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An eventful Saturday turned topsy-turvy on hearing the news of sudden demise of my friend’s father. I was too shocked to react and I desperately wanted to rush to my friend. The circumstances of his death were discomforting. He was a tailor in my street, stitching birthday and Diwali dresses for our family. His wife is a home-maker and he has one son (my friend) and two daughters, all of whom are married with kids and lived in different towns. He lived with his wife in the village, living a quiet retired life.
On the fateful day he was alone, with his wife having gone to one of her daughters. It was when he had gone out to buy dinner that a random drunkard rammed his motorbike on him, felling him to the ground. He suffered grievous injuries on the back of his head. A Good Samaritan took him to the nearby Govt hospital where he died possibly of internal haemorrhage caused by head injury.
Despite heading a large family with son, daughters and grand kids, he died alone like an orphan in a matter of minutes. This incident coupled with other untimely deaths in the family in the recent past, let loose a train of thought. I felt deeply affected not only because death can be random or freak but also because my father happens to be in a similar position like the deceased man. It could easily have been him.
There is a popular notion that parents always see their kids as only kids, incapable of seeing them as fully grown human beings. The reverse is also true. The children invariably see their parents as infallible beings, who would always be there for them for eternity. This belief is sort of ingrained from our birth, reinforced continuously by their series of sacrifices over the years and crystallised as faith – faith that divinity is perceived through parents.
When you find your father feeling exhausted after a couple of climb upstairs to dry out clothes under afternoon sun, you wonder why. After all, he is your father and you have never seen him stretch out tired, except when under illness. Gradually, age catches up with him and his mobility winds down like a stretched coil. It is a gradual process, preparing us for the ultimate eventuality – eventuality that he will one day reside only in memories.
Freak events like the one discussed earlier gives no such chance. He is torn apart from our life all of a sudden giving us no chance to react. Initial days will be filled with shock induced by trauma. We will have friends and relatives comforting and consoling us when the enormity of the event has not even sunk into us. The next few days will keep us busy with all sorts of rituals to bid adieu to the departing soul.
It is only when we are left to ourselves after all the rituals that we will realise what has been cleaved away from us. It will hit us that one constant presence in our life right from the day we are born has been snatched away from us brutally. We would rue not spending that one extra hour every day, one extra day every week and one extra week every year with him. We will wonder what unfulfilled desire was in his mind, what untold words in his lips, what little prayer in his heart when the untoward happened. No one will ever know!!!
Keats said “Melodies unheard are sweeter!!” In this occasion, melodies unheard proved to be the bitterest! Let us take time to hear the melodies. We never know when they will vanish into ether.
Sure these tragedies turn us into a crumpled piece of paper. Be that as it may, we cannot remain as such forever. Life has to move on more so if we ourselves have become parents, entrusted with the responsibility of guiding lives of our children. We must imbibe the memories of the departed parent in us, content in the belief that they have now become part of us, safely ensconced in our hearts – a place from which they can never be yanked away, much like we once used to be in their minds, as a thought – a figment of imagination. We should strive to be that guiding divine light to our protégé as was the departed soul to us.
As the old saying goes, humanity advances one funeral at a time. We all are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. It is time to be that shoulder for our off-springs and let humanity advance further.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
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Source: The Print
