…a cursed death

Actually this post was supposed to go with the last one, at least that’s the way I had planned it, since there’s some connection between these two. The only separation I had wanted between them was a thick line; one made up of the asterisk mark which is situated right on top of the head of 8 on the keyboard. But for some reasons I decided to keep this as a separate one.

It happens to me quite often. But once the surprise (or shock/revelation) settles down, it goes down to the kingdom of oblivion just like the numerous things that happen regularly. I’m talking about being shown the other side, sometimes instantly, sometimes not-so-instantly.

Once I jotted down kinda-draft of the last post titled ‘…a blessed death’, I went back to ‘The God of Small Things’, which I was reading after a decade or so. Since it was re-reading, there wasn’t any hurry to ‘know the story’. Naturally there was a lot of time to visualize Comrade K.N.M. Pillai. “Arms were crossed on his chest, and he clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow them and he just refused”. Or Estha crushing to his bed saying: “Et tu? Kochu Maria? Then falls Estha”. Or Chacko, ‘the spoiled princeling with the old Zamindar mentality playing comrade, comrade’, thanks Ammu. Then all of a sudden, nopes, not all of a sudden, one could see disaster lurking in the air, but still, chapter 7, ‘Wisdom Exercise Notebooks’, was a blow, perhaps the most heart rending of them all. “A different Ammu” made an appearance. “Swollen with cortisone, moon faced, not the slender mother Rahel knew”. And after she showed her phlegm on a handkerchief Rahel hated her. Yes, she hated her. Ammu died at 31. Not young, not old, but a ‘viable, die-able age’. She died at a lodge in Aleppey where she had gone to attend an interview. A room boy found her dead in her room and ‘he switched off the fan’. The church refused to cremate Ammu in their cemetery. So they went to the electric crematorium; Chacko and Rahel, just Chacko and Rahel. “The door of the furnace clanged shut. There were no tears”. And after a while they received: “The whole of Ammu crammed into a little clay pot, Q 498673.”