Going away and going on, forever

SANDEEP SINHA

“This one is for you, father,” read the photo caption on the front page of a newspaper showing an emotional Sachin Tendulkar raise his bat skywards after scoring a magnificent knock of 140 against Kenya to keep the Indian hopes alive during the 1999 cricket World Cup. He had lost his father days back and had to skip the match against Zimbabwe to attend his father’s last rites — a match which India lost — only to stage a great comeback in a fitting tribute to his father. Like everyone, sportspersons too are humans, vulnerable to circumstances, their feats on the field notwithstanding. But they are trained to handle their emotions better, not letting out their feelings.

One may also recall the death of Sanjay Gandhi in an air crash. Indira Gandhi, his mother and the Prime Minister, wore dark glasses, ostensibly to hide her tears, and made it a point to visit the family of Sanjay’s co-pilot, who had also died in the mishap, the loss of her own son notwithstanding. She was not just a mother, but also the Prime Minister of the country, and other citizens too were to be her priority.

In sum total, as one looks back in retrospect, life is about performing the four purusharthas — dharma, artha, kama and moksha. We go from one phase to the other in a mere fulfillment of our worldly duties, despite being aware that one day it will all come to a naught. But what matters is what we leave behind, the work we did and the lives we touched.

I remember reading an interesting tale of a father who took out his grown-up son for dinner. After the dinner, when the time to pay the bill came, the father sat quiet and still. It was then that realisation dawned on the son, used to his father paying the bills. His father now wanted him to pay. It was time for the son to understand the rites of passage and time for the father to pass on the baton of worldly responsibilities to his son.

Nowhere better does one understand the meaning of Sama Bhava (equanimity) than in the cremation ground where despite the grief over the loss of a dear one, you have to control your emotions and perform your duties. The burden of responsibility puts grief on the backburner. It is a predicament that even the common people face — only that men of eminence and celebrities who are constantly in the public eye and under scrutiny — have to handle it so much better.

It is a training that is grilled into the members of the armed forces, who walk the thin line between life and death and are sensitised to these lines from the Gita: Sukh-dukh samye kritva, labh-labhi jaya jayo, tatam yudhasya, yujwasya, naiva papam wapasyasi. Pain and pleasure, loss and profit are all relative, to be taken in stride. It is with this realisation and equanimity that you fight your battles and wars, and you can do no wrong.

In his book, Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr Brian Weiss narrates wonderfully the master spirits he encountered while performing hypnotic regression on a patient, and how he was told by them that a person must keep returning to human form after death until he reaches that spiritual plane that can be achieved only through knowledge. That knowledge does not necessarily come from books. It comes from our inter-personal relationships, freedom from parochialism and prejudice, and from virtues like patience and tolerance. And then, one short sleep past, we wake up eternally, as the poet John Donne said.

In Pathankot, Kavita Khanna, the wife of actor-politician Vinod Khanna, said on his first death anniversary that the event was planned as a celebration, to mark the way he had lived his life — to the fullest. Unfortunately, it is not so in most cases because the end is mostly preceded by suffering.

It is not just the going away, but going away never to come back again that makes the pain irascible, but the Stephen Foster song one first heard in school provides some solace: Gone from the earth to a better land I know; I hear the gentle voices calling Old Black Joe; I’m coming, I’m coming for my head is bending low: I hear the gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.”