17th January 2020, it was just another busy day of my life. After a hectic day at work, I reached home at around 5:00 PM in the evening and, while settling down at home, I checked my unread WhatsApp messages. I came to know that Bauji (my grandfather) was extremely unwell and had been admitted to the hospital.
At around 2:00 PM on that day, my cousin had shared a video in which Bauji was talking to one of his sons. In the video he looked gasping for breath very badly, he was not able to speak properly, and looked to be in a lot of discomfort. My father saw that video at around 3:30 PM and he sensed that Bauji's health was really bad and it needed immediate medical attention. So my father, who lived approx. 30 Km away from Bauji's place, just rushed to his place and, along with my cousins, took him to a nearby hospital and got him admitted there. When I saw Bauji's video in the evening, I also sensed that his condition was really bad. I immediately called my father to get an update on the situation. It was one of that rare occasions when my father sounded nervous. He told that we should have taken him to the hospital much earlier, one of the private hospitals to which they took Bauji for treatment had refused to give treatment because of his precarious condition. I sensed the apocalyptic news that was about to come.
I became very uncomfortable in that moment. Suddenly, my mind became empty of all mundane things that filled it up, and it was just thinking about Bauji. The WhatsApp group was filled with messages with prayers, queries on his latest situation, and of course the updates. Though some updates were reassuring in the sense that he responded well to the treatment being given to him, I was getting that intuition that we needed a miracle for him to recover from that condition. This was my first experience of being on the verge of losing a person whom I understood, respected, and felt connected with. I talked to my wife and my mother, my father was completely occupied at the hospital. They tried to give me hope and assurance that he might survive. I wanted to believe in them but I could not. However, by their repeated efforts and talks, I settled down a little bit as the afternoon turned into evening and then into the night.
It happens a lot with me that when I have to catch a flight early morning next day, or if I have any other commitment for early morning next day, then I keep getting up at night too often and keep checking the clock to check that I did not oversleep. Similar thing happened to me on the night of 17th Jan. Normally, I have a very light sleep, and that night it was even lighter. At around 4:00 AM on 18th Jan, my son, who was sleeping next to me, took a normal turn in his sleep and ended up touching me. I immediately woke up and ran for my phone and, with my heart pounding fast and praying to not see the unwanted update, saw the WhatsApp message that Bauji had left us at around 3:20 AM that morning.
My mind went blank for few minutes. In those few minutes I probably un-learnt whatever I have been doing for the past many years. The mind was flooded with all the memories and thoughts about Bauji. My wife, who normally wakes up only after 6 AM, woke up at that moment, maybe because of the same apprehension that made me sleep lighter than normal on that night. I called my uncle who lived in Bangalore, and checked with him on the details of the flight that he had booked to go to Delhi. I planned to accompany him for the last rites. The flight was at 10 AM in the morning, so I booked a cab to go to my uncle's place at 6:30 AM.
Until I boarded the cab, I had some control on my conduct. However, as soon as I sat in the cab, I broke down and I cried like anything. There were 2 types of thoughts going on in my mind. One type was extremely emotional, the moment it pictured Bauji from the past memories it made me burst into tears like anything. The other type observed how I was acting in that moment and tried to understand why that was happening to me. I tried to make the observer type stronger by repeating in mind what it said to me, but emotional type was way too strong to beat in that moment. The observer type reminded me of the article about the human capability of being able to be equanimous in times of such emotional sorrows, it kept telling me that Bauji had lived a complete life and he died with minimal agony from complex medical procedures. But still, the emotional thoughts refused to give way and overpowered. It was only just before I met my uncle, aunt and my cousin that morning, that I could control that emotional outburst. Throughout the 1 hour journey to the Bangalore airport, there were momentary outbursts but I was able to control them by starting some talk with my co-passengers. Until we reached airport, at around 8:20 AM, I was a bit more settled. Then the emotional thoughts took a break because of the overpowering as well as unavoidable airport check-in formalities. Through the episode thus far, I realized that I cried only when I was alone. Another Chautauqua came - is it that in such emotionally demanding situations, it is better to be alone and cry and let it out, or be in some company to control that practically nonsensical emotional outburst and try to come to terms with reality. Whatever be the answer, the time kept moving and so was the travel and the subsequent developments with respect to Bauji's farewell from this world.
