The taste of death as it snatches away three young Stephanians in Kerala

They went to see Kerala. Anubhav Chanda, Aditya Patel, and Kennet Jose.

Slipped and fell into the Periyar, or the big river, in Kerala. Water, that holds the secret of life, took their life. 

A shock from which St Stephen’s College will take long to recover. She stands, with folded hands, before the prodigious sorrow of the bereaved parents. The shock and dismay of friends and fellow Stephanians.

St Stephen’s is a close-knit family, not a teaching shop. The loss of a member is, here, a dismemberment, an institutional amputation. A cut to the quick that refuses to heal.

I have known death in St Stephen’s. Known death in my life. Have grown familiar with death, so to speak. So, death does not terrify me. The reason?

Only that which we know can terrify us. Death, we know not. Most people think of death in light of the pains and struggles, the desperation and the sinking, that precede death.

I watched my beloved mother die. Her final moments are etched deep and indelible on my mind. Also, the moment after she took her last breath. So, let me testify:

The suffering and desperation we associate with death is actually part of life, not of death. Death is anointed with a mysterious calm, an inscrutable placidity. Death keeps mum, with a subtle smile spread dreamily over her lips, like luminous wrappings over a cosmic riddle.

Of course, there is sadness about death. What, and wherefore, is that sadness?

The sorrow that death quickens in us is, ironically, a testimony to the uniqueness of every individual life. We feel sad about the uprooting of a tree. The death of a pet animal. True. But, there is a difference between all that and the death of a fellow human being.

Doesn’t have to be the death of a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, a friend… Any human being. Even a stranger. Certainly so, if we are human enough.

All of humankind, said Blaise Pascal, the wondrously prescient French philosopher, is one Person: a huge corporate person. Pascal is referring not only to all human beings alive today, but also to all human beings there ever were since the beginning of time.

This is what we mean by “kinship” - the intuition that we are one, despite superficial codes of differentiation like colour, creed, ethnicity and so on. This kinship is the seed of the fellow feeling and compassion we feel.

This is also the reason why war is an aberration. War, please think, is fratricide: brother killing brother. It is also suicide; for can you kill a fellow human being of any label or description, without also killing your own soul?

Let us return to the sorrow at the demise of a fellow human being; to its irreducible uniqueness.

Why should we weep, our hearts ache, at the loss of a dear one? (Aren't all human beings our “dear ones”?)

Consider this…

If your cow dies, you can buy another cow and keep her in the cowshed. If your mango tree is felled bya cyclone, you can plant another mango tree in its place. Cow for cow, tree for tree, you are fine. The void is filled.

But we say that the death of so-and-so leaves behind a void impossible to fill. Ever wondered about these words that we use ever so often?

The fact is that every human being - never mind of what description - is unprecedented and unrepeatable. All human beings are unique. There never was, there isn’t, and there will never be another like you. You, who, like me and my neighbour, my brothers and sisters in Congo, Upper Volta, Pakistan, Mongolia, ancient Egypt, modern Paris, tomorrow’s London... have come stamped with something so very unique and incomparable that no one else can take your place.

Is US President Barack Obama a substitute for my lost fellow Stephanians?

Is Amartya Sen a compensation for my servant’s child who died of diarrheal disease because she had no safe water to drank?

Can Socrates, Plato and Aristotle together take the place of the mother I lost half a century ago?

NO!

That alone is the pathos of death, which is nothing but a measure of the value of life itself. If you were not irreplaceable, if you were not unrepeatable, if I could have put somebody else in your place and filled the vacuum, tree for tree, cow for cow -

Anubhav Chanda, Aditya Patel, Kennet Jose…

I would not have wept and grieved for you. I would not have felt the taste of death in my own mouth because you are no more.

But there is yet another thing that I grieve over. Our ignorance in which death holds his spectral court. Each time death happens it repeats the same truth, bears witness to the same basic reality. You are unique, I am unique, we are unique. Incomparably valuable. 

Your life is stamped with a special purpose. How can you live as though you are only a stomach, a consuming mouth, a piece of drift wood that the currents of time carry off to the sea of insignificance and oblivion?

How can you, given that, pretend to be a bubble of mediocrity, an ambassador of pettiness, or a peddler of hate? For what?

I cannot wish that I don’t die. I can wish that I don’t die before I wake up and become fully human, so that my death becomes a celebration. A hymn of life. A ghazal, mellifluous with the meaning of being human.

Your lives, my young friends, are nipped. You have left like a poem that would've been written, a rain that would've been over the parched land, a blessing that would've nourished lives...

You've disappeared into the mystery of water. Now, we pledge ourselves to think of life, not of death; for water is life.

We shall refuse to think otherwise; for what can we do without our rivers? Our Ganga, our Yamuna, our Periyar that flow, for all that we have done to choke it with our dirt, like steadfast affirmations of life.

Rest in peace my young friends. Your struggles were only till you crossed the Line into the Land of the Unknown, from where no traveller ever returns.

Our struggles remain.

Also read: I, Valson Thampu, blame the teachers of St Stephen's College for academic rot