When a Young Person Dies…

Sanjeev Kumar Nath

One day some years ago I had gone to a town in West (Lower) Assam, on some official work, and my companion in that trip was a Professor of Arabic.

Finding him knowledgeable about Islam, and wishing to quench my thirst for knowing more about Prophet Muhammed and the divine communications He had received, I asked him many questions, and he answered all of them quite satisfactorily.

The long hours of the cab ride to and from the town was spent in this discussion. I was happy to know more about the Prophet. Since I am interested in understanding mystical phenomena, my mind kept on dwelling on what the professor had said about how the divine communications would come to the Prophet.

That night I had a dream. I was alone in a closed room, and a spoken sentence, “The Universe is a place full of possibilities” was thrust into that room.

It was as if some mysterious power forced that sentence through the closed walls of the room so that I could receive it. When I awoke in the morning, the dream was still fresh in my mind. How do I interpret this dream? At one level, one can say that it is nothing extraordinary.

It simply means that many things are possible in the universe; many things can happen, and many things actually happen. But it could also be interpreted as a dream bearing a strong positive message, a message of optimism—that one needn’t despair if some doors seem closed, because after all the universe is pregnant with possibilities.

            This positive, optimistic meaning appealed to me. I wanted to believe that that is what the dream was telling me. But possibilities do not mean only positive possibilities; possibilities can also be negative. If the universe is a place full of positive possibilities, it is also full of negative possibilities. It cannot be full of positive possibilities to the exclusion of negative possibilities.

The world is a place in which there is no justice in the sense in which human beings understand justice. You see cunning, dishonest people rise to wealth and fame, you see selfish, stupid, cruel ego-maniacs become rulers, you see honest, hardworking people struggling not to lose their sanity in an insane world, and you see these things happening all the time. Such things seem to be the norm, not the exception.

Most people who are not dishonest or cunning or ego-maniacs; most people who mean no harm to others; or who try to do good, have their own little problems of life to struggle with. They go on with their lives, experiencing the sorrows and joys that life throws at them. Most people get used to the injustice and absurdity they see everywhere.

However, occasionally some occurrence can hit you very hard, and the injustice or meaninglessness or absurdity of the world suddenly stares you in the face.

One such thing is the death of a young person.

Many years ago, when I was a postgraduate student, one of my classmates, a girl who lived in the university campus, died. We had a class with a teacher who was not known to be particularly soft-hearted and was something of a disciplinarian. Students who didn’t like his serious, grim looks used to skip his classes. That day we saw a different person in him. He could not even begin teaching. He wept and said he was sorry he was not in a mood to teach.

From what we could make out from his words between sobs, he was especially affected by the girl’s death because he had known her for years as a little child growing up in the university campus.

Then years later, when I was teaching in a college in Upper Assam, I went trekking inside the Namdapha National Park and some areas bordering Myanmar, with a group of students (all boys) and a few teachers (all men). Assam Rifles jawans with guns and with knowledge of the forest terrain were with us as guides.

Two of the boys, one a Gorkha and the other a Bengali, were intimate friends, and they somehow spent more time with us, the young teachers, than with the other boys. I had many photographs in which these boys could be seen reclining in their sleeping bags in the place where we teachers were also spending the night. Or they would be sitting with us, smiling.

Then, after we returned from the trekking and camping and got back to business as usual, one day these two boys went for a swim in the Buri Dihing river. Some eyewitnesses said that one of them, who was not an expert swimmer, had strayed into strong currents of the river, and his friend tried to save him from his difficulty.

In the end, however, both were drowned. It was a torture to look at those Namdapha photos after that, with the smiling faces of the two boys with the teachers.

I have suffered the loss of my own parents, and others close to me or related to me. I have been deeply affected by the loss of my parents, and have also mourned the deaths of other friends and relatives. However, the death of a young person affects me in a different way. It is difficult to express the feeling of utter bewilderment and sorrow that the news of such death brings.

