By Somoshree Palit
An account on why certain deaths should be funny
And I died last night.
Five years ago, I threw myself on the divan, in a very Dorian Grey-ish manner, weeping my eyes out, and as I softly plummeted down to my doom, I realized that the wall needed to be painted where the plastic chair had grazed it horizontally. Upon estimation of the poetic leverage of the thought, a number “flashed upon that inward eye”, the number ‘17.’
Numbers have always been an integral part of my life, essentially because I absolutely despise mathematics, and that’s exactly why God decided it would be hilarious.
If there is just one note of commonality between God and a child, then – no it is not purity of the being and innocence of the soul. Golding did not fulminate his frustration for 224 pages for nothing. It is a disease, a disease that knows no cure, which cunningly affects only God and children. I would have diagnosed it as Multiple Identity Disorder, but for the inconvenience of lacking a certain medical degree.
Everything went downhill when I failed in my arithmetic examination in high school. There were just seven girls in our batch who could say they had made the blood of Archimedes throbbing in their veins proud, by passing in a paper deliberately composed to prove our inferiority. I remember the number marked with glaring red ink, 17 attained on 100. It was heartbreaking, yes, especially for someone with an academic achievement record running down to her babbling years. Held back my tears, and realized I had grown.
Hunger has always appalled me, whether it is mine or people struck with poverty. Yet nothing on this planet appalled me more than the dire hunger of monkeys in mathematics textbook desperately climbing up an oiled pole to reach a bunch of bananas. Never did I ever understand why both holes in a tank needed to be opened when filling it with water, one tap filling and a hole emptying it, and how much time it would take to fill it up. My trains journeying from two opposite directions, which were supposed to meet like lovers torn apart by family rivalries never met. A boat, vying against or following the river current might have faced difficulties in reaching its destination, or might have even reached faster, assisted by the current. I have never known the joy of which of the either happened, for my boat always sank. The baby always aged a lot faster than its father, sometimes even 25 years older than its parent, and my awestruck teacher, eyes brimming with wonder and tears, awarded me an unwilling 17.
Those were the years of crooked teeth and genuine smiles, with a dash of melodrama. I kept on thinking, “What doesn’t kill me makes me feel alive,” so much so, that I wrote a full length poem on that. Whispers across school corridors made me know it full well, that everyone knew it full well, that my paper read “17”. My identity died a brutal death. It became 17.
Since then, all I had known about life was that I would go nowhere if I did not do well in mathematics. I did not do well in mathematics, I had realized pretty early on what does not kill me would mutate and try again.
One thing that I realized that day was, only bad grades became identities. Goodness in any form is like a frog about to be dissected, mostly ignored, soon forgotten and the sharpness of the knife receives momentary credit. Either way, the frog dies.
Cut to eleventh grade, I was told multiple of times that studying the arts would get me nowhere. Twelfth grade, and people I knew back in my toddler years, and had not seen them ever since, reappeared and reiterated how majoring in English Literature would get me nowhere. It became a fundamental responsibility on part of my friends, relatives, neighbours, people I had no knowledge that they existed – everyone to impress upon me the one truth that, literature would get me nowhere.
I am still here though, waiting for the day I would actually use x = [− b ± √ (b2 − 4ac)] / 2a in real life. There must be people who look up at a fallen tree and wonder at what angle its peak touched the ground instead of calling up the corporation for the removal of the fallen branch. It is because of them that this world still needs ‘how to use’ directions on shampoo.
June 10th. It was already time for one identity to die, to be replaced by another. Higher Secondary Examination results were declared, and I had the golden opportunity to gather a firsthand experience of the inside of a bee hive. Relatives, acquaintances, neighbours, relatives of neighbours, neighbours of relatives flocked together, desperate for answers to one burning question, “How much?” I felt like a queen, a Queen bee, to be precise, exactly the way she feels when other bees flock around her as she inches closer to death. 97% came as a rude shock, a pleasant surprise, a happy triumph for many, while for me it meant just one newfound identity : I was to be called 97% henceforth. Inviting a student with a good academic score for dinner is an age old custom in here. Wherever I went, I was met with dilated pupils, elevated eyebrows and smiling mouths that in totality could have meant anything between “I wish I could feed you” to “I wish I could be fed with you.” Double meanings are neither intended, nor welcomed.
One good thing about the death of an identity is that it is a painless death. There would be no grieving faces around as one dies, neither a need to prepare a spectacular one-liner. Infact, there would be plenty of trial and errors before the final sentence.
My new identity gave me the opportunity to talk with a sweet lady, something I would cherish all my life. “But how did you prepare?” she asked, a note of earnest curiosity in her thin voice. I mumbled sweet nothings, and then went full blown Darwin on her, “I studied all night, it did make me sick at the start but then it became a habit and soon I was able to not sleep at all and still stay perfectly energetic. You see, it comes with a necessity that propels you to practice austerity…”
My mother rolled her eyes to another dimension, and I stopped. The lady began again, in a tone that could shame a banshee to silence, “My son never stays up to study. I repeat, NEVER. All he does is watch the television all day, every day. Please tell him, please explain to him, will you, that if he continues this he would never pass! I have so many dreams for him, that he would become a renowned engineer or a doctor; stand first in the Joint Entrance Examination! Please tell him; he doesn’t listen to me, he will listen to you!”
I smiled a exhausted smile, the one that follows a battle for natural selection. “When is the Joint Entrance Examination?”
“He has already completed nursery this month. He still makes silly mistakes while adding digits! He will be the death of me. I can’t even sleep peacefully at night…”
It is at times like these that I realize why God stays up in heaven. He possibly lives in sheer terror of what he has created.
