A
friend of mine had once said to me that we constantly live with the
notion of death but the impact of death is felt only when someone
close dies. I remember agreeing with her and the memory of that
conversation surfaced this morning when I saw the corpse of Dr.
Tatiana. Dr. Tatiana, like many people from the West who are drawn to
the ideal of Human Unity, had come to live in Auroville. She was
killed on the road yesterday when a lorry hit her cycle from behind.
She
was a gynaecologist. I had not met her, but from what Paula had said
to me and many others who wrote eulogies to her on line, I gathered
that she was a warm, caring doctor. I saw her picture today. She was
an attractive woman of delicate features and smiling eyes. I had
never seen her in person so I can't claim to have been close to her,
but the impact of her pulse-less face as I looked at it through the
glass of the coffin she was laid to rest in was akin to that of the
death of my own.
I felt
guilty and sad.
Someone
I met outside the hospital must have felt my sadness. When I told her
about my visit to the farewell room, she told me that the Mother had
said that there were no accidents. She was trying to help me
rise above my sorrowing but I did not want to be consoled. Right
then, I was very affected by Dr. Tatiana's lovely but ex-sanguine
face lying in state in that casket in the well arranged farewell
room, with unobtrusive flower arrangement and perfume. Her eyes were
partially open like petals of a dying rose. There was even that hint
of her smile I had seen in her picture. Her face was pastel-pale and
clean and noble, almost like marble, cold but serenely cold.
I have
spent almost this entire day enveloped in that peculiar emotion I
experience when the mind is oppressed by death. It happens whenever I
read in the papers about capital punishment: it had happened when
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged. It had effected me once when I was
young, a bus driver had accidentally run over the head of a mechanic
still working on the auto-mobile. The feeling is not at all new. I am
familiar with it...
Long
after my father was cremated, way back in 1973, I was engulfed by
this emotion for days. I used to walk to the Hindu crematorium ground
in Panjim, climb over the wall, and sit there brooding for long
hours, missing my father. I was 10 years old.
What
happened today was something similar. Dr Tatiana was a person I had
only heard of, but her death made me wonder whether, somehow, we were
not related. Perhaps it is just a shade more than it being about the
dying of a fellow being. I actually feel the loss of a lovely person
I had not met in this life. Perhaps we had met in some other life, in
some other clime in bodies with different shape and colour? God alone
knows that.
But if
people meet across lives, I would meet this person who was Dr.
Tatiana in this life. And I would tell her how beautiful she looked
in her sleep, on this Dassera day.
