Death - the God without the halo

No, I still am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of my death as an eventual event. If I start thinking about how it may come, then some scenarios may be frightful. But I am not really very scared to think about death. I was not.

Of late I have been having visitations of various forms of death – permanent silence, permanent darkness and permanent absence. And of being alive but not being able to reach out, or being communicated to.

Last year when Chaklada passed away suddenly, I was suddenly extremely shaken. It is not the first death that I have encountered in my life of 46 years. And in this case I was not even physically near to that tragic departure. But I think for a long time, no death has moved me so much. It’s not that I used be in touch with him very regularly. An occasional phone call, sometimes as rare as once a year or so; an even rarer meeting during one of those trips to Kolkata. Birthday text messages, as his birthday was on my birthday alarm database. That’s it. But when I suddenly got the call, I broke down. In the office. Chaklada was an immensely likeable guy. And the exceptional quantum or degree of his geniality dawned upon all of us when we realized he is no more. As and when I talk to Natu, my friend and Chaklada’s brother-in-law, these days, even after six seven months of the sad event, I realize that even if we are not discussing him, a bluish grey patina of the reality of his absence is hovering in the airwaves that is carrying our conversation. And I start to wonder, how is he and Chaklada’s wife and daughter dealing with the fact that he is no more.  I met him around 18 months back; a few months after his bypass surgery. He looked his affable usual, although a little bruised from battle with the illness and perhaps more with the mundaneness of life. I told him that perhaps this surgery was a good idea as it may bring in much needed discipline in his life style, and that I have seen much older people get a fresh lease of life from this surgery. I did not think that I will not see him again. That I will not be able to pick up a phone and talk to him for two minutes on some obscure trivia. That he will not address me as “Ponting” as the way always does and tells me that he cannot forget the similarity my face has with that of the former Aussie skipper. I cannot understand how Koli-di or her daughter deal with that absence, which was so unexpected, sudden and most of all permanent. Irretrievable. An absence which will never be filled.

While death is something from which we are hidden in the beginning and from which we try to turn our eyes away all our life, it slowly lets us know that it is inevitable. And we, sort of make an uneasy truce with that knowledge.

But another form of absence that I came to observe, and get completely traumatized by, is what happened to my uncle – Nanukaku. Last July, on a Saturday I got a call from his brother in Bangalore that Nanukaku had a massive cerebral stroke and it is doubtful if he would survive. This was out of the blue. I had met him just a few months back in his residence in Dubai. A man with immense joi de vivre, he has been insisting that I visit Dubai with family and enjoy the riches of the city, before he departs from there to return to Kolkata permanently. That never happened – our visit with family. But I managed to go and see him and Renu Kakima, his wife during one of those hectic business trips and managed to spend an evening with them. While we hadn’t met for a few years, it did not feel like it. Comfortably ensconced in the airconditioned comfort of their small apartment, scotch in our glass, we forgot the hot desert city outside, and it felt like Kolkata of 70s, only him playing my father's role, and I playing his, in a manner of speaking. He showed me his small refrigerator where he stored his perfumes and deodorants, something for which he had passion and he was quite famous for. He gave me his tips and theory about pairing deos and perfumes. We reminisced about Kolkata, about which both of us had love but not steamy eyed and impractical romanticism. He certainly wanted to go back to Kolkata and settle there after being all over India and Middle East most of his life. He was looking forward to it. But what I noticed most in him was that he did not have that fatigued demeanour of someone who has worked for too long and cannot wait to hang his boots. He seemed to be enjoying his job, and although he was in his mid sixties, He did not seem to be lacking the vitality, which is missing even in me quite frequently these days. He complained when I stopped after two whiskeys, and insisted to come out in that stifling heat of the desert night to put me in a taxi. I remember him standing on the curb in his creaseless white kurta-pyjama, his nightdress for years, looking as dapper as he did in his suits in the 80s or as trendy as he did in his Saibaba hair and multi colored shirts in 70s. Those are the indelible images of him in my mind. 

Which is irreconcilable with what I faced when I went to visit him and to meet Kakima in a hospital in Dubai. I was not prepared for what was waiting for me. I had not, till the previous evening, heard about anything called permanent vegetative state, till my other uncle, the medic in the family menioned it over phone. As I was led to his enclosure and bed by Kakima, I saw the body of a man in an unusual slumber on a reclined complex bed, with tubes going in his nose and mouth and underneath the sheet. After sanitising my hand I approached the bed and Kakima gently rubbed his hand and shoulders and started saying in his ears, "See, who has come to see you!! From Bombay! Has come to see you!" The mouth was open with dried dribble at the corners. The face sunken to another face that I do not know. There lay a body which was perhaps completely oblivious to outside world. Or perhaps not. As Kakima continued to talk to him, and tried to relax his stiffened shoulder muscles and arms, and kept on saying my name, I saw the eye moving. Without any focus or visible recognition, without a meaning, without that warmth, vivacity and conviviality that it was always filled up with. My doctor uncle explained to me that unlike coma, some of the parts of the brain is functioning, but it is not known which parts. It is not known if he can see, hear, feel the external world. If he has some or all cogitative powers left intact. There lay a body which perhaps knew that there was an outside world but could not reach out anymore.

This thought is a choking fear that keeps revisiting me in various forms. When I have my morning shower and wash the soap off my face under the streaming water, I suddenly start wondering, in that momentary helplessness and breathlessness, what if I turn blind? What if can't see this world anymore? And then I have been having this dream or vision or thought which reminded me of the medieval practice of throwing people in deep dungeons under the earth and cover the mouth of the hole. What or how would have they felt? Fear of death. Thirst. Hunger. And not being able to reach out to the world or to be reached out to. And still be alive. At least for some time.

