He lived without disturbing the world

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Obituary

I ended 2025 with a funeral. I begin 2026 with a cremation. The death of the 99-year-old relative was expected. I was in the church attending her funeral yesterday when a call came from the son of an old friend. “It was an unexpected cardiac arrest,” he said. “Tomorrow is the cremation.”

I will begin the New Year with a visit to P’s bereaved family.

P was in his early 60s. I met him a few months back when I visited his place along with another friend. He looked healthy and happy. He was drawing a pension from the central government as he had taken voluntary retirement from the Intelligence department. “I have two mothers now with me,” he said in his usual ironic style. His own mother and his mother-in-law both were living with him. He had constructed an annex to his house, a large room with all necessary amenities including a corner kitchenette. There was a home-nurse to take care of the two old women. The mothers must still be there in that room.

P was a person whom nobody could ignore. One who lived life on his own terms. He and I lived in adjacent little buildings in Shillong for a few years, our homes on rent. I had never seen him pray or visit a temple. He left gods to themselves and expected them not to meddle with his life. However, when I visited him recently in his own house in Kerala’s district that has the most famous temple of the state, Sabarimala, I didn’t fail to notice the little shrine that stood between the living and the dining rooms. Had he become religious or was it just a family requirement? I didn’t ask.

Back in 1989 or 1990, while having a drink together in his one-room rental in Shillong, I expressed a desire to visit the famous Sabarimala temple. “I’ll take you,” P said instantly.  The temple, visited annually by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, stood on a hill not far from P’s house. I reached his house one evening and we started the journey to the temple early in the next morning. Without the usual accoutrement that Sabarimala pilgrims carried on their heads.

“We won’t be able to climb the 18 steps,” P said. Only genuine pilgrims who had observed the ritual of 40-day abstinence and carried the irumudikkettu, a bundle of items required for the religious rituals in the place, were allowed to climb those golden steps. Other visitors like me could arrive before the sacred idol through another way. P and I stood before Lord Ayappan earlier than the pilgrims who stood in a serpentine queue that stretched over a kilometre.

P made life easy. That was his way. Not for him the passions and furies that often accompany religionists. He would have scorned the kind of politics that is being enacted today by religious fundamentalists. He had scant respect for absurd conventions and rituals. But he never meddled with anyone’s personal beliefs or practices. He is one of those rare humans who practised what Fritz Perls recommended: You are you and I am I. If by chance we find each other, its’ beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.

P always maintained a certain distance in all his relationships. He wouldn’t let anyone get too close to him just as he never wished closeness with anyone. All that strain required to maintain interpersonal relationships wasn’t his thing. “I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. And you are not in this world to live up to mine.” He would have readily given the nod to Fritz Perls if they ever met.

When we met again in the second half of 2025, after a gap of many years and three decades after our Sabarimala adventure, he recalled one thing in particular. That the photographs I had clicked on my Kodak film camera during our Sabarimala journey were all blank when they were processed. Yes, that was true; I had loaded the film roll wrongly. But the way P recalled it thirty years later had an undertone: the deity punished me for not being a genuine pilgrim. P didn’t articulate that. Articulating anything too explicitly was not his way. He knew too well that many truths in life lie beyond the realms of absolute certainties.

I will be beginning my new year with my last visit to this rare individual who touched my life without ever touching it.