Path of Vision

The legs of the armchair of a peaceful life have long decayed. The old easy chair trembles and rattles when one sits upon it. It feels as if the skeleton of some great life, in its broken, weary frame, still wishes to grow again into blood and flesh. It wishes to begin once more, from the beginning. Entirely new. Whether drifting towards renunciation or the domestic, the human soul forever seeks the root of life. Beneath the mask, the man eventually recognizes his true self. And then begins the task of dragging the burden of the past. Under its weight, sometimes one hard shell of the mind after another cracks apart, sometimes the cells of the brain are scorched layer by layer. Man dies, and man lives. From the breast of the earth, suddenly one night a star falls, or one morning clouds swell across the sky. Today he sits with his reckonings, his ledgers. Paper and pen in hand. It feels as though he will leave behind a balance sheet of all debts and dues upon the earth. He leans toward life as if writing a deposition of history. Like signing an office attendance book—a proof of his laborious journey.
 
He cannot laugh the foolish laugh. Nor does he collapse dim in some rebellious sorrow. And yet, drinking the venom of life in silence has become his habit. But not into his throat—he feels all poison remains trapped in his mind. His heart is still fresh; the toxins have not reached there. The dense blood has grown denser still. Before hardening entirely, blood-thinners delay its rigidity. From the black cellars of the brain, death’s poison seeps, spreading corruption along every pathway. Water mixed with milk has left his chest white, lifeless. His colorless life has gone by thus.
 
There is no chance for him to cry in solitude for himself. If he must accept renunciation, then why this monotonous, numbed life? Why do his legs falter, walking the same memory-lanes till exhaustion? Why do his eyes blind themselves watching dreams of the past?
 
Then suddenly, a sound rises in his chest. In a world of silence and solitude, even a single breath feels like the ocean’s roar. Each moment seems an eternity of cosmic life. His tongue grows weary of wasting words. Perhaps the fleshly conscience has rotted, and in its stench his decrepit body has perfumed itself. Is he then falling into the jaws of death this way? They say a man’s mind dies before his body.
 
Death is essence. It will arrive one day, along the road of Time. Already it fills the mind with suspicion and disbelief. First dies conscience, dies goodwill. Only later does the brittle shell collapse.
 
Sushamay Babu lay in his easy chair, as he did every day. His face bore the look of one counting stars in the sky. Sometimes he even hummed Rabindrasangeet: “There is sorrow, there is death, there is burning of separation. Yet there is peace, yet there is joy, yet there is the awakening infinite.” Waves subside, waves rise; blossoms fall, blossoms bloom—at those moments he grew grave in devotion, lost in thought, entering some heavenly city far from this world. There, life began anew. There the barren vessel filled with joy. Only when the bell tolled did he return to himself, remembering dinner was not yet eaten.
 
His most faithful companion was Haran, who had cooked for him not for one or two days, but for thirty long years since the death of his wife, Santwana. After she passed, he became estranged even from his only son. Sunanda had gone to America on scholarship and never returned. Now he was a U.S. citizen. From memory too, his roots had been erased. He existed, yet he did not. Like a stranger. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they met briefly, but Sushamay Babu no longer counted him within his orbit. The daughter-in-law was foreign, too. She had visited once. No pull of blood, no cord of kinship. On paper a relationship remained, but to Sushamay Babu it never felt like one.
 
Now he was utterly alone, though in truth he had always been half a bachelor. Childhood and youth had been different—then there were many people, family and neighbors. Another time altogether. In this life, without noticing, he had transformed from a banyan tree into a palm tree. One day he looked up and found infinite sky above, and an abyss below his feet. Reality struck, and he regained his senses.
 
In this household lived three souls: himself, Haran, and his pet dog. That dog too had a story. Twelve years ago, when Sunanda last returned from America, he had brought the dog home. For one month before leaving, Sunanda cared for it lovingly. The son who had shed no tear leaving his father forever had nearly missed his flight for the sake of his dog. Had Sushamay Babu not kept the animal, life might have been easier.
 
For over a decade, he loved the dog as a lover loves his beloved, as a husband loves his wife, as a mother loves her child. To him, it was the only bond in the world containing pure, selfless love. Between man and beast a relation innocent, sacred, could still exist. When he had failed to make a single human being his own, the dog was no less.
 
Descending from the terrace, Sushamay Babu went downstairs. Behind him trailed his beloved “Shona.” Clumsily it managed the stairs, then waited by the kitchen door. The dog had not been well for days. Weighed down by age and biology. He called out: “Haran, bring food, brother.”
 
One morning he awoke to find saliva streaming from Shona’s jaws, soaking its little bed. Touching its body, he felt it slack, as if life itself had loosened. Just as his own weakening nerves, the once-muscular body had grown fragile, inert. They were complements of each other—both destitute, both solitary, both family-less.
On Sundays, his friend Shantimoy came to chat awhile. A bachelor too. Once, the two had traveled the world, chasing the dream of seeing everything. That dream fulfilled, Shantimoy now often said: “Persons like us—live like kings, die like beggars.”
 
