Every morning, when my eyes open for the first time, when my brain wakes up to the inescapable reality of the today, when my lungs tell me that they’ve kept up the tiring work of keeping me alive, when the tips of my fingers are still tingling with the evanescence of dreams I had subconsciously reached out for, my heart goes thump-thump-thump, screaming into my ears that without you, every waking up is an exercise in predestined futility. And every night, just before my eyes close for the last time, when the gap between my toes has accumulated the imperceptible dust of the shattered day, when the waves of deliverance have touched the roots of my hair for the briefest of seconds, when the riotous desires from the omnipresent halls of collective humanity have lived and died in my sweat and blood, my heart goes thump-thump-thump, whispering into my disintegrating cognizance that without you, every going to sleep is a scream into the nothingness of oblivion.
What makes a grown man cry? Is it a sudden upswell of genuine emotion, is it the sudden emptiness of having someone close being taken away, or is it something else? All his professional life, my father used to work for the West Bengal State Government, in the Audit and Accounts Service for the Education Department. For a few years, in the early 2000s, he was posted at Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College. Yesterday, a junior of his (who is still posted there) reached out on his mobile number, after having wondered about his unnerving silence from the 16th. I attended the call and broke the sad news to him. We spoke for half an hour post that, and the nearly-60-year-old man broke down in tears multiple times, as he recalled what a wonderful, honest and inspirational mentor figure my father had been for him. He kept saying again and again that he had never met anyone else like my father - so honest, so responsible, so encouraging, so compassionate, yet so humble - and that baba had been an asset to all the service holders in the college, someone whom they fondly remembered even now so many years later. And as I stopped myself from welling up, the only thing I could do was to picture his smiling face in my mind's eye and pray for his soul to help me become like him. A GOOD MAN in a bad world.
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