He smiled and said: This is my second chance. Open the windows. Inhale fresh air with me. Throw away fears and follow the life instinct. Give in to passions. Once again leap into the pond full of lilies.
Let’s hum a rhyme. Sing a song. Write a poem. Do not listen to the doctor. Go out, walk in the streets.
He did all that and painted a face, that of a child sharing a smile with a little bird and called it life.
He painted the fragrance of the night jasmine and called it life.
He painted the moon quietly entering his room and called it life.
He painted a young couple, warming up to a night full of promises and called it life.
He painted an old man, standing under the falling leaves and called it life.
He painted waves washing away footprints on a beach and called it life.
The second chance was brief. So they drew the curtains. Dimmed the lights and put some incense in the urn.
The evening had not yet descended on the plains. The sun was still visible. But the nurse knew this continuation of day and night was fast becoming irrelevant to him.
She knew, as did her patient, that tomorrow, the sun will rise again. But he will be among those who can no longer feel a warm sun, a soothing evening and a promising night.
Can a departing soul dance on nature’s beats? Perhaps, at least as long as their hearts beat. Do their hearts beat?
Now he is among those who have been asleep since the beginning of time. O earth, be kind to those sleeping inside you. O earth, be kind to us whose hearts still beat.
But death is not the end. It is not the beginning either. It is just a continuation of the inevitable.
Have we seen death? We have. Often. But we do not notice it.
I saw it once in a Starbucks café in Washington. It was sitting at a safe distance from a young man, sipping hurriedly the last drops of his coffee. He finished his coffee, went out to a metro station and jumped before an approaching train.
I noticed this death because it happened so abruptly and it was so shocking. Most of the time we do not notice death but it is always there.
Every day we meet those who are destined to die. Sometimes we stop them too, to ask about an address, a shop or a nearby café. Most of the time we just walk past them.
Sometimes we greet them, exchanging words that mean little to us. Every day we see faces that we forget as soon as we look away. We see but we do not notice. They remain faceless to us, as we to them.
In these millions, they are just numbers. We are just numbers. Numbers, crossing each other on numbered streets. No names asked. No names given.
Opportunities to meet yet another person that we may never meet again, slips by and we do not regret it.
Another story remains untold, taken to a graveyard and buried or cremated.
This is yet another life. This is yet another death. Both go unnoticed.
With mutual indifference, we live in the same space, the space we share with both life and death. Do they also remain indifferent to each other? Perhaps not. Perhaps they exchange notes and do talk about those who are destined to die on a fine day or a misty evening.
As people walked into his room, the nurse removed the curtains. She left the flowers where they were but let the sun in.
People paid last tributes to him. Some wept. Some quietly wiped their tears.
“To God we belong, to Him we return,” said his Muslim mourners.
"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” said the Christians or silently crossed their hearts.
“From untruth lead us to truth, from darkness lead us to light, from death lead us to immortality,” said Hindus.
“Will the earth touch the sky, if I am removed from between them?” asked my poet friend Shakil Azad before he died here in Virginia last year.
The earth did not embrace the sky when Musadiq Sanwal died but his death left yet another poem unwritten, another story untold and another painting unfinished.
“But Kashan is no longer my town. My hometown has been lost,” wrote Iranian poet Sohrab Sepeheri (7 October 1928 – 21 April 1980 / Kashan). “With feverish effort, I have built myself a house on the far side of the night.”
“Wherever I am, let me be! The sky is mine, the windows, the air, love, earth, are all mine. What does it matter if mushrooms of nostalgia grow from time to time?”
In another poem, now engraved on his gravestone, Sohrab wrote: “If you come looking for me, I am behind nothingness, at a place where the breeze brings messages from distant flowers, near the sands where delicate riders left their footprints.
“This is where the umbrella of desire opens with the freshness of rains … if you are coming to see me, pray step gently, lest the thin shell of my loneliness should crack.”