When I stood 150cms on the ground my bones decided they had had enough. I guess I have heard less of “What is your name” and more of “How tall are you” all my life. 14 year olds taller than a 19 year old me asking my age was an added buoy. Humans never lose a chance to shower other humans with unsolicited advice, and plenty of “Exercise and drink milk” came my way. Height was mine, the kids section in a mall was mine, half tickets were mine, all mine, mine alone, and yet the entire world was concerned.
Not only did heaven bless me with a size like that of a compass pencil, but also with a brain that switches off at random. Comebacks to tell tale tragedies like “What can you even see down there?” or “Why are you so short?” usually strike me during a shower, compulsively a year or two after the incident. Even then, this is one of the identities I am proud of : all dynamites came in small packages. I am not saying I am one admirable dynamite. But termites are scary too. Right?
Of all identities, this stayed with me. Although it killed my real identity, it never drew to cessation. Mesmerized glances behold me like some alien straight out of Mars, and turn away, not because they are embarrassed that they judged me by my size; but because their wandering eyes search for the curator who dared put me up for exhibition without detailing my proportions. Kind souls have told me time and again that my exterior does not matter; it’s the ‘inner beauty’ that counts. If no one judged a book by its cover Barnes and Noble Deluxe Editions would not have existed.
Yet, I am proud of this identity. I am no king, and yet people bow down their heads when they speak to me, and I, like some god of righteousness, hold my head up high. At times I do wonder if the beheaded Orpheus felt like me while looking up to the skies and singing his songs of love. Probably did; even I need to scream to make empire state buildings hear my voice.
I just figured out that tall people are more susceptible to be victims of bird droppings than shorter people, unless those birds were trained in marksmanship by the Imperial Stormtroopers. I did not know what to do with this information. Hopefully, it helps someone else with a comeback.
Fixation is redundant, Freud said that long back. Change is dynamic, and my identities took that seriously. They changed their units, from percentages to centimeters to currency. They changed multiple times. They resurrected multiple times. Identities beget identities, they change, they die, and they are born again.
Winning an essay competition brought me more facetime than a tendon brought to Achilles, and long lost acquaintances, who had given me up for an un-hatched egg, steadily made their return. “She is my so and so”, they said. “I once shared my eraser with her in kindergarten”, they said. “My colleague lived 4 and a half miles from the hospital she was born in”, they said. The note of familiarity kept changing, with one singular phrase to sum it all up, “She received a prize of Rs. 50,000.” Considering the endless noises chanting “50,000” incessantly, pretty sure God would have skydived down to his earth had His name been chanted likewise.
Of all newcomers who claimed shared ancestry, fifty percent never read the essay, and the other fifty had no idea what the 50,000 brouhaha was all about. An identity, which should have been in a name, or at least, in the words that won a competition did not live long enough to see the day. I would not deny that it give me a separate kind of heaven, a heaven where my parents smiled proudly and my teachers, who had helped me grow, beamed the brightest, and my friends, who had not given up on me looked on with eyes that said “Treats”; but it had also given me a hell where the number of zeroes after five mattered more than the sleepless nights spent in research and writing. Some days I felt like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, other days I was just his earlobe.
That day I realized death was not a sudden shock. Death was a series of short events that gave ample cryptic notes before leading one six feet beneath the ground.
Behind every identity is a man who wanted to be remembered, and men who wanted to forget. My numerical identities committed themselves to a pole dance round the carcass of my actual identity. Now that I look on it, who is not identified by numbers? From birth till the day we die, every phase of our life is numbered. There is a registration number in our birth certificates. We have several identification numbers – student identification number, roll numbers, registration numbers, permanent account number, ration card number, credit card number, debit card number, passport number; even the death certificate has a number. Quite certain, had Longfellow lived long enough, he would have written “Number thou art, and as a number returnest.”
Cosmic bodies are identified by numbers, and so are we. Although this may sound inspiring, it is not. It is not an honour to be remembered by a bad grade, or a height that the world finds hilarious, or an amount of money. Either of these is as bad as being identified by one’s feet size in their local shoe store. With every number that I earned to my name, I lost a part of my name. With every new identity I gained, I lost my real identity.
All the numbers I began to be identified with, a part of my identity succumbed to death. Every time an identity was born, the past identity collapsed. Again. And again. And again.
I met a toddler last night at a family event of a rather small gathering, roughly the size of America. Amidst all the hullaballoo of “50,000,” she asked me, “What is your name?” A bliss that could level a thousand blazing suns surged within me. I had never been happier to tell my name to a toddler who would surely forget it a minute later, yet here was a divine creature not interested in one, my grades, two, my height, and three, my bank account. I told her my name, and went so far as to give her a candy I had sneaked in for myself. She smiled, kissed my cheek and ran off.
A divine encounter, I kept on musing. An hour later, I saw her mother asking her who gave her that candy, and nonchalantly came the musical answer that drove me to tears, “Doraemon.”
And I died last night. With a series of numbers to my name, and an added name to my numbers, I died last night.
Sometimes I do wonder if all of this happened because I did not forward that one WhatsApp message about a goat to twenty of my contacts.
These numbers are indebted to no one, not even Death. An identity does not die because it has lost its initial charm. An identity dies because a new identity has taken its place. They do not follow the cycle of death and resurrection. Only when a new identity has resurrected, the older one dies, and never makes its return. This continues, a name to a number, and a number to a name.
This is what helped me accept the identity of the toddler’s “Doraemon”. It brought me the sense of a journey : from a human, to a number, to a human again. Well, almost. Cats are humans to me.