We weren't lovers like that: A tribute to an Indian surgeon who died after falling off a cliff in Canada
"1601 Sunset Avenue
Utica, NY 13502
Take the 90 East Thruway towards Albany and then take Exit 31 to Utica
Then take the route that says Downtown Utica and then turn right
You will cross two small bridges... drive straight...
Keep driving on Genesee Street and then you will see a tall church... Turn and drive to the end of the Shaw Street
The corner house on the end on your left is mine.
It is a brick house." - April 25, 2007
I had wanted to write "I had yellow sunflowers on the wallpaper". But I didn't.
You could have found that brick house. We could have smoked that cigarette but we didn't. Loss is often more about the “maybes” and imagined lives. I knew you briefly. It isn’t enough to write an obituary. But remember, I used to be an obituary writer once? I will give it a shot. For you, who is now lost forever.
Last night, I started to write about an affair that never was. Memory surprises. I will write to you. You will never read it. But then, who knows?
They say the stars are the departed. I went out on the terrace. I searched for the newest star. I made up one for you.
We didn't have smart phones back in those days. We believed in directions and descriptions. Hence, the tall church and the two bridges.
We got lost often. But that was the point. Losing and finding yourself and other things. Now, I am looking through the messages exchanged in 2007 for memories.
That silver phone is no more. We exchanged messages there, too. And because I scrolled through our chat and my brother always tells me Facebook is a repository, I know you sent me an "almost" poem once.
"Dare to breakdance naked in old age?
Dare to sound a barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world?
Dare to say no to drugs?"
You sent me this one night. We were both nocturnal. You wrote poems in after hours and I strung together sentences until 3am. We were always in an "almost state" and when you asked me again "do you dare?" I had said I dare to drive on icy roads on bald tyres. Ten years can be a century. You asked me if I ever was a non-crisis person. I never reached that perfect state.
And then, almost randomly you had asked "do your shoulders hurt?"
I read about your death. I clicked on your profile and they said you had fallen off a mountain where you had gone trekking with your girlfriend.
Thirty-eight 38 years is no age to die. I am 38 years old. I still want to climb mountains. Sometimes, you remember a face, a dance, a little conversation. There are encounters that memory holds. Ours was like an “ellipsis”.
I have always let the dead be. But last night, I sent "farewell" to you, who is now no more. Your Facebook wall is full of outpourings of grief, of memories.
I recognised a few names from that brief memory in time. They haven’t taken off your profile. The “last seen” appeared and I would like to believe that you read the little message by me.
There are numerous articles in your memory with quotes from everyone who loved/loves you. We belonged to a time long gone by.
Dr Shreyas Roy loved a beautiful view.
His Facebook page features numerous photographs of vistas taken from vantage points in India and on his beloved Mount Royal, where the talented 38-year-old paediatric transplant surgeon fell to his death early Sunday morning...
It took a search-and-rescue climbing team about 20 minutes to reach Roy, who had fallen about 10 metres and was found in cardiorespiratory arrest.
He was declared dead in hospital around 5am Sunday.
Roy was scheduled to leave the next day for Chicago, one final training step before assuming a full-time position with Sainte-Justine's tight-knit transplant surgery team in 2018..."
A life cut short. You were returning from dinner with your girlfriend. You both were celebrating your one-year anniversary. All I remember is that you once mentioned rooftops of the world. You were on one such rooftop. And you were in love. I will ignore the fall.
***
It has been years and I remember so much and so little. I remember the spring night when you smiled from the car and waved a goodbye. I turned into the lane and drove back to Utica. That was the night we met at that house that was crumbling and at the end of the street.
Outside one of the windows, you could see a television perched on a wooden tower. Naufal, my Pakistani friend, lived on the ground floor. There used to be those flurry cats that were loved by the academic from Jadhavpur University and his white girlfriend. Then, there was a white man called Bryan, who insisted I watched Star Wars. He learned to make masala chai and egg curry and would cook meals for everyone sometimes. I’d drive down from Utica now and then. You came by often.
You were in medical school in Syracuse University and I was a lonely writer in Utica. I had graduated from the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and had moved to Utica to work as a staff writer for Observer-Dispatch.
You played music. We were younger then. We believed in Nirvana and Star Wars and the healing power of joints. We also believed in love. We were hopeful and young and stupid. We were a little less corrupted, a little more daring.
You told me about your grandfather and the TB clinic in Bihar. Basawon Singh was born in Jamalpur in Bihar. Your grandfather had spent 18 long years in prison in British India. He was a democratic socialist the government had issued a stamp in his name in 2000 and there is a stadium in Hajipur in his name. I had gleaned all this from Wikipedia and other sites.
"Isn't he awesome," you had written.
You wrote about the mango manjars falling down dry, you told me about the grove of 150 litchi trees and the fist fight that ensued when you went to calm it in the village.
"My family is a giant circus poised on the brink of constant disaster," you wrote.
We laughed a lot.
You once called Delhi “an airless tomb of a city”. You were in transit there. Now, I live here. Ten years ago, I had told you I was a writer. Now, I am shy of such claims. I am an “almost” writer.
