By Rajshekhar Pant
Two young men from my little hill town are gone.
They belonged to gentle, middle-class families where values were quietly lived rather than loudly professed. They had each found their own way in life and, within a span all too brief, had earned the respect that comes only through perseverance and character. Then, almost together, illness overtook them. They spent long, uncertain weeks in hospitals in Delhi before the news arrived that both had died—on the very same day.
In a small mountain town, grief is never confined to a single household. Every family is bound, however loosely, to every other. Sorrow travels from one doorstep to the next until it belongs to everyone. The town has fallen silent. There is, in moments like these, very little left to say except to pray that no family should ever again be asked to bear such a loss.
Death has always unsettled me. But this is something else entirely. These were children I had watched, years ago, hurrying to school in the crisp mountain mornings, schoolbags bouncing against their backs, their tiny hands clasped in those of their parents. How does one reconcile those living memories with the stillness of death?
I have always tried not to look upon the face of the departed. That final image has a way of lodging itself somewhere deep within, refusing to fade. I would rather remember the laughter, the brightness of a living face. In the end, memory is all that survives us.
This morning, when one of the bodies was brought home from a Delhi hospital, I went to a family I have known since I myself was a child. I sat quietly on an empty chair near the gate and watched the tragedy unfold around me. Few things are as devastating as an untimely death. It seems to suspend time itself. Everything familiar suddenly sinks into a darkness of uncertainty. And for those who remain, life, I suspect, never quite regains its old rhythm. Something irrevocable changes forever.
The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke saw death not as life’s negation but as its fulfilment—something that grows naturally from the life each person has lived. Yet I wonder whether even Rilke had stood before a death like this: one so sudden that it tears away every illusion of order and leaves only bewilderment. Six months ago, who could have imagined that these two young men would be gone?
Rilke also believed that modern civilisation had turned death into an impersonal, almost mechanical event, whereas an awareness of mortality deepens our appreciation of beauty and lends urgency to life itself. Faced with such a loss, however, these reflections feel painfully inadequate. What young person, with dreams waiting to be realised and a future calling out to him, pauses to contemplate the certainty of death? And what parent, what friend, what neighbour, ever imagines death waiting just beyond tomorrow?
Perhaps Franz Kafka came closer to the truth when he wrote that death offers no explanation; it simply arrives. Life, he seemed to suggest, carries only one certainty—that it will one day end. The questions that torment us afterwards—when, how, and why—remain unanswered.
Perhaps this is why Indian philosophy speaks of rebirth and the invisible continuity of karma. Perhaps these ideas are not merely metaphysical propositions but acts of compassion, offering those who survive a way to endure what otherwise seems unbearable. Without such faith, how does one carry the weight of such grief through the years that still remain?
Wherever you are, may peace be with you both.
Perhaps this was all the road you were destined to walk together.
(The author is an amateur filmmaker, a photographer, and a writer, who has written over a thousand write-ups, reports, etc., published in the leading newspapers and magazines of the country. He can be reached at pant.rajshekhar@gmail.com)
