It is hard to say ‘goodbye’

I am not a sentimental man but often I am caught in deeply emotional situations which leave me helpless. This happens particularly when friends die on you, laughing one day and leaving you empty the next.

With every death your world shrinks. When the people you love or quarrel with disappear, you feel cheated, as if they played their last prank on you. Their exit is often so quick that there is no time to say farewell, no time to make up after the last quarrel. The little miracle called “sorry” eludes you when you want it most. You spin around full of regrets, wishing you had said and done so many small things that you thought of but postponed.
A friend of mine died last week. He was an impossible man and an impossibly talented man. He was drunk on life and full of its hangovers. He had that strange intelligence that convinced him that he could cheat life, break its rules. He was one of those cheekily intelligent people who felt he began the chess game of life playing white pieces. When time began check-mating him, he felt his body slowing down. He realised that the best of him was over and the best that remained were his friends, his wife and his old colleagues. He realised that his eventual talent was the friends he made, not the houses he designed or the dreams he left as anarchic footnotes. I remember the last time he called drunk, unhappy, roaring with sentiment at 2 in the morning. I screamed at him out of sheer tiredness and he said, “I love you and what is wrong with saying I love you at 2 o’clock.” The logic was immaculate and exasperating. But a lot of friendships become just that. You want to sculpt it one way and it grows anarchically in a different direction. I wish I was more tolerant and then feel cheated when friends, like tricksters, pull the disappearing act on you. You run out stuck between a “sorry” and a “goodbye” and realise there is time for neither.
It is this sense of loss that I am unable to cope with. I remember talking to an older friend, a great scientist, who was also a genius. He shrugged and said, “Both my brother and wife died of cancer. Cancer makes you helpless, it destroys the ones you love. The doctors keep assuring you like professional idiots as you watch life drip away.” He paused, and then said, “I was a rational man. I hated rituals, but it is the rituals of grief that teach you wisdom. Rituals are performances and they demand one from you. You have to mourn, cry, grieve, then wait for healing. It is the ritual that lets you return to normalcy. It is boring, it is repetitive, it is redundant and yet wise. It heals.” Perform a ritual around a fire, around a diary, give a speech. But do it. Grief evaporates slowly. It needs space and time. One has to respect its music and grammar. Even then it has its ironies.
The pity was that this scientist friend was the next person to leave. He disappeared into the sea while on a swim. I went and stood before the sea. It looked angrier than I was, and it screamed, indifferent to my pain. Nature performs its dramas indifferent to the lives we enact. Yet, the cosmic scale of it gave me a sense of proportion. I now know my friend is down there, discussing evolutionary jokes, laughing with the fish, content to disappear into the sea he loved.
I drew a goodbye message on the sand and the sea wiped it with easy contempt. I laughed and never looked back.
Yet, every time I hear of another death, I feel helpless. Life seems unfair. Yet, death has its own mysteries. A single life that disappears makes one scream while a thousand bodies leave you merely numb. It happened to me after the Orissa cyclone, where bodies littered the fields, oddly intact in saline water. Instead of autobiographies, I recited statistics like some autistic creature. How do you say goodbye to a field of bodies? The only thing you have is rage and silence.
I must confess I belong to a rational, secular, individualistic age in which one can make rational choices and be psychoanalytical but is helpless before loss. I want to learn to say goodbye. I want that sense of grace, the courage to face loss, face myself in every loss. My illiteracy about grief still surprises me but I am learning.
Sometimes death seems so unfair and futile. The other day I saw a college kid die instantly, hit by a truck he was trying to outwit. His body lay on the side while the truck hurtled on. He was young, a dandy with shattered goggles and colourful socks. All of it seemed so futile. I stood a stranger, bidding goodbye, providing an anonymous salute to an anonymous man.
I remember the story of an activist friend after the 1984 riots. He was sitting appalled after the violence. An old woman he spoke to said, “Tera duty sun-na hai, mera duty rona hai” (Your duty is to listen, mine is to cry). I have sat and listened now for decades. But death always ambushes you, just as life surprises you. Between the two I know I am getting older.
The reader must forgive me for this personal piece, but sometimes there is little news in what we call news. The real story and life’s meaning often lie in the personal.