***
We never smoked that cigarette. We tempted each other with "truth or dare", and many years later I don't know what truth is anyway except that you are gone.
Grief is strange. I can't map it. You moved on. I went on to write more sentences. Occasionally, I would stumble across your updates.
We began by writing to each other quoting Eliot and his fictional "Mr Prufrock", who I loved. In New York City, I often tried to understand smog and fog.
Prufrock, I imagined, was walking down the streets of this Gotham-like city with buildings that reached up to the sky. You could never see the sky though. That was how I saw smog.
You started with Prufrock’s challenge. There were no formalities exchanged but this shard of poem.
"How about this as food for thought:
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair" - you
I said it was The Wasteland. You corrected me. I had forgotten Prufrock's baggy pants. It was April. I was reading The Wasteland again. But you explained about the "potential"...
"It's actually Prufrock just before he starts talking about being bald and old and women telling you that you missed the point.
That moment of the poem is rich with possibility: If I dare... maybe anything could happen. But it's also fraught with the potential for cataclysmic failure: there is time to second-guess yourself and turn back.
Now let's play a little game - why don't you explain back to me how that quote might apply to you and me?" you wrote.
I called it the smog and the fog poem.
I wrote back to you. I asked you to send me poems that you wrote then.
I was always alone in my apartment with the yellow sunflowers on the wall. I was always measuring potential situations. Prufrock measured the evening and life with coffee spoons.
"To dare... there are always at least a million way of doing things... but do we dare?
Mostly, I am afraid.
When I turn back, napkins are no longer pink and my room is no longer mine...
I am stuck in the moment... can't go back, can't move beyond... I am just shuttling between worlds..." I wrote back.
You were brave.
"I think you're hitting it... do we dare?
Just when I've given up on a girl ever surprising me again, ever impressing me again, ever keeping me awake late into the night thinking (even though she's miles away and fast asleep) again... I meet you," you wrote back.
You wrote about the blood pounding in your ears and glances you kept stealing at the bridge of my nose or the nape of my neck hoping that I didn't notice it all. And then you said you wanted to see me again.
And again, you asked "Do you dare?"
That’s when you asked me if I would like to have a smoke together.
I said I lived 55 miles away.
You said I had a potential for not being cold. You were optimistic.
“Some bad in the Jackson-ian sense (as in Michael) is good... potential for not being cold is maybe what I meant. Why do you say I'm obsessed with potential?” you wrote once.
Was I cold? I don't know. I was non-committal. I had come to live in that forsaken little town to learn to live on my own. I had broken up with my fiancé. I had learned to do online banking, I learned driving and I was learning to cook. I watched reality television, went to the malls and was a drifter.
“You interest me in the sense that a doctor is a poet, too,” I wrote. “When I had to dissect a frog once, I vomited on the table.”
I am sad at the loss of the potential of the doctor-poet. I have learned to understand that everyone is a poet. You told me once that everyone feels they are the most misunderstood human in their knowledge.
“It’s why guys like Sartre and Camus were able to make a living,” you wrote.
I read a lot of Camus in the years after I left.
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world," is my favourite quote from Camus.
I sent you a Mahmoud Darwish poem called "I Belong There" on the 18th day of our nocturnal conversations. I believed then I was in self-imposed exile in Utica. I read a lot of Darwish then.
I read it again today.
"I belong there. I have many
memories. I was born as
everyone is born...
...I have learned and dismantled all
the words in order to draw from
them a
single word: Home."
Are you home yet? I am still living the same life in a different city in a different continent.
***
Do you remember I offered to take you to my favourite Bosnian restaurant in Utica and get you baklavas. That was the old café I spent evenings at. The refugees built it when they first came to Utica and they had an old coffee machine, a jukebox and they let you smoke indoors.
You asked if there was ever a moment if I was just a “kind of… a person” and if my shoulders hurt. That was the last message. You probably gave up on me. I was still light years away from being a non-crisis person.
It is better now. I returned to India a year later. You became a doctor and you did your things and retained some of the idealism from those days and critiqued the US medical system. You were born and brought up in New York, but you had your roots in what I still call “homeland”.
Some encounters are like frozen moments in time. We weren’t really friends. Never really lovers. Never really anything. But you made me smile.
So many affairs and so many heartbreaks later, you realise the ones that could have been had the most potential. But that’s the eternal tragedy of time.
A mountain is a peaceful place. This morning I read Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock again and I want to send these lines to you. Our conversation was unfinished.
“Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
...I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
...Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
…I do not think that they will sing to me.
...we have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
You once told me you’d sing in front of me.
My editor asked me if one could write to a dead person. I said I did. I didn't know who else to write to except you. She smiled.
Today, I will smoke a cigarette in your loving memory - a perfect stranger who once explained to me the dilemmas and despair of J Alfred Prufrock. You brought back poetry to a writer you once met in a town that had so much snow that it looked almost white in winters.
Snow is a distant memory now. I live in that "airless tomb of city" struggling with memories and memoirs of those who could have loved you and those you could have loved. Maybe ("maybes" are the most important signifiers) I will dance naked in old age if I make it to that point. For you.
RIP doctor-poet Shreyas Roy..