My Daily Concluding Ceremony
When I was going through Seema Goswami’s brilliant column titled “So sorry for your loss” in HT Brunch last Sunday, I was struck by her opening remark. “There is something about death that makes us exceedingly uncomfortable. We don’t want to imagine a time when our parents will no longer be around. We don’t want to dwell on the prospect of our own deaths.”
My mind started racing down memory lane, two days after the devastating earthquake that struck Nepal, (April 25, 2015) and shook the very foundations of the Himalayan kingdom. The huge loss of human lives sent shock waves across the world. The whole of Northern India was in a state of shock. Since Lucknow too was shaken to the core, the aftershocks that followed led to panic and mayhem all around. So when a severe jolt rocked Lucknow at around 11 a.m. on April 27, 2015, to be precise, I saw two of my colleagues hurrying out of our university building, with their backpacks, camera et al. I watched in bemused silence and at that point in time, I was sitting in my Director’s cabin when we heard the rumbling and saw the tables shake. When my boss expressed thoughts about moving out of the building, I comforted him saying that by the time we would walk down our first floor office, the tremors would have ended. That was that.
After an hour, when I saw my young colleagues trundle back to the faculty room, I asked them disconcertedly as to why they had rushed out despite being aware of the fact that Lucknow did not fall under a high seismic zone. One of the colleagues turned to me nonchalantly and what he said made my hair stand on end: “Arre sir, you have already lived 80 per cent of your life. Now, let us live out our young lives.” The sentence had a life-changing impact on my life. I then began to wonder what exactly life –or for that matter- death meant to me. I recalled my days of yore, where I used to be constantly haunted by the fear of death.
When I was 16 years old, one day my father fell down in the bathroom and injured his head. The house was thrown in disarray and when the doctor who was rushed in, diagnosed it to be a severe case of hyper-acidity, I somewhere felt I was responsible for it. When my father came around later at night, he turned to the assembled family members quite dramatically and in a severe tone declared: All the stress I am going through these days, is because of Chander’s wild and wicked ways”. I was dumbfounded.
To put things in perspective, my joint-smoking experiments had got my family in a flap. Ever since that day, the fear of my father’s death started haunting my psyche. Many nights I would lie in bed wondering when the bathroom door would swing open and I would hear my father screaming as he crashed to imminent death. I then started penning down poems on death, devastation and tragedy. I wrote about how the three are the handmaidens to success, for an upcoming journalist that I thought I was. For over two decades, I sharpened my pen doing stories on death and tragedies and it became my calling card.
My fear of death made me hungry for knowledge, so that I could dispel the notions of darkness that seemed to permeate my soul. I dabbled in the secret orders of the day and became a part-time occultist. That soon lead me to flirt with Indology and mythology and I became a die-hard fan of the ghoulish misguided genius and necromancer Alistair Crowley. His Book of Thoth became my guiding light in my ‘dead and decaying’ profession of journalism. I soon felt it was fashionable to flaunt my deviant thoughts to keep off my fear of my death.
But now in the 20 per cent of my remaining life, I needed to come to terms with life on life’s terms and did not want death to come in the way of my happiness. I decided to catch ‘death’ by the horns and fling it out of the recesses of my mind. At the point in time, the university was conducting the final year students’ concluding ceremony. The term concluding ceremony triggered a thousand thoughts in me. I wondered what if I could watch my own concluding ceremony. I fancied my chances of watching my own death as an out-of-the-world experience and then return the next day to haunt my own body. When I shared these blissfully ‘wicked’ thoughts with my colleagues they laughed me away and forbade me to think in such morbid terms. To me, death was not an end but the beginning of a new life. That night I wondered if I was just being grandiose in entertaining the idea of death or was it to shock myself from the stupor of being ‘living dead’. I honestly admitted to myself that the idea of personal concluding ceremony was fine as a dramatic thought but in real life was I ready to face my own separation from this world? Did I need to hoodwink myself to think the world is an illusion and it is time to call it a day? I full well realized that if I had to opt for death voluntarily, then the pain and suffering could well be hard to endure, but endure it I must. As a family man, who had miles to go and family promises to keep, was I trying to escape responsibilities? No, not really. I then pontificated on why thoughts of death are taboo in society and why is it such a dreaded subject. Or it could well be that I was trying to play out a romantic abstract notion of death that would bring me sympathy and affection by the troves.
Questions apart, I came to the conclusion that by being merely told that I had lived out 80 per cent of my life, I had begun to stop chaining my thoughts. I realized I needed to unchain my present thoughts from the past and from the future. It was a moment of great emotional insight. A Zen Buddhism moment of self-awakening! That very moment, I truly turned into a proverbial new leaf. My work skills and productivity increased by leaps and bounds as I realized that I didn’t have time on my side, since it is set to conquer me, sooner than later. I had now become a man in a hurry. There was so much to be done and so much to be lived in one single day. Philosophically, I had long understood the concept of death being rebirth, of death being the beginning of a better life. But today, I ‘kill’ my daily sinful thoughts at the altar of truth and embrace my fellow-beings, like there is no tomorrow. This is how I live my own concluding ceremony, every moment of the day. Life, I hug you, always groovy!
I will conclude by sharing Seema Goswami’s wonderful thoughts on grieving: “Sometimes it is okay to not say anything at all: If you can’t think of anything appropriate to say, stay silent. It is for times like this that hugs were invented.”
PS: Today, as life turns the bend, I look at the long and straight road ahead!