On Death

I don't quite remember when I first learned about the existence of death. But for a long, long time, I refused to acknowledge its inevitability. Since I grew up among a lot of medical people, the knowledge of death must have seeped into my consciousness quite early in life. But, paradoxically, I was also quietly confident that those who died did so because they had the misfortune to have lived their lives before immortality was invented. Just as a child growing up early in the 1940s must have known quite certainly that it was only a matter of time before the British left India for good, so did I grow up with the calm assurance that immortality would be discovered long before my time was up. I had queer notions of immortality. Sometimes, I imagined it to be a kind of eternal existence, tranquil, peaceful and embracing the whole world. Sometimes, I would imagine immortality to be a smooth and endless transition from one life to another. But to me it never was nothing, it was always something or the other, very real, inevitable and waiting just round the corner. For the time being, however, there was death. To me the cruellest part of death was symbolized by an unfinished story or book. One day, you were there, ravenously devouring it or idly flipping the pages, dog-earing a page to carry on the next day, and the next day you weren't there anymore. You had ceased to be. The story or the book would never be completed by you. The story would be there forever, just as inexorably as the irrevocable fact of your not having finished it despite wanting to. As cruelly true as Genera;l Dyer's Jallianwalabagh massacre. As cruelly true as the Holocaust. A dark, evil shadow hovering over the survivors. Haunting them in wakefulness and sleep. As determined to seek revenge as Caesar's ghost.