:: Opinion

Grief & loss when death do us part

By Farrukh Dhondy

Oct 03 : "If religion is the opium of the masses

Superstition is its ganja"

From Das Dasguptal by Bachchoo

All one’s life one comes to terms with death. None of us have the privilege of being the young Siddharth, protected by his dad’s diktat from seeing old age, sickness and death. We are beset by these horsemen of the human conditional apocalypse and one contemplates their foreboding in different ways at different times. One hopes to attain something of the tranquillity or the peace of the Buddha before the reaper hits you with his scythe. These thoughts are prompted by my attendance for two days at the Catholic Masses and the funeral of a friend with whom I grew up and have known for all my life.

The death of Dara, Darius Francis Cama, was not the stuff of tragedy, not a shock, not generative of the desolation and waste one feels at the death of someone cut off in their prime. He was 68-years-old. He died of cancer which started in his tongue and spread to his oral cavity and then upward and downward to anatomical locations I couldn’t bear to enquire about. It was a painful death and a lingering one. Towards the end he had a funnel pierced into his stomach through which the medical staff would pour doses of pain-killing morphine and the nourishment to keep him alive.

My mother died peacefully, my father, 20 years before her, probably even more peacefully. He dropped dead while walking the streets of Isfahan, Iran. No, he wasn’t a professional street-walker. He was in Iran as a contract worker and was on his way to the local hospital to visit a sick friend. My mother and younger sister had gone on ahead and my father, following them on foot, spoke in his scant Farsi to the shopkeepers on the High Street and collapsed during the conversation. They called the ambulance and he was brought to the hospital where my mother and sister were waiting for him — but he was dead.

I was in England and got the news by phone.

I am now trying to remember or gauge the quality of my distress at the time. I certainly felt that he had more of a life to live even though he had lived a lot, seen and done a lot in the time he lived. My mother died when she was nearly 90. Her memory was going and she was quite frail. She would sit for hours on a sofa in my sister’s lavish drawing room and play Patience at a small table. I would on occasion find a card or two that had slipped from her uncertain shuffle and dropped by the sofa and would pick it up and tell her that she could never win a game with a card or two missing. She would look at me uncomprehendingly. It doesn’t matter, it’s not about winning, she would say. One may not hold all the cards — it was an attitude to living a life and to departing it.

The first death I experienced was my grandmother’s. I was eight. She died of a heart attack with two renowned Parsi doctors of Pune in attendance. I was deemed old enough to follow the bier to the Towers of Silence, clad in white and was acquainted then with the funereal ritual of exposing the body to the vultures, which seemed barbaric then but must be classified as ecologically desirable now.

Her death left a gap in my fledgling existence but it was not the same when a childhood friend, Sunder Wadhwani, perhaps four or five years older than me, who was the leader of our gang of youths, joined the Indian Air Force and died in a MiG crash during training. He had married young Maureen when he got his commission and she was pregnant when he plunged to his death. She died of a broken heart soon after. This was the tragedy of my teenage, the nightmare of the crash, the literal breaking of the heart of someone I knew, the horror of the unborn baby dying inside her. There was gossip in the town. Did he make a mistake? Was he trying one show-off manoeuvre too far? Did the MiG fail him because it had been inadequately maintained? The circumstantial and political questions faded. The horror, the loss, the void of a life cut short remained.

Then there was Anil Madan, again part of the later group of friends in Nowrosjee Wadia College, Pune. We used to meet every day — in college, out of college and at weekends. Graduation and the pursuit of higher studies or jobs scattered us. I came to the UK and heard, a few years later, that Anil had done a masters degree in science and had migrated with his new wife to Boston. We kept in touch.

He died in a car crash at a road intersection in the late 70s. I was writing a book, a "novel" or concatenation of stories, about our boyhood and he haunted the writing. Poona Company is dedicated to him and I still see his gentle and penetrating eyes perusing the prose. He would have smiled and said a kind word had he actually read it.

Dara’s death was so different. He came to England, worked at odd jobs and very early on in his sojourn converted to Catholicism and then became a priest. He spent 10 or 12 years in Bolivia doing missionary work among the rural population of the Altiplano. He would write to me about it. Then his Order recalled him to serve as a priest in one diocese after another in England.

There were 600 people at his funeral and 55 Catholic priests. A bishop presided. I stayed two days in Swindon and Gloucester to make a gesture of representing his friends and family from that boyhood life, but found over those days and at the Mass and the funeral that he had won the affection of a whole community.

I was the only one there who didn’t share the certainty that he had gone to heaven. They sang, they prayed, they commended his soul to their God, they praised him — and they believed it. I spent a few quiet hours looking through his books in his simple suite of rooms and at the funeral, in representative respect rather than piety or belief, I recited a Zoroastrian prayer over his coffin as they buried him.