Dudurudh

There’s a lot to loathe about the process of grieving amidst the lives we live. Our listless effort to gather the puddle of memories, joys, sadness and feeling of loss in the cup of our trembling palms and carefully move it across the table as if it were a solid block of butter so we can do what we imagine needs to get done – being researchers and doctors and architects and lawyers and engineers and sons and daughters and mothers, attending meetings, replying to emails, scanning patients, being strong and unwavering and professionals – all until the WhatsApp notification tone goes off again with a picture from 2012 or a voice note from last year and an anecdote from JP Nagar or Wayanad or Goa and rooftops or beaches or mountains and about nearly dying and laughing or about nearly dying and crying or about nearly dying and staying alive and then, and then suddenly the whole world collapses into the room in front of you. The nose twitches, eyes go out of focus, breathing becomes unsteady and tastes slightly saline. That feeling is not sadness – its perspective. It’s the realization that we don’t see each other nearly enough. The hugs aren’t long enough and tight enough. That in the serious world of the mature adults, the emails and the meetings and doctoring and engineering and lawyering and researching don’t wait despite our desperation (they do, actually). That we want, more than anything, to be together again. That mortality is real but that beginning with high school, we can’t even count the many different and full mini lives that we lived together as we grew up. That in the end – the very end – we will celebrate those many mini lives that we lived. 

I can’t write an obituary for Vedu. I met him this past year, for what I didn’t know would be the last time, on the sidewalk near his house – a stones throw away from where we first met in a classroom 16 years ago. We spoke for a while about the incredibly difficult set of circumstances he was battling and then about some new repository of audiobooks he’d discovered and about other random things – life and the universe, perhaps? He flicked the ash from his second cigarette of the evening and made some comment about the massive rat that had just scurried between our legs into the sewer below. I don’t remember what his comment was but I laughed a lot. That exact portion of the universe – between where we were standing that evening and our school barely a kilometer away – is familiar with the sound of that laughter. There aren’t grains of sand in that neighbourhood or times of day or night that haven’t echoed with the chaos of a dozen teenagers living out our fullest lives without a care in the world. Today, it feels like it has all fallen silent – but only until another WhatsApp notification pops up with another funny picture of him or a screenshot of some witty conversation or a low-quality video of something mundane to the rest of the world but hilarious in ours. Then the laughter is back – once again instigated by him, this time in his absence. We’ll hold on to that and each other, forever. I love you, my friend.