It was 3:30 PM when we reached the venue of the last rites of Bauji. Everyone was waiting just for my uncle who traveled with me from Bangalore, to begin the rites. As soon as we reached the venue, we were asked to quickly go to the room where Bauji was supposed to be bathed before being laid on the funeral bier. For the first time in my life I saw the naked body of a man whom I knew and respected for the way he lived his life, lying on earth without life. All the men in the room, including my dad and his brothers, started bathing the body. The emotions again got heavy and I cried. They asked me also to touch the body and rub a small portion of his body slightly, to participate in the ritual. I rubbed him slightly at his shoulder, my hand was shaking, I was touching a dead body for the first time. The bathing ritual got over in few minutes, and then Bauji was dressed in a new white colored kurta and pajama. Then he was laid on the funeral bier which was kept outside in the veranda of the venue, where everybody could see Bauji for the final time and offer their last words/prayers for him.
I cried every time I looked at his face. In that moment, with him in sight, that controlling affect of being among the people did not hold me from crying. Even though some part of me told me to stop crying, I could not. I remembered all his birthday celebrations which I had been a part of in recent years, I remembered how happy he was on seeing all his descendants celebrate his birthday. I remembered him saying "tu har saptah aa jata hai, mil jata hai toh bada accha lagta hai!" (I feel very happy whenever you come and meet me on the weekends), I remembered his teachings like "a beggar never sleeps with an empty stomach. It is easy to earn bread but it is very difficult to earn respect". I remembered when he cried while sharing his grief with me. All that came to me in that moment, when I was looking at that man lying lifeless in front of me.
After everyone had paid their last respects, Bauji's sons and grandsons lifted the funeral bier on their shoulders and took him to the funeral place which is called "Shamshan" in Hindi. There at the Shamshan I got the first and the strongest realization of the ultimate truth of life which is Death. "You will not take away anything with you, you came into the world naked and with empty hands, you will leave alike" - I had heard and maybe said this infinite number of times in my life, but I experience the meaning for the first time when I saw his funeral pyre. When the pyre was lit with fire I could see the stages in which this human embodiment of life goes back to its five basic constituents - air (breath), soil (skin n all body parts), sky or space (the space occupied by the body), fire (the evident constituent at that moment), and water (Ganga, the final destination for the remains). The funeral completed at around 6:00 PM in the evening and, coincidentally, by the end of the funeral my emotions had also settled down a bit. Bauji had dissolved into 4 out of the life's 5 basic constituents, and now his final journey to the 5th and the final constituent was left.
The funeral happened on Saturday and, as per Hindu rituals, the ashes and bodily remains are not flown into the holy Ganga on a Sunday. So it was decided that we will leave for "Asthi Visarjan" (flowing of remains into a holy river) on Monday, early in the morning. It was a very cold North Indian winter morning. On such days, normally, people can't even think of taking a bath early in the morning. They get that chilling feeling just by the thought of it. As per Hindu ritual, all of us who were taking Bauji to his final destination were supposed to take a dip in the Holy Ganga. My father, the uncle who traveled with me from Bangalore, Bauji's 3 other grandsons and I were the ones up for the task. As much as we were happy to be with Bauji on his last journey, we were at the same time scared and already shivering thinking about the dip in the icy cold water of Holy Ganga. However, with the courage bestowed upon us by the almighty, and with the strength of our love for Bauji, all of us took that holy dip to mark the end of Bauji's final journey. It was around 11:00 AM when we took the dip, fog was dense and there was no sign of a sunshine so far that morning. Miraculously, as soon as we completed our bath in the Holy Ganga, the Sun shone just for four to five minutes. With that sudden unexpected sunshine, we got a feeling that Bauji conveyed his blessings to us, and acknowledged that he has reached his final destination happily.
During this episode of never-expected emotional and physical experiences, of extreme intensities, I got around 3 days to spent at Bahadurgarh, with only my parents and myself in the house. This situation of only me being with my parents had happened after a very very long time. I was unwell throughout this episode, and the emotional and physical stress had worsened my health. My parents were taking great care of me, by serving me really good and healthy food, the morning tea at around 6:00 AM, home remedies for acute cough, carrot halwa (pudding) and some other delicious ghee sweets. My wife was busy in Bangalore, taking care of my son and managing household along with her three-hour daily job at a local dental clinic. So there were minimal phone calls from her during this period of 3 days. Those 3 days turned into a kind of an unplanned solo vacation for me. Because of some unpleasant emotional episodes within my family in recent years, regarding differences of opinions, there was minimal effort from both my and my parents' side to get into discussions related to our conducts and other aspects of our mundane lives. (I am yet to unleash my expressions on those). At the same time, we did not have any hard feelings against each other from those past episodes, and we were just around each other in a comfortable space of time and being. This brought to me another realization that sometimes, driven by the emotion of our care for our immediate family members, we just think about potential problems of their lives and then start putting all our mental faculties into an unwarranted thought process to give them advice and extravagant discourses on how they can make things better. Avoiding the start of another Chautauqua on these family issues, I will restrict this one to the point wherein I was feeling very comfortable just being there with my parents.
