So long da….

It takes death to drag me back to writing.

I lost a friend a couple weeks back. It was wholly unexpected and yet when he was finally pronounced dead, it came as a relief to us friends. So precipitous was his decline from a healthy individual to a clinically dead mass of flesh.

NR and I were schoolmates for a few years. Back then, he was always full of energy, opinions and dare I say, himself. He seemed blessed with an intensity which in retrospect most likely consumed him. We kind of drifted apart after passing out from school. But I used to get regular updates of him from mutual friends and it didn’t seem he had changed much. He seemed to have retained his intensity and was channeling it productively into his work as an engineer in an aeronautics company.

And then, quite fortuitously, we met a couple of years back. He was in India for a few days after his father’s demise and I happened to be in Bangalore on work at the same time. I was keen to meet him after all these years and we ended up spending a lovely evening. Me, NR and another classmate. It was to have been a get together of more people, but thankfully in retrospect, others kept crying off. This allowed us the time and space to indulge in nostalgia and utterly pointless yet eminently enjoyable pop philosophy. All it took us was a few beers and slices of pizza. As the evening wore on, it became obvious that NR was tormented by his thoughts. He was still convinced of his own righteousness and yet there were traces of tentativeness. Life was not being linear and this seemed to be worrying him. His father’s passing away seemed to have affected him profoundly and like most of us, he was keen to “make sense” of all that was happening. And in trying to do this, in my opinion, he was clutching at straws. I told him as much and added that most of us, unfortunately, are fairly incapable of “figuring out” these things, presuming of course that there is anything to be figured out in the first place. He disagreed, though less vehemently than I would have expected. At the end of the day, we made our peace and parted ways. But the memory of the evening and in particular, the depth of his torment, stayed with me.

As it usually happens, life then got in the way of any meaningful “keeping in touch”. Life handed both of us our share of unexpected hands which we had to deal with. Yet, I made it a point to check on NR’s well being as often as I could. After a while he stopped responding to my messages which I thought, knowing him, was par for the course and nothing significant to get worried about. I also presumed that the inevitable process of acceptance had kicked in.

Then, quite shockingly, we received a message that NR had suffered a health incident and was in hospital. We monitored his progress and initially things went well enough for all of us to start hoping for his full recovery. But it was a false dawn and in a few days his condition had deteriorated irretrievably. So much so that when the end came when it did, we could not have hoped for anything more merciful.

As it were, our meeting in Bangalore was the last time we spoke. Maybe because of my own familiarity with some of the helplessness he expressed, I kept returning to our conversation. At times, I was curious to understand the progress he may have made in resolving some of the issues. I was even hopeful that we could exchange notes and learn from each other’s lived experiences. That was not to be. Even more poignant was to hear one of the very last voice notes he had sent to one of our classmates. It was apparent that he continued to be bewildered by all that was happening around him. Given all this, it would be facile to presume that afterlife would have provided him with the answers he was seeking. Alas, there is no such confirmation from him so far………. Till such time, so long da.