Meditations on death and dying, part three if you like

I was very tired at the end of secondary school, because I had suffered such a nasty, brooding childhood, and had read so much (it takes my breath away to see how little the vast majority of ‘educated’ people have read by age 16 these days, but maybe it’s good they haven’t…), and had grown up so achingly lonely and misunderstood.

Then came eight years in Kolkata. Went through high school, college and university; broke my heart over a love affair that was doomed from the start, had a very bitter disillusionment and rejection inside the family, read vastly more than anyone I knew, had more than a little brush with the working world, suffered the ghastliest of physical pain over and over again (look up memoirs of things like how a friend cut out a festering carbuncle with scissors and forceps with no anesthetic beyond ice and alcohol), discovered how utterly unsympathetic and downright nasty so many people could be, fell seriously ill, was thrown off the ladder of career advancement by a soulless fate, and came back to my home town. I was more tired than I could have believed I could be eight years ago. I had no idea how I could get on with life.

Life picked me up and got me that schoolmaster’s job. Then for a while it was roses and sunshine, though there were dark patches enough in between. I found a calling, and gave my heart and soul to it. It brought me rich rewards, in many forms. Despite much angst and heartburns and nasty unexpected turns of fortune every now and then, it was on the whole a wonderful time. For a while, I forgot the tiredness and bitterness and sense of futility aching in my bones.

And then my daughter was born. No, it was as if I was born anew, and truly, ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’. It was as if I had finally found what I had been longing for with all my being all those barren years behind me without knowing it: not religion, not politics, not socializing, not philosophy, not money-making, not romance, but the sheer, unadulterated, all-fulfilling joy of bringing up a child.

Two decades and a half have rolled by since then again. So many thousand pupils have passed through my classes in the meantime: so many have adored me and gushed over me, then forgotten me or remembered only to badmouth me. So many small and major cataclysms in the family, including yet more heartbreaks, and bringing home the parents I had thought I had lost forever, gradually losing my most loved ones including my lifelong dogsbody, my grandfather then my father, and watching my mother slowly growing old. My wife and daughter leaving the family hearth and moving farther and farther away, not just bodily but in mind and soul. I keep on ploughing my lonely furrow still, mostly because there’s not much else that I am good at, and it at least keeps me sane. These last years have been merely slogging away, pulling the oars relentlessly towards a dimly visible shore that now often seems like a mirage, knowing more and more that the world grows increasingly boring, repetitive and unrewarding, and eventually it will come down to dragging on mere bodily survival; ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. Only hoping it won’t drag too long. Some people are so lucky; they are still working like a horse according to their old, old routine when they just drop down and die. Well, I do at least hope that it would be only a matter of days or weeks, not months or years. So you can treat this post as the third installment of my Meditations on death and dying… not everyone, at least at my age, and having lived the way I have, is afraid of dying as such. Which is why I feel like throwing up, in this pandemic context, that so many people, even much older than me or with parents who have long passed three score years and ten, are wetting their pants to think that they or those close to them might die off soon.

Greatest lesson learnt from this sojourn on earth: most people don’t care for us for what we are, and the very few who do are not understood, let alone appreciated. The mother of an ex student, now pushing fifty, recently communicated to me, after complete silence for nearly a  decade, saying she wanted moral and spiritual counselling from me, because, to quote her, I am different from everybody else she has met in her whole life. In very polite terms, I told her to buzz off: I am too old to get involved. She should have asked twenty five years ago.

If there is something called an afterlife, not a return to this world, please God.