In such lonely hours, Sushamay Babu sometimes remembered his younger daughter. For though he pretended to push away the past, it returned. Rina, Santwana’s elder daughter, was married. Between them was Sunanda. The youngest was Shona, his dearest. She loved to travel, loved the law, wished to be a lawyer like her father. Her mother’s face was hers, but her soul resembled her father’s.
 
Three years after Rina’s marriage, one night on Mahashtami, Shona went out to see the goddess idols. She never returned. No one knew with whom she had gone, where she had vanished. Police searched, connections were used, but nothing came. She vanished like an illusion. Did she live somewhere unknown? He never learned. He searched long, long.
 
That was the great wound of his life. A dagger from behind, silent, leaving him crippled. After Shona’s disappearance, Santwana collapsed into bed. At forty-eight she suffered a stroke, and never rose again. Sushamay lived because the world still required him. Man lives in waiting for death.
 
“Persons like us—live like kings, die like beggars.” Each time Shantimoy repeated it, he clutched Shona closer in memory. Was it envy? Did Shantimoy resent his social prestige? Thirty years he had lived alone, staring at the sky from his easy chair. That battered chair was his favorite. Soon it would perish. His simple life too would end. Loneliness had never so possessed him as now.
 
Why then did he cling to Shona, his dog? For the remaining years, he wanted to hold on. But can one hold anyone simply by wishing? A government veterinarian, visiting, said: “Why spend so much on this dog? It won’t live long. Even if it does, the suffering will be unbearable—for the dog and for you. At eighty, you should not take this burden.”
 
Sushamay Babu asked: “Can I not admit it to your hospital? I’ll pay all costs.” The doctor smiled: “Some deeds seem cruel, yet they contain humanity. Old police horses are shot by firing squad. Some call it cruel, I call it kind. Even terminally ill humans in first-world countries are given sleep, released from pain. I feel it is more kindness than cruelty.”
 
“So you suggest I kill it with medicine?”
“If you hand it to us, we’ll do so in days. Otherwise let it be. Or, you can abandon it outdoors, leave its fate to nature. Then your conscience too will be clear.”
 
The words struck Sushamay like a broom sweeping trash. His heart trembled. So fragile are civilized ties. A sigh escaped him.
 
The doctor added: “And you—living alone in such a large house—is it proper? Stay half the year with your son in America, half with your daughter in Australia. Can servants be relied upon forever?”
 
Thus the daily transactions of giving and taking, the shifting names of relationships, kept changing colors. Sushamay placed Shona on his bed, then lay upon his own. Looking skyward, he grew dazed. Sometimes he drifted far from the present, as if standing at the edge of a cliff, no path ahead. Then suddenly, he returned, the bustling city around him again sinking into primordial silence. Stars blazed, announcing their eternal presence.
 
He rose, dressed, and told Haran: “Tell the driver to ready the car. I’m leaving now.”
“Shall I come too, master, so late?” Haran asked.
“Did I ask you?” he thundered. Haran fell silent.
 
He lifted Shona’s sweaty body—its fever had broken. The dog was hot in his arms. Quietly, he placed it in the car. The empty road stretched, the city asleep. As the car stopped near a roadside park, he descended, cradled Shona, and laid it gently upon the grass. Then he withdrew his thin arms from its body, tiptoed back like a thief. At the very moment the car started, the dog stirred weakly, lifting its head.
 
Sushamay froze. His impulse was to flee. But his weak heart rooted him. He saw Shona staring at him, unblinking. Its eyes were calm. No fire, no water. Only a strange, unfamiliar look, as if seeing him for the first time. As if the world itself was a stranger it had never known. Then, placing its head between its paws, the dog lowered its eyes, accepting fate.
 
For a while Sushamay sat frozen. In the silence of night, his thoughts dripped like dark water.
“Shall we go, sir?” asked the driver.
“Yes. Drive,” Sushamay whispered.
 
He returned home, weary feet dragging. Collapsing into his easy chair, he doubted his own existence. All masks fell from his face. He remembered the waste of his life—for whom he had shed blood, sweat, tears. All gone. Had they abandoned him, or had he abandoned them? Fate he did not believe in. Nor afterlife. He was the very man who had abandoned a sick dog on the roadside—to be crushed by wheels or torn by vultures. His mind was that same treacherous mind which leaves countless men alone on the desolate road of great life. As he had once let his daughter vanish from his world, so now he surrendered the dog to its fate. Was it not the same betrayal?
 
He lay upon his easy chair, his skeletal frame resting there. No longer did he wish to begin again. For he now knew: wherever one begins, one day the path will narrow to solitude. Unless he can cut free from past and future and live in each moment, in each eternal instant—peering into the great man within life’s depths.
Sleep overtook him. The visible world dissolved. He saw himself stumbling upon the road to the Great Liberation, falling face down. His anguished cry drew no response. None turned back, none came to carry him. They all moved forward—together with Yudhishthira. He had reached nearly close, so very close. Yet, for the smallest measure, salvation was denied.
 
And in such a petty life, what better end could there be?