But this darkness is as much true as the light if not more. This permanent absence is perhaps truer than the tactile presence we live with everyday. Perhaps this IS the ultimate destination, the ultimate truth.  For ages, man has sought meaning and has sought to throw light on things that we do not know. All spirituality is thus likened with light. But the truth might be that there is no meaning, and this eternal darkness, stillness, quietitude and absence is the reality, is the real presence. The God, without the halo.

Us and them - philosophically speaking

(This is an exact copy of a mail sent, on a Saturday morning, to a colleague, who is into reading a lot of high quality self-help books emanating from the West)

I was reading the HBS speech by Clayton Christensen, titled "How will you measure your life?", which later on became the core of the book you are reading. As I read it, I was slowly discerning the similarities of approach between him and Covey. In both cases, there is a hidden zealot of the hard line Christian thought. So I wasn't surprised when I found out that he was born in Salt Lake City, to Mormon parents.

The middle eastern religions provide instructions and dictats, and are more application oriented, in the external world. The Hellenic influence on Christian thought has brought a lot of focus on reason and certainty. Thus the western thought is about how you should behave in the external world, with a huge emphasis on determinism. Only recently they have started looking inward, and even then their analysis of self is in light of the external world. It is struggling to flow from outside to inside.

The oriental thought, on the other hand recognises that we still, after 2500 years since Buddha, do not know more than 0.05% of the universe, and thus real knowledge attainable by us is not the knowledge of material world, but our own selves. Our discourses are thus flowing a little more fluidly from inside to outside.

This isn't a critique of the western thought, for there is nothing good or bad in things that exist or come into being. It is just the way they are.

The matter in hand is our situation. We come from a diverse thought culture which in one sweep embraces, the profoundly philosophical, rational and almost atheistic treatise of Kapil's samkhyasutra, deeply spiritual and only symbolically religious Mohamudgar, or Nirvana Shatakam of Shankaracharya, and pantheistic tendencies of the semi-religion, wrongly known as Hinduism. On this, when the deterministic and narrowly focused western thought on work and god and country is imposed, for almost 400 years, it is bound to create some terrible confusion in our minds.

China, has avoided that to a great extent. And I believe that is a key difference (not necessarily bad or good) between us and them.

Have a great weekend!!

:-)

music and those things

I was listening to a CD of S D Burman's Bangla songs. On a Sunday morning. An agenda less Sunday morning which comes with that indescribable restlessness that modern urban living brings to us when we find we have nothing to accomplish that day. Music is a legitimate way to distract on such occasions, without extracting any commitment. Rostropovich would not like it. In the introduction to "The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection", he writes: "Real, great music should never serve as a background for activities or chores not connected with it. Our world has been cursed with "Elevator Music". Waiting in an airport or visiting the doctor or dentist, we are so often beset with canned "Classical Music". I will even visit cafes, especially in Japan that serve classical music as they serve your food. Many's the time that I would leave, paying my bill for food and drink I had neither eaten nor drunk. Because my attention has been captured by the music playing in the background."

Good man Mstislav would not like us to use music as a background. But unable to run away from our banausic lives, while longing nothing less but a total escape, we continue to use it that way. However Music is a clever master.  Relegated to background, it stills works its ways to the resonating ear, to the restless mind and to the heart ready to give in. And before you know, something else is happening to you than just getting distracted.

Actually I started writing this not because S D Burman’s music worked on me to write this.  I was not even planning to write about that music or any music at all. I was not even planning to write. But in fact I started writing to distract me; to distract me from completely breaking down in tears.  Tears, which had no reason, absolutely no reason whatsoever to burst forth. The tears were caused, in a way by the music, but not by it again.

So, as I was saying, on a bright Sunday morning, I put some old Bangla classic by the maestro S D Burman and lolled on the couch with news paper.  As the music filled the room, I was kind of swaying to the melody in a prone position. Medha came into the room, and settling down at the table to drink her milk, started complaining mildly about “old and boring music”.  I got up from the sofa, and to sort of taunt her, started making exaggerated and slow dancing gestures to the music.  But soon I was lost in my own mind and my own thoughts, or no thoughts at all, while my body kept moving in a slow pace, much, I am sure, to the amusement of my family and the maids.  Soon there was some song on the speakers which I cannot recall at all, and the melody, the interim music that goes in Indian songs between two stanzas of lyrics, started to work on my mind. It started to conjure something, which I could not touch although it was almost tangible. I could not see it but it had a picture and hues. I could not identify the flavor but it had some and more.  It created that sense of déjà vu that visits me occasionally, and always completely without any announcement. While I say déjà vu, I have this premonition that it may not be from my past, or from my life at all, at least not this life.  These fragments, intense and almost tactile, show themselves up, and saunter albeit rather transiently, just outside that invisible line beyond which I cannot reach out and capture them.  I stand there, lost in that moment, feeling inadequate every moment. Inadequate, for not having the perseverance, the dedication, the commitment to go chasing it.  And perhaps not having the tools or dexterity to capture it so that I can show and or tell about it to others.

I grope around desperately for a few moments, looking for something but not knowing what it is. I stand or sit or lie there, enjoying the color, hue, melody, texture, taste, smell and everything apparently sensory but actually unreal, associated with that ephemeral object. And I suffer my intense inability to catch hold on to it and paste on a piece of paper. And my throat chokes, my eyes start welling up and I slowly start descending to the prosaic surrounding that I am never to escape.

It’s not about music. But I have observed that music has been the trigger for most times when I have had these visitations, these satoris, that make life worthwhile.  Perhaps someday, I will be able to catch the note, the notes and the melody and put them on a ruled papyrus for others to listen to.

Till then….