The other day one of our postgraduate students died, and I am yet to come to terms with the news of her death. She was one of the students belonging to a small group of which I am the mentor, and I had met her only a few days before her death when she came to ask something about an assignment that she would have to complete before the end of the semester. And then suddenly, she is gone, never to come back.

She happened to be one of the few students whose attendance in class was 100 per cent. She would always be seated in the front, and now I cannot but notice her absence among the first row of students.

            All the teachers were in a state of shock when the news of her death was conveyed to us, and many of us drove to her home, quite near the university, that day. Her body was in the courtyard, and people were pouring in to pay their respects to the dead.

Many from her community were getting ready for the janaja, the Muslim burial ceremonies. She was a quietish student, not bubbling over with laughter all the time, but neither grim-faced at all. She had bright eyes and a ready smile. Now I saw that face in the grip of death—pale, still, with stuffings in the nostrils. No more will she smile and greet anyone; no more will she speak.

All her hopes, worries, anxieties, excitements, expectations, were gone. Gone where? Who can say? Her religion says the soul is imperishable, my religion says the soul is imperishable, but who among us knows anything at all about the ultimate reality of life or death? The only fact that faced me was that she was now a corpse, and soon even the body will be interred in the earth.

            Why did she have to die? The mother was weeping, inconsolable; the father was talking between sobs; her younger sister was standing by, quiet, in a state of shock. Some people were trying to push chairs towards us, but we remained standing, knowing not what to say. We teachers speak and speak in class. We talk so much. But we remained tongue-tied in that room, no one knowing what to say.

At some point I blurted out, recalling what a good student she was, how polite, how punctual. And then at some point we took leave of those grief-stricken people.

As we drove back, my thoughts were with her parents : “Today we had a condolence meeting, and many of our students also visited her house, but tomorrow we will have classes as usual. The world will go on as usual–not just the cosmic events like the sun rising and setting, but even mundane activities like the shops near her house opening and closing, the traffic on the road…everything will go on as before. But her parents will no longer see their beloved daughter at her table, preparing for her exams, or eating her lunch or listening to a song.”

She died when the holy month of Ramadan was nearing the end, so that just a few days after her death, Eid was celebrated. Every year during Ramadan and during Eid, her parents will be forced to think about her absence with renewed pain in their hearts.

And the day after her death, our classes resumed. We have a syllabus to complete, and the students have to prepare for their exams….so we just returned to business as usual….Someone in the world may be very sad, heartbroken, but does the world stop its business for a moment? It doesn’t. Everything goes on as usual.

About suffering they were never wrong,

            The old Masters : how well they understood

            Its human position : how it takes place

            While someone else is eating or opening a window

            or just walking dully along;

            (From “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W H Auden)

May be the parents will also gradually come to terms with their grief. That is what we humans do, all the time. Facing misfortunes, the Old Testament prophet Job said, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away” (Job 1.21). Job manages to find favour with God because of his extraordinary resilience, patience, and submission to God’s will. But do we have any other option at all? Isn’t Job’s lot ours too?

The person who is musing on death in this manner, I her teacher, who is affected by her death so much, will also die one day. I don’t know when, may be tomorrow or today or twenty years later…but die I will. Who can escape death?

Death dances his victory everywhere:

“Some find me a sword; some

            The flange and the rail; flame,

            Fang, or flood” goes Death on drum,

            And storms bugle his fame.

            But we dream we are rooted in earth—Dust!

            Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,

            Wave with the meadow, forget that there must

            The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

            (From “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Yet I do not so much dread the prospect of my death as I am sad about the death of this child, this girl who would be younger than my daughter if I had a daughter. T S Eliot did not have kids, but his poetic genius did not fail to draw inspiration from such things as the laughter of children.

In school we had a teacher who did not have kids, and we teenagers, cruel and unjust in those days, thought that he was a hard task master and did not seem to have any sense of compassion for the students because he did not know what it meant to love a child; after all he did not have any. Today I understand how stupid that argument was.

            Her name was Yasmin, which means 1) the jasmine flower, 2) gift from God.

(Sanjeev Kumar Nath, English Department, Gauhati University, sanjeevnath21@gmail.com)

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