Seven years ago, in the early hours of this day, on 08 August 2019, Baba died. He had worked till literally his last day, teaching his beloved pilots at the school he and Maa had so lovingly built on those beautiful farms at the foothills of Sinhgad, and then he was gone.
There was no long illness, no disability eating away, degree by degree, at the person he was. No waiting outside ICUs, no expensive procedures that everyone knows are increasingly futile but nobody has the courage to stop, no months in which love and protectiveness curdle into concern and worry, then exhaustion and desperation, then (because we are human, however much we pretend otherwise) irritation and frustration, then hopelessness and cynicism, until death finally arrives carrying with it the one thing nobody wants to admit feeling: relief. Baba escaped all of it.
Twenty-five years ago (oh, man… a quarter of a century!), around this same time of the year, on 17 September 2001, my brother Abhi went into the sands of the Thar in his beloved MiG-21 at over 400 kmph. It was a dark, moonless night, and multiple instrument failures meant he did not know he was in an inverted dive. One moment he was flying; the next, there was nothing; and there wasn’t even enough time between those two states for him to know that the one was becoming the other.
I cannot think of two more fortunate deaths, and yes, I know exactly how strange that sounds. We are supposed to wish for long lives; we congratulate people on reaching eighty and ninety and a hundred as though longevity itself were the achievement, never mind what those final years actually contain; and we have become terribly good at keeping bodies alive, often long after the lives inhabiting those bodies have become something their younger selves would never have chosen. I don’t know whether I want that. Actually, I do know: I don’t.
I was always jealous that Baba was partial to Abhi (as Maa was to me), and there is something almost annoyingly appropriate about father and son mirroring each other even in the manner of their leaving. If I were a believer, I’d like to imagine the two of them sitting somewhere in the hereafter, clinking glasses and talking flying: “I was here, and the boss was here,” palm held out, thumb and pinky extended, instant aeroplane, followed by some flying joke comprehensible only to pilots while the rest of us Earthbound misfits continue to wonder what the fuck is so funny. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in any of that, so I have only this world in which to think about them; and, inevitably, about myself.
I have realised over the years that I don’t particularly fear death; what I fear is dying. The long version of it, I mean: the version in which your world grows smaller by degrees, where independence becomes assistance, assistance becomes dependence, and the people you love begin reorganising their lives around keeping yours going; where every conversation is about doctors and medicines and reports and bowel movements; where everyone keeps saying, “He is fighting,” when perhaps the man inside that body is bloody tired of being conscripted into a war he never volunteered for. That frightens me far more than being dead ever could.
So when my turn comes (and preferably after I have managed to annoy everyone concerned for at least a couple of more decades), I hope I get something resembling the deal Baba and Abhi got: I want to be completely, ridiculously alive immediately before I am completely not. If fate has any sense of theatre, perhaps I’ll be on a motorcycle on some beautiful road, a machine I love beneath me, helmet filled with my own terrible singing, thinking about the next corner, the next chai stop, some argument I fully intend to win when I get home, something I want to write, someone I love. And then nothing: no other vehicle involved, nobody else hurt, no innocent stranger condemned to carry my death around for the rest of their life, no hospital, no prolonged pain, no time to understand what is happening. Just a full stop at the end of an absurdly enjoyable sentence.
This is the sort of thing one hesitates to write, because the people who love you hear “I want to die” when what you are actually talking about is how you want to live. And I do: I want a great deal more of it, more roads, more arguments, more writing, more meals, more motorcycles, more people, more mistakes, more mornings when I wake up curious about what the day intends to throw at me. I want to use the bloody thing up, and when there is finally none of it left, I hope I am not made to spend years watching the fuel gauge crawl towards empty.
Baba taught till his last day. Abhi flew till his last millisecond. I should be so fortunate.
