Death

Light shone through to the alley Krishna was walking on as he pulled his hood lower to hide more of his face. It wouldn’t do to be spotted by one of his fans—not now while he was already running a little behind his schedule to reach the library. He couldn’t allow his fans to slow him down. People would say that he could turn his fans down, or ignore them altogether but his fans were one of his soft spots. And why wouldn’t they be? They were one of the only people who had acknowledged him for him and his literary works, not because he was the son of a rich businessman. His fans hadn’t been the ones who had tried to force him, unsuccessfully, into taking over the business from his father. No, that wasn’t them; that was his father’s foolish subordinates who’d thought that fresh blood would be good for the company. But enough of these thoughts, he told himself, they would only slow him down, and it wouldn’t do to keep the children from the orphanage waiting. So he decided not to dwell any further on his past and continued walking quickly to the orphanage.

The children there greeted him with smiles and asked for him to begin his story. But before he began, he asked the children whether they wanted to ask any questions about him or his work, since he wrote books for both children and adults. One of the older children immediately raised his hand up.

“Yes?” Krishna asked the boy.

“Mr Krishna, most of your works depict many deaths, whether due to murder, natural ageing or accidents. Can I ask the reason for that, please?”

Ah, the magic word, Krishna thought. How could he refuse a polite kid like that?

“If you wish for the answer, you shall have it, of course. I depict reality as it is. People die everyday, and of course, sometime in your life, you are bound to lose relatives and loved ones.” Now, he wanted to stop himself from continuing his answer but somehow, emotions that he had suppressed after his best friend’s death leaked out. “When somebody dies and that somebody is your loved one, at first you don’t want to believe that you have just lost someone close to you. You want to believe that this is just a bad joke. When the funeral procession continues and you eventually reach the crematorium, you want to believe that everybody else is just playing a prank on you, a prank that everybody but you are in on. You expect that your loved one would just jump out of the neatly arranged pile of wood and straw, and begin laughing and say that your face looks funny. You wait for your loved one to do that, but it never happens. Then you begin to cling to the fact that your loved one is alive, even though your own eyes see that your loved one has been buried. You then start to believe that sometime during the procession, your loved one swapped bodies with a life-sized doll and so, will be waiting after the funeral to laugh his head off at the way you looked during the whole procession.”

“But, of course, it never happens. You keep waiting for him, but he never turns up. Eventually a few weeks pass and you finally begin wrapping your mind around the fact that he actually is dead and is never going to turn up. At first, you feel nothing. But after time passes, you start to notice his absence, and wish for his company. His absence becomes even more acute and slowly, steadily, you begin to grieve his loss more and more until one day you cannot take it and become a tearful mess. You begin cursing the gods, for taking away someone so young and so promising, and spend every moment thinking about your loss. Some weak willed people even lose their minds, unable to believe, no, unwilling, to believe that their loved ones are alive no longer. Even the strong willed, have their moments, losing control and breaking down.”

“Then you begin to curse death. You begin to spend time imagining how to kill death itself. Your dreams centre on a silhouette, smirking at you as you break down once again in the memory of your late loved one, and begin imagining the silhouette as death itself. Every time you wake up, you begin sweating all over, remembering the dream, or rather the nightmare, as a wake-up call to yourself to stop having ridiculous thoughts about killing death itself. But you never seem to stop yourself from occasionally thinking about slaughtering death if it were to ever come face to face with you.”

“You begin having thoughts of fighting death, but then reality and logic set in. However, the logic you begin to think of is twisted, and instead of thinking of death as a natural, unavoidable phenomenon, and remembering that your heartbeats are numbered, you begin thinking that death is unfairly preferred by god himself. You begin thinking about his traits, his skills. You start analysing death, begin to picture him as and immortal, invincible and of course, invisible opponent. You begin praying, no, begging, to god to make death a mortal for just one day, so that you can punish death, annihilate it for so unfairly taking your loved one away from you. When your wish is not fulfilled, you begin cursing god for not fulfilling your wish, for favouring death over your favourite creation and giving death the power to be who he actually is right now. You start questioning your belief in god, but then stop abruptly when thinking about the creation of the earth. The scientists couldn’t be right about evolution, could they? You realise with a sinking feeling that the scientists could actually be right.

You begin losing your faith in god and then come to realise that all your belief in god has been for nothing. You begin to realise that god does not exist and neither does your fantasy of death being a mortal.”

Krishna got his sense back before he could continue anymore on his rant on death. Who was he talking to about death? Weren’t these just little kids who had come to meet him just so they could hear some stories from him? With a sinking feeling he realised that every word he had spoken until now, at some point, had connected with these kids. He tried to rescue the situation. “But don’t you think I’ve spoken a bit more than enough about death. I’ll tell you a story now. Once there was a knight who wore an armour that shone very brightly…”

- Avash Byanjankar