It was the middle of the day, perhaps a quarter to one, and I was in my office doing my official chores. Seems a little overstatement and an ounce of an exaggeration though I’m often complimented for doing my job with total justice and concentration. As I engross in my work I embody a mild retrospection of Patricia Hample’s Look at a Tea Cup where the cup is symbiotic to work and identity. Basically, the idea is the way you do your work determines who and what you are. In the meantime, I got startled up when the Front Desk Officer informed me about the call that had rung all the way from my home. This psychosis got further fraught up a sense of consternation inside me and my body outside reacted with unendurable torment like anything. This painful oddity subjected me to bizarre speculation that something pernicious might have happened back at home.
My home is the place where I had kept him as a living carcass a month ago. Earlier, he was hospitalized for more than a month, and I myself had been his follow up there. When we admitted him he had no consciousness for three days. After three days he was diagnosed with a severe case of Schizophrenia. People around had looked at him with suspicion, doubt, and hesitation, and sometimes with a kind of fear psychosis. I talked to doctors who had similar opinions. However, amidst hopelessness and desperation, I found him the reverse. In fact, I had found in him the unquenched insanity. Like the insanity begets creativity I had found him a curious explorer, an inquisitive child, an artist willing to act resilient against society and recreate everything in his own design. Whenever anyone approached him he responded with astonishment as if something new, something formidable would happen. His queer response to everything made me rethink him as a child rejoicing and beguiling at every wonder around. His response was poetic and his ways like an artist. He was perhaps into preparatory grief to final pacification of life and death. I could observe his preparedness in his eyes and the movements those eyes imbricated. Call it my fate, I was really pleased to see him as an artist who is reviewing all mundanity on the one hand and, on the other hand, I was really panicked, perhaps with the equal parity, to see him die. This made me to think about the epicenter of the problem.
I still remember he did never live his life. He lived for others- mostly for his wife and children. As the fated man subjected to the sociocultural masculine discourse he had struggled for his survival. His individuality had evaporated long ago; had been ghettoed in solipsism and his self caught on the terrains of bipolar extremes of Id and Superego. Out of three children, I was always dear to him. I was his beloved. He loved me a lot, perhaps more than anyone. Other members of the family always overlooked him and invariably made him feel abandoned. He always sacrificed his pleasures to the amusement of others, and that day he was sacrificing his life too. Ironically, he was dying to amuse others. His death is but made. He could have lived longer if he had received the dignity of his life and sacrifice.
As I was knocked in my office, I approached the call with a kind of consternation. I had chill into my backbone. I lifted the receiver up, responded to the call. I heard a shrewd voice of his wife, “he departed just five minutes ago, so come home soon.” I really felt that her voice had no remorse, not even a spoon of agony. The sky fell over my head. I remained perplexed, hit by a sudden thunderstorm. I stood then and there, unmoved. And gradually I felt that my feet are slipping. Earth below me shook terribly. I nearly fell over. Suddenly, I felt comfortable support to my back and knew that it was from the security who was glaring me and my frantic activities.
Now, I had only one motive- to reach home and see the dead body. I reached home quickly. We, including my spouse and a son, rushed to fly off. The travel was a curse to me as it never ended. I found the journey a perennial burden. He died after a month of the sabotaged trial and tribulation with destiny and I was dying multiple deaths during the journey. The memory of my childhood, his love and care, his support ran all over my veins. These images kept flashing on and flashing off invariably. Suddenly, I looked at my own son, merely a three years old child on my lap. He smiled faintly at me and his smile forced me to visualize the same vista of my life where I used to do the same to him. The soul chocked and the palpitations went off my eyes poured down. But I hid it from my wife because a male is not supposed to weep, but face everything with the audacity to disintegrate into a depression to severe schizophrenia to death.
Finally, I reached home. The mob was around. People were talking about how hard and bad his death was. I stepped onto the porch. There on the ground, he was laid like a log covered with a white canopy. People glared at me. We made the necessary plan for his funeral. I was broken inside and outside. I went into the room. I saw his wife and two children around busy in a loud talk. His death was indifferent. They were making plans and merry notes, I guess. When they saw me, they jostled up. I saw them quite happy, quiet silence. I wanted to ask how it all happened. But knowing that it would a rhetorical question I kept still. But quietness is different from stillness. Still does not mean doing anything. They ate words so they were quite. I had many words to ask, so I was still. I came outside and observed the mob. All had the opinion that he could have lived longer if proper care and dignity to his living were ensured.
We did his necessary crematory rituals. He suddenly disappeared. I was left with astonishment to see how cruel, barbaric, and demonic human nature can be. All theories and philosophies whirled around my head. I remembered Darwinianism and the drive to survival. I remembered Hemingway’s philosophy on human nature and how human beings are though perishable but undefeatable.
I got once again subdued inside my own pain and was lost in my memory, retrospection, and agony. What I knew was he was no more, and they killed him.
