The first email I saw on that first day of my working week - was a link to a Facebook post. The post reminded us of a deceased friend's 50th birthday, and it was on a FB group created by his loving (and grieving) wife. That prompted me to click on the link and then one thing led to another and I was soon browsing the photos and videos that she had so painstakingly archived on the site. As I scanned through their memories, a deep sense of melancholy took root. My stomach felt like I had just finished a huge and unwelcome breakfast - heavy and acidic.
I was going through the photographic memories of a friend, who at the time was extremely close to me - akin to a brother! Through the three years of our internship in AFF we shadowed each other constantly. He moved to Dubai before me and then left Dubai to return to India. From that day on the siblings of time, geography and careers wedged their insidious presence between us, and we drifted away from each other. Browsing through the photos dredged up memories of days past, of smiling faces of our younger selves, of friends who had walked in and out of ones life - and the sense of despondency grew.
What happened to us? What happened to our friendships and our bonds? To our dreams and aspirations? How much of where we are, was a result of choice and how much just chance? As I saw my friends beaming smiling face, I wondered as to the emotions that would have been roiling beneath. I could still recall the tone of his voice in my mind and even after a gap of a quarter century recall quite a few of our conversations. I remembered his brimming confidence and his gentle ribbing at my reticence to recognize my own merits. The silly bets we used to place, the good and torrid times we went through and the perspective that he provided me at a time when one was sorely needed. We often pitched ourselves against each other, without ever being competitive. We gloried in each other's successes and felt in equal measure the pain of the others missteps.
And as tears started to well up - I took a deep breath and steeled my mind, to turn to the refuge of the mundane tasks that lay before me. As I started my working day by going through my list of action items, the grip of my friends spectral hands on my brain eased. And as those memories started to submerge into my unconscious mind, I began to feel normal again.
But then in a twist that only our subconscious can provide, I suddenly recollected a conversation just a few days earlier, with my father's friend. He was visiting his son in Dubai and we had this conversation at his son's house where he was hosting a dinner. He and my father have known each other all their lives, which translates to a period stretching over eight decades. He was in a retrospective mood, probably looking at his children and grandchildren all grown up. At that age, most material desires had been wrung out of us - eked out by the inexorable force of the piled up years, compounded by the slow erosion of our reducing physicality.
And as we talked our conversation somehow drifted to all the deceased people we both knew(including my mother). He started to recall their names, which he reeled off like a prayer. It was a much practiced litany of names that if interrupted, needed to be restarted from the beginning. As he evoked each name in rapid succession, their faces flashed by in front of my eyes like a photo montage, some in black and white and some in color, depending on how long it had been since they had passed on. It was forlorn and fascinating at the same time.
Most of those faces that flashed by, in my mind's eye, were remembered only through the lens of my childhood memories. Grainy images of impossibly tall men and stern faced women, seen from a child's diminutive perspective - of authority figures who used to scold or rebuke us as children, when we created a nuisance. Those memories were of days past, when adults showed displeasure in abundance and were spartan with their praise! But I realized that those images were monochromatic and one-dimensional, almost like cardboard cut out figures. All of them had lived their lives much as we do - they loved, laughed and cried, had the same pressures and stresses and derived happiness from the similar stimuli.
I felt the same sense of melancholy at the time, a sense of imminent mortality and the futility of our brief span here. Despair at the fragility of our earthly bonds. Death takes us all eventually - it is truly the great equalizer. It dictates what we take with us when we go (nothing), but does not dictate what we leave behind - the memories that outlive us in the minds of those we touched.
