When the doctor told Henry Theodore he was about to die,he was not moved.He should have been,i know but he just stared back at the doctor’s large black eyes,took at deep breath ,the air smelled of phenol and ammonia,observed the dead silence around him which was only broken by the anxious clicks of the doctor’s pen.Then he walked out.He was not anxious.No he was peaceful,serene.He always, for lack of a better word,expected it and in many ways was glad that this day had come.
He always had these strange ideas about death and afterlife.He had no friends ,no friends who actually understood him anyway.He was one of those crazy loners i suppose who nobody felt comfortable associating with.He stopped talking to others because somehow they never understood his point anyway.But Henry was a smart boy,he read and boy he read a lot – Tolstoy,Gandhi,Karl Marx,Aristotle,Ayn Rand,Che,Hitler,he read them all and then he read some more.He read till he got tired but he was hungry,curious.Curiously is the funniest of all feelings,it can change human nature forever and stretch the boundaries of the mind to the sea of the unknown,the mysterious.
He was not afraid to die,he always considered living to be a far greater challenge.
“Don’t be afraid of death,learn the art of dying ,if the art of living is not your cup of coffee.Make your life worthy of something even in the face of death.Donate your organs,go save a child,join the army,glorify your death even if it gives just a moment of false pleasure.Make yourself useful”,he often used to say to his classmates who gave them the “weirdo” look.
He did not get bothered.He was a misfit,he knew that.People and society was least of his concern. In fact one Sunday afternoon when Maggie ,for whom he had a secret crush,asked him what he was contemplating on ,Henry replied – “You know Maggie,we humans should not exist at all.We are a misfit,an anomaly into the natural cycle of Mother Nature.We improvise.The sense of Self,the realization of our Self ,our false existence,our conscience;the fact that we are all in a way someone ,when in fact each one of us ,individually and collectively are in fact no one.We kill to survive,often for pleasure and are the most dangerous of all creatures.We should not exist at all Maggie,that be the true justice”
She did not talk to him for two weeks .She thought he was turning into a psycho.Henry though he was merely being observant,but not every girl would be interested in his strange theories of mass suicide on a warm Sunday afternoon.He did not understand human nature,his greatest struggle was to understand his own nature,which was so volatile that the moment he thought he had captured it,it transcended and transformed into something different.And it was gone,forever.
When Henry could no longer contain his curiosity and when anxiety almost made his heart fail,he started maintaining a journal.One of his earliest entries was :
“We were all part of a star someday,what we are made of today was part of a star long ago and we shall always be – Stardust,for that is all the Universe is made of.We have the Universe in us,just as the Universe has us in it”
That day as he walked out of the Doctor’s chamber – he engaged in a constant monologue and hummed to himself -“From Dust to Dust.From Ash to Ash “.Henry’s great experiment on Life was going to reach a completely different level but he was quite oblivious to it !
End of Chapter 1
Picture Courtesy : Aswin Pai
Nirvana - The search within ! 