In 1988 I died. I was forty years old.

Remembering myself when I was forty

     My friends were all forty too, more or less. Each one had a crisis, a goal, despair, families, something that defined them. I had none of those things and I did not want them either. This worried me a little. I had been a writer for some years. I wasn’t sure if that defined me any longer. I realised I was conflictless. Perhaps it was a phase; perhaps it would change. But because I died, I never found out.
     When you die, you stay the same age. I’m still forty. Talk about never aging.

Kavita

     I met Kavita many, many years ago. A few years after my death. She was sitting in a library, apparently suffering, being oppressed by all the books she had never read. People like Kavita are never really human; they imagine themselves as protagonists of life’s great novel; they are always waiting for someone to pick them up, suck out their stories, cradle them, justify them; she thought she was walking, talking poetry. I’m a simple man, easy enough to explain. But Kavita was complex; she made herself complex, always enclosing herself in parentheses, sitting neatly in a footnote, waiting for someone to realise that there are explanations for every thing she does and says. Kavita was a collapse of logic. And yes, she was excellent subject matter for a novel.
     But in death you are essentially numb. So I never did manage to write Kavita. It is one reason why I regret dying. I remember the day was the twelfth of August, another square marked in the interminable calendar of my death.

The odd memory

     This must have been in the nineties. I attended a poetry reading. When I left, my heart was pounding. I don’t know how or why. There is no footnote for dead hearts pounding. It was a sensation—I think—of pure joy at having discovered a thing to unravel. Like reading a book back when I was alive. It was almost like being human again.
     I used to walk home in those days. But I was so nervous, I entered a bus and sat next to a woman. I was like air and she did not see me. She was making strings of malli pu. If it weren’t for that woman, I would have lost my sanity in that bus ride. She had a bag filled with jasmine buds, a ball of string, and beautiful, calloused hands that worked steadily, stringing the flowers together. She did not stare at her work or sigh or make a mistake, so much so that she might have been blind. That is a real achievement: to have sight and yet choose to be blind. I wanted to reach into her skull and pull out thoughts. I shuddered at the very idea of this crime. It lasted twenty minutes.

Kavita’s letters

     Once Kavita left five letters on a park bench. It was the most decisive thing she had done in her life, or so I imagine. She walked away, thinking of how brave she was. I laughed at the drama, but very quietly. When the dead laugh too loud, it can cause storms. I picked the letters up for myself. It wasn’t stealing. Dead people don’t steal. We misplace things for the living.

Sex

     I don’t have it.

Kavita versus the flower seller

     Read a book. Then try remembering what you read. Do you remember everything? Whole chapters and conversations? No, you remember fragments. In the same way, Kavita and the flower seller are fragments of my life as I recall it now. Two episodes that flash bright as bulbs in my mind. But there are essential differences between the two. I could not violate the flower seller’s mind because of a barrier made of silence. In Kavita’s case, however, thoughts were arranged and distorted into the words I read in her letters. Even when she walked by herself, she spoke. Like an irritating metaphor in a poem, she meant too many things. I was irritated with her. I had mixed emotions about everything to do with her. For instance, I wanted to live again so that I could write a book about her, but I was also happy to be dead because everything about her stank of symbolism, and the human condition, and literature.

Sometimes I remember friends too

     Basu died three years before I did. He reminds me of the seventies: a geography of mountains, plains, deserts and beaches, lakes and oceans in the same landscape; to the east, a sunrise, to the west, a sunset. Everything happened at once in the seventies. Or, memory distorts the seventies so that I think everything happened at once. Anyway, Basu just about survived the first half of the next decade. He had become nostalgia that could not endure itself, and he died of colon cancer.
     When I mourn him, I also mourn Sharon’s marriage to a stockbroker and the birth of Gayatri’s twins.

Nomenclature

     Sharon was my neighbour and a model. She had big, shiny hair. She always said, “I will consider it” as if her consideration were the most important thing to everyone. Basu and I always cracked jokes about: “So, it’s Sharon’s wedding night. Her husband wants to have sex. What does Sharon say?” “Oh honey, I will consider it.”
     We weren’t very funny. But it pissed her off, so it stuck.
     Sharon was the only one who wondered about my name. Everyone called me Prabhu, or sometimes, K. “Telll meeee,” she would screech. “Maybe. I must consider it first,” I would reply.

The memory

     The memory of Kavita persists like the memory of alcohol, hookers, cocaine, a good book.

The mystery of my death

     I wonder about it myself. For years I had been falling into nothingness. When I was in my phase of no conflict, I think that was when I began dying. By the end of 1988 I was dead. My body stayed behind, but where was my mind? There was no resistance to anything. I had stopped writing. I had a little money, the house I inherited from ajji, a big garden with a banyan tree. I sat in a big chair everyday, shuddered now and then, tasted nothing, but I stayed there, softly breathing for the next twenty years or so.
     Now it is 2007. Body joins mind. They wear white and cremate me. What took them so long?