During those 3 days of unplanned solo vacation, with minimal disturbances of phone, work, and intrusions into my personal space, I had plenty of time to feel bored. I realized that I had not got that feeling of boredom since quite some time in my life. I started looking around in the house, for the changes that had happened since I stopped living there, that was 4 years back. I was looking at a mini-cupboard which my parents had recently got constructed, it was stacked with books and some files and documents. Suddenly, I found my old mine of gold - the books which I had read many years back. These were the books that gave my thinking a new direction many years back. They helped me break free of the conventional cast of thinking, which many of my peers were and are put into through an upbringing based on the copybook style of the Indian middle-class upbringing. I re-read "The Alchemist - by Paulo Coelho" and then hopped on to "Who will cry when you die - by Robin Sharma" which I completed after coming back to Bangalore. These 2 books helped resume metamorphosis of my mind. The metamorphosis had been paused because of indulgence in setting, meeting and achieving some professional, family and society driven, and some other vague material desires. I was happy that it resumed for some reason.
This whole experience started on 17th Jan 2020 and it ended on 21st Jan 2020 when I flew back to Bangalore. I felt like a changed person after this experience. It kept coming back to me randomly during my days, and I kept getting the urge to dive deeper into the fresh as well as renewed feelings that marked the resumption of my metamorphosis. I shared these feelings with one of my colleagues in office. He happens to be one of the few people who shares with me the feeling of the need to break free from the conventional thought process, the thought process which we develop because of external influences that bury our innate senses of realization. Somehow the divine blesses me with one such companion everywhere I go, as if "the universe is conspiring to help me reach where I want to" (The Alchemist) :). He is a South Indian guy. For me he is a kind of a book that gives me fresh perspectives on self realization, along with some insights into the South Indian culture. On listening to my experience from Bauji's demise, he told me that the thoughts that were going on in my mind at the moment can be termed as "Shamshanam Bairagam". That is, when we participate in the funeral of a close one at the funeral site, which is called "Shamshan" in Hindi and some other Indian languages, these thoughts sweep into our minds. These thoughts disconnect us from many, if not all, materialistic things that we do in our daily lives. I thought about it a lot and then also realized the feeling. Along with that realization, I liked the term that he gave me as a possible way to identify these feelings, and that's how I arrived at the title of this post :).
I will end this with a realization that Bauji's demise from this world gave me this experience, these feelings, and the associated learning. I feel blessed to be a part of his lineage.
I cried every time I looked at his face. In that moment, with him in sight, that controlling affect of being among the people did not hold me from crying. Even though some part of me told me to stop crying, I could not. I remembered all his birthday celebrations which I had been a part of in recent years, I remembered how happy he was on seeing all his descendants celebrate his birthday. I remembered him saying "tu har saptah aa jata hai, mil jata hai toh bada accha lagta hai!" (I feel very happy whenever you come and meet me on the weekends), I remembered his teachings like "a beggar never sleeps with an empty stomach. It is easy to earn bread but it is very difficult to earn respect". I remembered when he cried while sharing his grief with me. All that came to me in that moment, when I was looking at that man lying lifeless in front of me.
After everyone had paid their last respects, Bauji's sons and grandsons lifted the funeral bier on their shoulders and took him to the funeral place which is called "Shamshan" in Hindi. There at the Shamshan I got the first and the strongest realization of the ultimate truth of life which is Death. "You will not take away anything with you, you came into the world naked and with empty hands, you will leave alike" - I had heard and maybe said this infinite number of times in my life, but I experience the meaning for the first time when I saw his funeral pyre. When the pyre was lit with fire I could see the stages in which this human embodiment of life goes back to its five basic constituents - air (breath), soil (skin n all body parts), sky or space (the space occupied by the body), fire (the evident constituent at that moment), and water (Ganga, the final destination for the remains). The funeral completed at around 6:00 PM in the evening and, coincidentally, by the end of the funeral my emotions had also settled down a bit. Bauji had dissolved into 4 out of the life's 5 basic constituents, and now his final journey to the 5th and the final constituent was left.
