Death and her friend, an exchange
It’s been a month since Dad’s passing. In his absence, the nostalgia of his presence is all I have.
Nostalgia, though is a friend with a mind of its own. She arrives without notice, and comes bearing gifts that she alone decides. If you will your memory to remember something specific, you’ll struggle but let the mind wander and you might be rewarded. Push the mind towards a definite day or an instance and it will go all blurry but later, on its own whim and at its own pace, nostalgia arrives with what you were trying to recollect, and renders you dispossessed.
You hope for an escape in the recollection of that memory. Instead, nostalgia transforms you into a forlorn refugee. On other occasions, nostalgia trickles herself into a conversation. Miles away from the context of what’s being spoken, it brings either a joyful fragment from the past or it grips you with unspeakable sadness of what was or even worse, what could’ve been.
This evening as I was heading back home after my weekly run of groceries, it was the silliest of Dad’s images that struck me like a bolt. It was his manner of appreciating a repartee or a joke from someone in the midst of a conversation. Sometimes, he’d accompany it with a single spoken word, Waah or Daarun (meaning excellent in Bengali).
Alongside, he’d also lift his head, sport a big smile and his right hand would spread out, taut and straight, in the direction of the narrator, as if he were saying, ‘Well done, you!’
I remember this gesture so specifically, and yet in all the time he was alive, and in the thousands of times I have seen him do this, I never paid this much attention to it as I did today trying to recall everything about that gesture. Was it a straight vertical lift of his chin? Or did he tilt his head sideways? Did he use his right hand or left? Or both? The heart ached for these answers that the mind was reluctant to provide and the harder I tried, the worse my recollection got.
Victor Hugo once said that there is no force that can stop an idea whose time has come. He might as well have been speaking about death. Or nostalgia. That’s how close they are. Like death, nostalgia needs neither a season nor a motive and when either of them comes marching, there’s nothing to do but accept the unstoppable force of their being.
Like companions who have lasting relationships, death and nostalgia also have their differences, but that only draws them closer to each other. Death is cold, nostalgia warm. Death is final, nostalgia recurs. Death takes, nostalgia gives. Death can outlast everyone and everything except nostalgia and nostalgia waits for death so that she can become even more meaningful for the bereaved.
As I walked up the stairs today, I imagined a conversation up there in heaven.
Death heads out for a walk in the evenings. Nostalgia calls her from behind and asks, ‘Want me to come?’
‘Of course. I am inadequate without you’, replies Death.
Dad hears this exchange from a distance. He finds this witty. He lifts his head and gives a beaming smile. This time he tells death, ‘Daarun!’
Meanwhile, I ring the doorbell.
It was always his right hand he lifted, I recall and break down in the hallway.
