GOING AWAY

To

A dead man lying on the road

I’ve seen beggars sitting by the pavements, impatiently tapping their bowls and muttering incoherently, as I make my way home. Helpless mothers, straddling an infant and begging for food have passed me by at traffic signals. And I’ve observed the homeless too, they sleep under the thinnest, most threadbare of blankets on the chilliest winter nights. No one bats an eyelid. 

They’re the discarded, the useless, a pileup of humanity that the society does not need but cannot find a way to do away with, either. Yet life continues. Somehow, it refuses to cease. It keeps pumping through their veins remorselessly.

I had come across the poor so many times, but never a dead man. Never a man so irreversibly barren of life, sprawled across the tarmac, while onlookers wondered—should we bury him, burn him, or leave him here... 

For two days in a row he lay at the entrance of a busy marketplace. Minimal dirty clothes and hair matted with dust. Was he drunk, or dead? No wife, no children? Did he even have a job to call his own? I don’t know what to call him, how to describe that man. He looked like every one of us will do when we are quite dead and forgotten too. His eyes were shut as if he had let go, as if letting go was the most logical thing to do. And that tiny smirk playing out on his face—he knew exactly what was going on in our minds.

I wonder how he died and why. But more than that, I wonder if he was at least the master of his own life, when alive. I hope he held the keys to that door. I hope he was not a slave to misery and debts. I hope someone somewhere out there misses him, now that he is gone. I hope they are not like these onlookers, wondering and wondering but doing nothing.

My biggest hope is that no one may clamor upon his possessions, no matter how little he possessed. Like a beast he died, but let the memory of a ‘man’, a human being at least be kept alive. As I looked at him I could not see any chances of his last rites being performed. And God knows what he wished to be done to his body once he had departed. 

The truth is, at some point of time, the corpse will have to be identified. If they do, they may still not come to know what the man had wished for. It is possible that his wishes, unspoken, died on his lips as the last breath also gave way. 

Looking at the man was like standing close to the precipice. Death is so close, none of us knows exactly when and how we will depart, but we are staring at death every moment. Rich or poor, I don’t know a single person who wants to die unknown and uncared for. Who wants to go without leaving their mark? But that man, who probably had nothing, left anyway. 

He left just the same. And he left with many words unsaid, clasped to his chest, lost forever and decaying with his corpse. One fine morning, he vanished from that tarmac too. 

But now that you are gone and for all that it is worth, all I can say is ‘rest in peace’.

Yours truly