Tonight I'd like to post editor and educator Dr. Sunil Sharma's "Eerie Resemblance," which he described as a piece "mirroring some South Asian realities." I think you might find that this piece is universal as well.
Eerie resemblance
---Sunil Sharma
He died in a well-lit and clean hospital ward, un-cared by the guys in white robes with dangling stethoscopes, immune to the stink of death, in a pricey set-up.
Death is a roaring business. Pain sells but its source is disposable.
I had cried a lot in the cold corridor, a mere teen, that time, shivering in the wind that came off a choked river few miles down the highway to Delhi, the capital of the country.
Nobody noticed. It was common in that hell---sobbing orphans and widows.
I knew the secret.
Pa, before the cardiac arrest finally took him away, was not alive much earlier also. In fact, the poor man had died years ago but again, nobody in the family had noticed it then.
I found a cadaver roaming the house in a little north Indian town.
Sitting on a cot, in an open yard, wearing a loincloth, bare chested, gazing at the sky, on summer nights that hinted the retreating spring, Pa struck a figure solitary in the crowds.
He would look ahead or up, brooding.
Perhaps, communing with the stars that guide lost souls on gloomy heath and meadows dark.
The breeze kissed a sunken face recovering from terminal illness, eyes blank, soul drained,
The son youngest would not dare disturb the reverie of a man who could have been a good writer, if time would have been kind
He would hardly talk, going deeper inside, remote from the surroundings---like a yogi, preparing for another journey.
Fifty years later, his same son assumes that forlorn position, downsized, forgotten by all.
Odd!
Sitting in a dark room, brooding, blank inside, the cavities opening up during melancholic nights, a replica of his sensitive Pa,
Watching the stars above the sodium-vapor lights...and the vagrant moon.
Some existential pains have got an eerie family resemblances, texts, textures and postures!
The past repeats.
Pain is a narrative of continuities, despite temporal voids and fissures; a universal saga that death can never conquer and erase by its icy fingers.
In mourning
Pain
Grief
We all are united by a strange script understood by all!
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Author-bio:
Mumbai-based, Sunil Sharma writes prose and poetry, apart from doing literary journalism and freelancing. A senior academic, he has been published in some of the leading international journals and anthologies. Sunil has got three collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction, one novel and co-edited five books of poetry, short fiction and literary criticism. Recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. Another notable achievement is his select poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree-2015.
He edits the English section of the monthly Setu, a bilingual journal from Pittsburgh, USA:
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I'll finish with some music. Somehow Ahmad Jamal's 1959 version of "Darn That Dream" seems appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BD8-aYrKew
His "But Not For Me" is from 1958: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkogQxKXwZc
His "Stolen Moments" is more recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HClD5wy7K5s as is "Lament": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9cb6RrfksA
