Two things

1

A German acquaintance died yesterday and as death always does,  she flung at me the same old surprise - a vacant recurring thought that he whom I so often saw on roads, a one purposed anti-pesticides man is no more! The  campaigner will no longer ride on his '0 emission' tricycle along the dusty roads. The cashew patch which he tended since a little over a decade near my house will feel empty. While he was alive, till the day before yesterday in fact, those were trees which yielded organic nuts. Now, with this hero fallen, they may yield the yearly, if not worthless, unworthy fruit.

Death of an activist, whatever the scale of his activism, leaves behind a lacuna until something more exciting comes along to divert us. Yesterday when I read of his demise in a brief circular I made a mental note to meet his partner, a Mangalorean,  lover of stray dogs and a staunch  but subdued activist herself. I saw her standing in the shade of the organic cashew stall by the edge of the patch. She was with one of her dogs, a kind eyed black and white Besenji-like Indian mongrel.

 She looked collected. "How are you holding up?" I asked her. She smiled and said that she was better, but that if I said anything wrong at that moment she might break down. "Anything right, for that matter, too" she said, making me consider not making small talk. But then she began talking herself. She recounted the last few hours when her friend for the last 20 years was still living. It was a feeling account, of good deeds mostly, of her friend. She referred to him as an artist and I remembered a scrap metal installation he had made bang in front of the new town hall. That wasn't a long time ago.

He will be ' buried', she told me, on Earth day, which falls on Sunday, the 22nd. Quite fitting  for an avid naturalist to be inhumed even in today's trend of cremations, I thought. Like "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" of old. And She insisted that I visit his corpse in the 'farewell room' at the health center. She said that her friend looked serene and peaceful. I left her with her dog for the farewell room about 15 minutes ride away.

In the farewell room his body lay in a glass casket. The air conditioned room was fragrant with various bouquets and flowers. The picture of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother by H. Cartier Bresson, taken when he was in India in 1949-50, seemed to be the only permanent presence there in our world of fleeting forms and things. There was a white man sitting in meditation. At some point in time he would break his meditation and go about his business, whatever it is. He seemed to be one of those principled foreigners who come to India for 'right reasons'.

***

2

Of late I am reluctant to go to functions. It seems there is hardly anything novel. I am so tired of vernissages and public gatherings that I choose to borrow English and American TV serials in bulk from our library and watch them till almost dawn. Their serried, sequential order seems to satisfy my old world logic. I know that the serials are humbug but they move before my eyes better than the stiff public display of concealed compromises we humans choose to flaunt as our success stories. Watching the false as real is better than watching the real knowing it is false. In the former there are no expectations of me; in the latter there is nothing but expectations...

I guess I am becoming a loner! And quite understandably because the Himachala or The Arunachala still beckon the deeper me. I think that I belong there.