Autumn’s Spring

My beloved writer Albert Camus said, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” I have almost completed a book titled Autumn Shadows. It is my own story, a sort of autobiography. Forgive the presumptuousness of a very ordinary person who dares to write a memoir. Every person has a story to tell, I’m sure. I don’t know how interesting my story is. I had to tell it for my own reasons. Let me give a short extract from that book here. The memoir will be published soon as an e-book soon at Amazon. This is a hype that I’m trying to create in the autumn of my life when every leaf is turning out to be a flower, a beautiful flower. 

Here’s the extract from the first chapter.

Insects come to die in my living room. Every morning I sweep them into the dustpan from beneath the fluorescent lamp where they lie dead in a heap of atomic dark spots while Maggie prepares the morning’s red tea flavoured with a leaf or two of tulsi or mint picked freshly from our little kitchen garden.

Life and death.  Both come from the garden.  The insects breed there somewhere beyond my purview.  The tulsi and the mint are nurtured by Maggie and me. 

We live in a rather small village named Arikuzha in Kerala.  Our life has been a long and absorbing journey from our respective villages through Shillong and Delhi before returning to the relatively pristine charms of Arikuzha.

“I came here to die,” I told my friend in the village.  It was just a year after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India.  Maggie and I were teaching in Sawan Public School, Delhi.  The school was killed rather mercilessly and much eventfully by a cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).  More about that later.  The death of Sawan threw me into a bout of depression which fostered in me a profound revulsion towards life.  I wished to give Maggie a sheltered place which she eminently deserved.  Arikuzha became the final choice.

“You will find peace and happiness here,” my friend predicted.  I found a job immediately.  Carmel Public School at Vazhakulam where I started teaching in the senior secondary section instilled in me a renewed enthusiasm for life. I struck a unique rapport with the students.

One of the first things I did after settling down in Kerala was to go through Albert Camus once again.  Camus’s Sisyphus was my faithful companion from the time I read the eponymous book in my twenties. 

Sisyphus is a Greek mythological figure who was condemned by the mighty gods to roll a rock up to the zenith of a mountain for his sin of bringing immortality to human beings.  The gods ensured that the rock would never reach the zenith.  Just before Sisyphus reached the top of the mountain, the gods would push the boulder downhill.  That is quite typical of gods. 

I read Camus for the first time when I was grappling with my religion.  The first book of his that I read was not The Myth of Sisyphus, however.  It was The Stranger (also translated as The Outsider), a novel about a man who is an outsider to the society because of his sheer lack of conventional morality.  I read the book at the age of 21 when I was a student of religion and philosophy.  A companion brought my attention to the book because he thought – I presume – that I was not very unlike Meursault, the protagonist of the novel.