ALIVE AND KICKING

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
- Woody Allen.

It was Father’s Day - June 16, 2019. The Sun blazed with savage intensity over the open-air crematorium on the banks of the divine Ganges. The brazen flames cavorted with unconcealed ecstasy over the pyre that rested my grandfather as if celebrating their triumph over his lifeless form. A sinking feeling of deja vu overwhelmed me. Barely three months back, I had witnessed my maternal aunt being consigned to the all-purifying flames after she succumbed to a massive cardiac arrest. She was only 53. Obesity was her nemesis.

The combined heat from the Sun and the pyres must have been excruciating. Yet I stood there, unflinching. Had grief paralysed my somatosensory system, or was I hallucinating? The past, the present, and the future appeared to coalesce before my eyes. My aunt, my grandmother, my father, and my mother: one after the other, they joined my grandfather on his pyre. Paradoxically, I neither felt pain nor sadness at this mass funeral of my dear ones. I looked around and found the crematorium full of dead people walking towards their respective pyres. Suddenly, existence itself began to appear meaningless in the face of inevitable death.

I withdrew into a shell and practically stopped interacting with people. Though I was never the archetypal bibliophile, I had been a consistent performer in academics. However, even academics ceased to interest me anymore. Predictably, my unabashed rejection of social ties and nonchalance at nosediving academic performance drove my parents to utter panic. Consequently, perhaps, my oversolicitous father negotiated a year-long sabbatical from work, and tried his best to divert me from the path to ‘self-destruction’. His efforts, however, were futile as I continued to throw caution to the winds, brutally insensitive to the mental agony to which I had subjected my hapless parents. Almost a year passed thus - a year of uncountable sleepless nights for my parents.

It was April 29, 2020. “Irrfan is dead! Cancer!”, announced my younger brother as he barged into the living room, his countenance an inscrutable concoction of emotions. Irrfan (Khan), incidentally, was the actor who portrayed Senior Pi in the Hollywood blockbuster, “Life of Pi”. For the few minutes that followed, the silence was deafening, almost unendurable. And then I erupted. “Why can’t those ‘Great’ scientists cure all diseases.... and death? Why do people have to lose their dear ones?”.

“Maybe Destiny has chosen YOU for the task”, quipped a voice, disrupting the menacing quiet. Startled, I swivelled around. There sat my mother: calmness incarnate. Yet her piercing eyes radiated a steely resolve that unnerved me. How much I hated her for ‘taunting’ me. What made her think I could do something which “great scientists” couldn’t - arrest diseases and death? The very next day, another Bollywood actor, Rishi Kapoor, lost his battle with Cancer.

Unknowingly, the purport of my Mom’s words gradually pervaded my entire fabric. The very eventuality of having to lose a dear one made me jittery. “What can I do? I am too frail”, I argued with myself unconvincingly. But the more I contemplated, the more I was convinced that since I dread losing my loved ones, I can’t afford to remain a mute spectator on the sidelines waiting to be rescued by some imaginary emancipator who probably doesn’t even exist. I have wrecked my life and the lives of my parents enough already. It’s atonement time. As my father says, “You are not dead till you are alive. And till you are alive, keep kicking.”

So here I am; alive and kicking, raring to wage an epic war with Death. A war that I intend to fight unto Death!