The vocabulary of my mother’s house comes from satsang. When someone dies, it is said here – ‘His body has become peaceful.’ The Sindhi community, which has seen the sorrows of partition, has sometimes been successful and sometimes suffered huge losses by dabbling in various businesses, is not easily afraid of death and diseases. I remember father used to say to mother – ‘My clothes are torn, in how many places will I be able to sew them?’ Actually he was talking about his body. I heard mom and dad asking each other whose ‘station’ would reach the station first? That is, who will get off the train of life first? Is this an acceptance of death and a philosophy? If I compare it with my Gujarati in-laws, the story becomes different. Here the body is taken care of with emphasis on ‘Quality of Life’ and memories are preserved even after death. One family has gone through the ups and downs of history, the other has clung to education and modernity. I feel that between these two, I do not experience two homes, but two different countries. And their differences are most evident in their attitudes toward death. Whereas it is said that death is the same for everyone. The first thing that comes to my mind are John Donne’s famous lines – ‘Death, be not proud, some have called the mighty and the dreadful, for they are not so.’ Here the poet is saying to death that you are proud of the fact that you destroy us, but we sleep for a long time and create a new world somewhere else. Death, don’t be proud that you are strong. Death has to perform its duty and comes to serve everyone at some point or the other. When I read this poem in school, there was neither the need nor the ability to think about death. But now I have started remembering this poem. Does it talk about impunity? Is this what my parents understood in their own way? Is it possible to live without fear of death? This question comes many times now. I guess I didn’t feel any fear at the thought of my death. But witnessing the death of your close friends and family is a scary thought. It is a scary thought to find yourself in a sea of sadness. How do we make that idea smaller? Will saying that ‘the body has become peaceful’ give us the assurance of the immortality of the soul? Will this grief become bearable by feeling alienated towards loved ones? With all these questions in mind, I started looking for the idea of death in literature. I find literature to be the best reflection of the depths of life. Anyway, I want to hear you a special story from this journey. If I get a chance, something else next time. This is the story of Gujarat’s well-known and senior writer Dhiruben Patel, titled ‘Angat Anubhav’. Rasikbhai is a very talkative employee and is an expert in narrating bad news. When he sits on his chair in the office, other people do not move around. If Rasikbhai is asked if he wants tea, then the Purana of tea starts that hey tea, you should drink Mehsana’s tea, where is milk like that of a cow these days? In this way the conversation goes from tea to milk and from milk to cow and buffalo. If the topic of rotis came up, Rasikbhai would start narrating how much roti the servants eat nowadays, what kind of flour makes soft rotis, where the wheat from is good, etc. Once the people in the office come to know that Rasikbhai’s young son passed away suddenly. When Rasikbhai returned to the office after a few days, people thought that he would speak a lot. He had the habit of speaking so much. But Rasikbhai remained silent. Whatever questions are asked, their answers can only be yes or no. They had escaped the jungle of words! This is the most complex color of death. Losing your own child. Then death comes into the midst of your life! I remember father used to say to mother – ‘My clothes are torn, in how many places will I be able to sew them?’ Actually he was talking about his body. I heard mom and dad asking each other whose ‘station’ would reach the station first? (These are the author’s own views)
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Rita Kothari’s Column: To what extent are philosophies included in our domestic conversations?
