, complete, closure. It kept coming back to me in its ironical form sneering at me. It is easy to disguise our grief and bury it in the anonymity of a vast crowd that gathers to pay respects to the departed. It offers us privacy denied to the family members whose sea of grief we turn our faces away from; even as we wish we be left alone in the vastness of our solitude as our tears run down unanticipated. But then the family's grief seemed the only legitimate one in its raw, searing rage as they heeded no embankment and threatened to engulf all in their grief. What does one say to parents who have lost a second child even as they exclaim that that would have bargained trading off with places with the reaper? What does one say when the mother keeps talking to the dead body as though he were alive and she is imploring him with entreaties to return? A young wife and younger daughter find themselves all alone for the first time in a place which was always the of heart of husband and father; knowing such loneliness and isolation for the first time. All those plans, all those promises, all rendered in ashes, immersed in the bay. “Who will you now talk to? Your friend has gone forever” she said really to herself than to me, amidst tears in grief, anger, and exhaustion, a feeble consolation from one whose grief would be bottomless, and the years ahead seemed shrouded in loneliness.
I keep looking for signs that brought some coherence of why he had become such a driven person despite my loud admonitions over the last several years. He would merely smile at me and say “yeh sab karna padta hai Swami”! I would just mutter something in anger. I would regularly keep chiding him about his failure to heed his health and all he would do was to smile, while we both knew he would not. When he smiled it smoothed away my worries and i would forget the question as he would hurry to his next appointment. He was such a warm and charming person, loyal to those dear to him, a winsome smile and a sense of humour that can even bribe the grim reaper to release his noose if he chose to. As I watched the river of people who visited him, I even wondered if he was the same person i knew. So many people saying so many things about his being a great man, institution builder, visionary, man of ideas, some in consolation, some with little understanding, some with genuine regard. I probably even resented them as being tinged with insincerity. Not that they were false but that we never knew him in those terms. Those things just did not matter. He was simply Sriram; someone some of us loved deeply. His biographical details were for the press like the one that a student sent me, for they had no pace in our heart.http://www.
Some said that it was a case of medical negligence. I believe that to be rubbish, and that when the call comes it heeds not our petty defences and sweeps up in its firm embrace and no tubings, procedures, ventilators can prevent it. Probably he had a premonition about his health and that explains why he wanted to cut life to the marrow and drink it to its lees in such a passion. I remember the night when we were both drunk at midnight and got into a huge fight amidst the ruins of Halebid with no human habitation around; or the time we got into the wrong bus after drinking and instead of going to Madurai reached the Aurobindo ashram at Pondicherry and fought again whether we should throw away our stock of rum given the holiness of the site; or the day we prayed at Sri Ramana Maharshi’s ashram and looked for a bar in vain in all of Tiruvannamalai; or even how we trekked all through the day to Rajmachi sustained by vodka which fellow trekkers took to be drinking water that we refused to share; or chanting Shivoham Shivoham in a drunken state at Manori beach. Yet though he was my partner in crime, I always got the stick and the blame I believe, and he got away scot free with his winsome smile. And I always looked the villain. We talked all the while "of ships and shoes and sealing wax, of cabbages and of kings and why the sea is boiling hot or whether pigs have wings". We competed in so many things great and petty without letting the other person know, just for the fun of it till i dropped out entirely, sobering down and retiring from active life and possibly lost him in the process. I changed my departments to be with him, demand that I be located next to his cabin, and live next to his house and shadow him all through such that Dr Shrikant would constantly accuse us in false jest of conspiring against him. He also chided me for living out of Sriram’s home than my own, but then we would mock the old man each evening over a drink and fight, much to Jayshree’s exasperation; who once threw us both out...and little Harshita would reveal our misdemeanours in a conspiratorial tone to my willing mother. Now those two beautiful souls are trying hard to comfort one another hiding their individual grief, waiting for some solitude to register the scale of what has happened.
I can’t believe that i can’t talk to him again. I would scold him, if i saw him, that it is the living who suffer, not the dead. I look at his mobile number and still feel he is there, he surely will call, someday somehow; that he would show up at my door to my delight smiling broadly exclaiming “Swami what are you doing?” or perhaps say “lets go”.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" Joan Didion
A friend in need is a friend indeed.. Very touching write up touched me. God Bless
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