Killing death

The man lies sprawled out. Blood flows from his head, down the neck, turning his white shirt crimson. A few little rivulets are drying on his left arm that is stretched towards me, as he lies on the road divider. On the other side, a white car blocks traffic at an angle, beyond it is a motorcycle, mirroring its owner’s plight. A few men stand around the fallen man, studying him. A man with a worried expression, answering questions, clearly defensive. The traffic slows down before me. I honk hard, before reaching the scene. It’s 40 degrees outside but I turn cold when I see the fallen man.

It’s a discarded body I sense. His time was up and the soul had moved on, looking for a new body. It could have been hovering around, watching how a tragedy can attract voyeurs, turning what is probably the biggest question we don’t ask into a tamasha. Is he sitting with me? Instinctively, I stop the music and send a prayer to his soul, and perhaps one for myself, a sigh of gratefulness. For that body, that soul, could have been mine. I steer my car away, killing the thought. I try and think about financial regulation, spectrum wars, new transport policy. I fail.

For what I am trying to smother is the idea of Death itself. It is something that has intrigued the minds of men from the time they took the evolutionary jump from simians. Death — the end or the beginning, a domain or a transition? The soul cannot die, we’ve been repeatedly told; it’s there in our psychic DNA. But the body, and the attachments that it creates, is important, isn’t it? It is the Now, in “here and now”. It is the Moment that holds the past and the future within it. It is the Truth in touchable reality.

Or is it?

Could the last question the yaksha asked Yudhisthira, about what the greatest wonder was and his answer — we see death every day and yet we live as if we were immortal — be the key to unlock the Truth? To know, after all, I’m not immortal? Is this immortality the reason why society has created an immortal God, the highest aspiration of the body? I reach the hotel, leave Death behind, and get my story.