memory and forgetting

Today is the 13th, unsurprisingly, of July. The rituals of grief are necessary, even for people like me to rail against. No one mourned for him that day. We went away one man less than we came as and nobody bothered about it. He was only a body, disposed of after the life was no longer there, not a person who had always been. Now I realize the importance of mourning, why a person should not go away unlamented, why there are social taboos attached to it. Why it was so important to sing for Lysidas, to state ‘Lysidas is dead’, and why it’s so good that it was Milton who sang for him. Baba went away unlamented, unmourned for. The world did not break apart for him. Only in a in a tiny corner of tiny me, he lives. I say it without any pride, any vanity. I wish his memories shone brightly in the hearts of many others, and shone brilliantly in a way it doesen’t in the dark mustiness inside me coz I’ve devoted myself to not being horrorstruck by that time, to ignore if need be, in order to go on. Cuz there I feel the irony and indeed, the kindness of it all. He perhaps came the closest to being the best man he could be as my father. These are solipsistic musings and in his quiet way, he has probably cared for many others about whom it would not occur to him to mention since he wouldn’t have regarded them as in any way out of the day’s job at all. To baba, you have my everything.