My Friend Sriram

A Srinivas Rao    26^th September 2016

He would have been 54 today and would have been as cheerful as always, for neither misfortune nor tempest would dampen his optimism. “A person must have a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge” remarked Nietzsche and Sriram was doubly so. Yet rather than listening to the gurgling brook of his voice over the phone, I am met with silence, four months since his untimely demise. I haven’t deleted his number though, not that he might call, but that I might wake up. I miss his infectious and disarming smile that would put even Medusa lower her guard. This is a reminiscence of a person who was close to me and was my best friend. I have wondered what if any we had in common, I believe it wasn’t much, yet we liked each other’s company and it has intrigued me as much as onlookers. I can’t describe him in eulogistic terms; though he had much that was worthy of applause. Probably what fascinated me were the contradictions which we ever so unconsciously gloss over as we make much of a false sense of consistency as a virtue.  Most of us if not all are inconsistent creatures, inconstant and shifting in our motivations, fears, desires and aspirations, it is ‘human all too human’. Consistency I think is a narrative strategy of the mind that possibly highlights, represses, and interpolates in retrospect, creating a convenient fiction of the self. At a distance from one’s own self one might see the range of protean characteristics that really animates each of us; though we crave for that indubitable, mysterious, unchanging essence which might well be a figment of imagination.

S Sriram-Farewell My Friend!

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.