Death After Life

by NINAD JOG

"Babli hanged herself from the fan," my mother told me. "She did it in the afternoon, when she was alone at home. It happened two days ago."

I was shocked beyond words. A year elder to my teenage sister, Babli was one of my neighbors in Mumbai. After writing a long suicide note, she fashioned a rope into a noose and strung it over the living room ceiling fan. She locked all the living room doors and closed the windows. Then she climbed on the stool, eased her head into the noose and kicked the stool.

When Mrs. Ganguly came home from work that evening, the front door did not open when she turned the key. She knocked on the door a few times and called for her daughter, but to no avail. The door would not budge. Panic-stricken, she asked one of the neighbors for help. The neighbor broke open the door, only to be confronted by the grisly sight of Babli's limp body hanging from the ceiling fan.

I didn't know it at the time, but Babli's suicide was a cry for help that had gone unheeded, with tragic consequences. She must have suffered from clinical depression, brought on in part by her father's untimely death from a heart attack a couple of years earlier.

I had been friends with Babli's brother Shiv, who was about my age. But our friendship had fallen by the wayside over the years, perhaps due to my parents' ongoing quarrels with the Gangulys and with many of the other residents of the building. It hadn't helped that the Gangulys had a fierce Alsatian dog that had a habit of pouncing upon people when he was unleashed.

We tend to remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when he first hear any bad news. I was sitting in my parents' car when I learned about Babli's death. My parents had picked me up from Bombay Central station, as I had returned to my parents’ home in Mumbai by the overnight Rajdhani Express train from New Delhi, on vacation from my job.

I did not talk to Shiv or to his mother that day. I didn't talk to them the next day either, or the one after that. In fact, I never offered them my condolences. Not that I didn't want to offer them; I just didn't know how to.

I didn't speak to Shiv ever again, other than exchanging quick Hi's when our paths crossed in the building's staircase. His sister's death was the last nail in the coffin of my friendship with the one person who had been my only friend in the neighborhood during much of my childhood.

I don't remember if Babli's funeral had already taken place on the day I returned from New Delhi, but I do know none of my family members attended it.

***

Three years later, I was in the U.S. as a graduate student when I learned about the death of the mother of my friend Faisal. Faisal had recently graduated from the same university where I was enrolled, and had moved thirty miles away to Annapolis, to live close to his work.

After spending a weekend with his friends, Faisal came home and called his parents in India, only to learn that his mother had died the previous day. Shocking as the news was, it was also unexpected, for she hadn't been ill or bedridden. She had complained of severe chest pain in the morning, and had fallen unconscious. Faisal's father and his relatives had scrambled to take her to hospital, but their efforts had been in vain. His mother was no more.

To make matters worse, Faisal's mother's funeral had already taken place by the time Faisal learned about his mother's passing. It is devastating when your mother is not only gone, but is utterly gone when you least expect it to happen.

Faisal's father had called him several times after his mother died, but they hadn't been able to talk to each other, since Faisal had been away from home with his graduate school friends. He didn't learn about his mother's death the next day, since his phone did not have an answering machine that his father could have left a message on. Cell phones were not in wide use in the mid-1990s, and Faisal's father did not have any of his son's friends’ phone numbers.

Faisal's friends rushed to be with him in his moment of grief. They stayed with him for the next few days as they cooked for him, ran errands and consoled him.

But I did nothing of the sort. In fact, I did not even call Faisal to offer my condolences. I cannot claim that I didn't bother because I didn't know his mother. I did; I had met his parents at their home in Mumbai just a few months earlier during my first trip to India after moving to the U.S.

Back when Babli died, I could have claimed that I had received no guidance from my parents on how to express condolences. But I could make no such claim now. For I was an adult, a bird that had spread his wings - however tentatively - and broken free of its parents' nest.

Part of me was reluctant to drive over to Faisal's home with my mother, who was on her first visit to the U.S. when Faisal's mother died. It would have amounted to rubbing it in my friend's face, "Look, my mother's still here, but yours isn't." I couldn't have left my mother at home, but the round trip would have taken a good two hours, and I didn’t want to leave my mother home alone for that long.

***

I was four or five when I first heard of human deaths. A construction worker's baby died of drowning when she dipped him in a large tank of cold water one morning at the construction site adjacent to my building in Pune. The builder halted construction for the rest of the day while the last rites were performed.

I came to know of it because my balcony overlooked the construction site, and because my mother told me. I must have been puzzled, because I asked my mother where the baby went after it died. My mother told me it was reborn as a butterfly or a horse or a donkey depending upon how well it had behaved in its past life. I asked my mother what would happen to the horse after it died. My mother told me it would be reborn as a butterfly if it had behaved well, or as a donkey if it had behaved badly.

I mulled over the matter. "But how does a horse know if it's behaving well or badly?" I asked. "Who tells a horse how he's behaving?"

My mother was stumped. She decided it was best not to tell me rebirth stories. I don't know how she distracted me that morning, but I do know she didn't tell me any life-after-life tales for many years after that incident.

***

The death of Faisal's mother wasn't the first time I heard about the death of a friend's parent. I was six when my class teacher told the class that Romal's mother had died.

"Let's pray for Romal's mother," Ms. Pacheco told the class one morning, when Romal came back to school after a week-long absence. "She has died and has gone to Heaven."

All of us stood up and prayed, as did Romal. I kept casting quick glances at him even as I prayed. Sad though I felt for his loss, I was glad he was back. My happiness easily trumped my sorrow, for I had missed Romal all those days. We seldom ate lunch together during the hour-long lunch break, but we always played together after lunch, and during the two short mid-day recesses.

Fearful of people and anti-social that I was, I hadn't liked Romal when we had first met. But he had always liked me, and had stuck by me and had invited me to play with him and his friends.

I never said a word to Romal about his mother's death. I left the school shortly thereafter, for my father got a new job and we moved to Mumbai. Sad as I was to leave Pune, I was sure I would come back to live there one day. But that day never dawned. I left Loyola school and bid Romal D'Souza adieu for good.

I did get back in touch with some of my friends from Loyola after coming to the U.S. None of them remembered me, for fifteen years had passed. But they were kind enough to take me at my word about knowing them in primary school. I asked them about Romal, but my question drew blanks. Perhaps Romal had also moved to a different school.

***

Over the years, I've come to believe that one life is all that there is. I would have liked to believe in an afterlife, or at least in a mechanism that preserves our consciousness and our sentience long after we are gone. But death is a matter where I'd much rather stick to the available evidence than fly in the face of it.

We worry about what will happen to us after we die far more than we worry about what we were up to before we were born. For having lived life to the fullest, we begin to miss ourselves as death approaches, and we cannot bear to think that an Earth robbed of our presence will continue functioning smoothly without giving a damn about our absence.

And yet I must thank my mother for telling me that the construction worker's baby had turned into a butterfly after it drowned, and I must thank Ms. Pacheco for telling the class that Romal's mother had gone to Heaven. For a child cannot comprehend that a loved one has vanished into nothingness, but the child is reassured to learn that the loved one continues to live, even if it’s in a faraway realm that it cannot access.

***

In recent years, I have expressed my condolences to a number of my friends when their parents or loved ones have died. But those expressions have largely been cursory, just enough to pass muster.

Yet the offerings of condolence that rankle me the most are the ones I didn't express, whether to Romal, to Shiv or to Faisal. For those are the ones where I knew I should have done something, but didn't.