The funeral happened on Saturday and, as per Hindu rituals, the ashes and bodily remains are not flown into the holy Ganga on a Sunday. So it was decided that we will leave for "Asthi Visarjan" (flowing of remains into a holy river) on Monday, early in the morning. It was a very cold North Indian winter morning. On such days, normally, people can't even think of taking a bath early in the morning. They get that chilling feeling just by the thought of it. As per Hindu ritual, all of us who were taking Bauji to his final destination were supposed to take a dip in the Holy Ganga. My father, the uncle who traveled with me from Bangalore, Bauji's 3 other grandsons and I were the ones up for the task. As much as we were happy to be with Bauji on his last journey, we were at the same time scared and already shivering thinking about the dip in the icy cold water of Holy Ganga. However, with the courage bestowed upon us by the almighty, and with the strength of our love for Bauji, all of us took that holy dip to mark the end of Bauji's final journey. It was around 11:00 AM when we took the dip, fog was dense and there was no sign of a sunshine so far that morning. Miraculously, as soon as we completed our bath in the Holy Ganga, the Sun shone just for four to five minutes. With that sudden unexpected sunshine, we got a feeling that Bauji conveyed his blessings to us, and acknowledged that he has reached his final destination happily.
During this episode of never-expected emotional and physical experiences, of extreme intensities, I got around 3 days to spent at Bahadurgarh, with only my parents and myself in the house. This situation of only me being with my parents had happened after a very very long time. I was unwell throughout this episode, and the emotional and physical stress had worsened my health. My parents were taking great care of me, by serving me really good and healthy food, the morning tea at around 6:00 AM, home remedies for acute cough, carrot halwa (pudding) and some other delicious ghee sweets. My wife was busy in Bangalore, taking care of my son and managing household along with her three-hour daily job at a local dental clinic. So there were minimal phone calls from her during this period of 3 days. Those 3 days turned into a kind of an unplanned solo vacation for me. Because of some unpleasant emotional episodes within my family in recent years, regarding differences of opinions, there was minimal effort from both my and my parents' side to get into discussions related to our conducts and other aspects of our mundane lives. (I am yet to unleash my expressions on those). At the same time, we did not have any hard feelings against each other from those past episodes, and we were just around each other in a comfortable space of time and being. This brought to me another realization that sometimes, driven by the emotion of our care for our immediate family members, we just think about potential problems of their lives and then start putting all our mental faculties into an unwarranted thought process to give them advice and extravagant discourses on how they can make things better. Avoiding the start of another Chautauqua on these family issues, I will restrict this one to the point wherein I was feeling very comfortable just being there with my parents.
During those 3 days of unplanned solo vacation, with minimal disturbances of phone, work, and intrusions into my personal space, I had plenty of time to feel bored. I realized that I had not got that feeling of boredom since quite some time in my life. I started looking around in the house, for the changes that had happened since I stopped living there, that was 4 years back. I was looking at a mini-cupboard which my parents had recently got constructed, it was stacked with books and some files and documents. Suddenly, I found my old mine of gold - the books which I had read many years back. These were the books that gave my thinking a new direction many years back. They helped me break free of the conventional cast of thinking, which many of my peers were and are put into through an upbringing based on the copybook style of the Indian middle-class upbringing. I re-read "The Alchemist - by Paulo Coelho" and then hopped on to "Who will cry when you die - by Robin Sharma" which I completed after coming back to Bangalore. These 2 books helped resume metamorphosis of my mind. The metamorphosis had been paused because of indulgence in setting, meeting and achieving some professional, family and society driven, and some other vague material desires. I was happy that it resumed for some reason.
This whole experience started on 17th Jan 2020 and it ended on 21st Jan 2020 when I flew back to Bangalore. I felt like a changed person after this experience. It kept coming back to me randomly during my days, and I kept getting the urge to dive deeper into the fresh as well as renewed feelings that marked the resumption of my metamorphosis. I shared these feelings with one of my colleagues in office. He happens to be one of the few people who shares with me the feeling of the need to break free from the conventional thought process, the thought process which we develop because of external influences that bury our innate senses of realization. Somehow the divine blesses me with one such companion everywhere I go, as if "the universe is conspiring to help me reach where I want to" (The Alchemist) :). He is a South Indian guy. For me he is a kind of a book that gives me fresh perspectives on self realization, along with some insights into the South Indian culture. On listening to my experience from Bauji's demise, he told me that the thoughts that were going on in my mind at the moment can be termed as "Shamshanam Bairagam". That is, when we participate in the funeral of a close one at the funeral site, which is called "Shamshan" in Hindi and some other Indian languages, these thoughts sweep into our minds. These thoughts disconnect us from many, if not all, materialistic things that we do in our daily lives. I thought about it a lot and then also realized the feeling. Along with that realization, I liked the term that he gave me as a possible way to identify these feelings, and that's how I arrived at the title of this post :).
I will end this with a realization that Bauji's demise from this world gave me this experience, these feelings, and the associated learning. I feel blessed to be a part of his lineage.
