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You left my life, the grove devoid of life,
Without asking leave of me,
Such an aberration never took place before,
When you begged my permission,
For trifles, your peers laughed at you with derision,
I at times reminded you of your longer tether,
Of your freedom and your independence,
But you preferred to play
A role such that the most ideal follow,
When led astray by your peers or by your age,
You made a clean breast of every “transgression”,
Which to all looked merely an act of age’s folly.
Your departure has left me,
Stunned and shell-shocked,
Appears providence preordained
To rob me of my costliest jewel,
Whose worth is not known when it lies with you,
When gone, you die for it.
Boarding a jet first time at a big airport,
We were witness to scenes new,
Those that offended your ideals few,
We saw many airhostesses in their usual attires,
I knew they hurt your moral code strict,
And you had found their naked legs: symbol of one morally derelict,
The other last words “Doctor, I am not feeling well”.
You used the English tongue to show your conditions fail
Thereafter you slept for months three,
Before you left for a life free.
I yearn for more such words,
From you more with my bodily ears.
But I can only hear you,
With ears of my inner eyes,
Where one can hear, see, and feel alike.
Your three months’ sleep,
Preceding your final sleep,
Was the leave “preparatory”
Availed by us public servants,
When we are in service yet not in service.
You simply looked at us,
Your eyelids turned around,
And curves noticed on your foreheads.
Some sounds uttered,
Your mother deciphered,
Your reciprocation to our love,
While doctors with stony heart termed it
As involuntary actions of the body,
In a “vegetative state",
Their words seemed atrocious such
That they shattered our hope’s pack of cards.
I had bought you,
A walkman and played the songs,
You relished most,
With melodies sweet in your ears we hoped,
To awake you from your slumber long,
But when the witch whom the world calls
A lady doctor hurt me,
With her words offending,
“One with a brain dysfunctional,
To a melody cannot respond,
And stands on the threshold of perpetual sleep,
From where seldom does anyone revert back".
When the doctor had announced,
Your merger in the Supreme soul,
In his jargon “cardiac arrest”,
Your mother had vociferously cried,
And made me make frantic calls to many a god’s men,
Who could bring you back from His company great,
But I remained neither shocked nor stoic,
But in an exultant mood.
All shall but call me deranged in mind,
As you shall not such a father find
That turned to his adversities a total blind.
For he had deserted this world,
Of matter, of wants, of diseases,
Of all the worldly limitations.
I shed no tears for him,
For he has become a part of Him,
Who is Perfect for he loved perfection,
And was never relaxed till he got his heart’s satisfaction.
Why weep over this?
Is it not a matter of celebration for the father
Of a son in his twenties,
Who attained this which others get,
After many long, long years
Of worldly troubles and tribulations?
Should not the father revel in
His son’s merger in the Infinite,
In the Omnipotent, the omniscient and the omnipresent
The Infallible, the Inexhaustible, the Endless and the like?
(Though having an elegiac content, this is a self-serving reply to the inner conflicts arising out of the premature demise of my young son at the age of 21.) |
