There is a beautiful parable about a prospective groom who escaped to the Himalayas because he met death in the market. Death, timid as she was, made an agitated-seeming gesture, which the groom interpreted as menacing and immediately fled into the mountains. A few hours later the bride, who was after all a personal friend of death, reached out to her and asked, “Why did you frighten my man this morning?” As if death herself had forgotten that she was the all-powerful being, she replied apologetically, “No, I didn’t intend to frighten him at all. Rather I was surprised to see him in the market as he had an appointment with me in the mountains.”
This parable, though clothed in metaphors, radiates a clear yet powerful truth: that often, if not always, our anxious response to the unexpected happenings in life brings us to death. Had the groom simply ignored that mysterious lady and not fled into the mountains, where of course he died, he might have lived longer. Anyways, the groom fled from death to meet death, and that, above any other truth, is the heart of this parable.
However, this mythical groom is not the only one who fell into the vain illusion of escaping death. According to another parable, not merely an individual but the whole community is known to have set upon itself the formidable task of dodging mortality. A few young men in one of the remote villages put into the mind of everyone that they could live forever if only they found a way to imprison death, which they succeeded after numerous abortive attempts. Within a few weeks, however, these young men, eccentric as they were, found themselves assaulted by the thorns of curiosity. “What if she has escaped already?” Tormented by uncertainty, they decided to check on her on a full moon night, assuming that on such nights death is in her weakest phase. Meanwhile, days of break from work had sharpened death’s ability to foresee events. So when those men came to peek into the cave, she hid behind in the dark corner, tempting them to enter. The next morning villagers found those young men lying dead inside the cave.
Death is inevitable. Yet, as these parables demonstrate, we humans have tried time and again, either through thoughts or action, to dodge it. Legendary masters like Tolstoy and Kafka contemplated it so thoroughly that their worldview was decisively informed by how they processed their own mortality. For Tolstoy death is that fulcrum that motivates one to live life, which won’t be granted again, authentically. In ‘The Death of Ivan Illych’ the protagonist, who is faced with the certainty of death, reflects on his life and is overwhelmed with bilious rage. He realizes, with a sharp blade in his soul, that he has wasted his life. In Tolstoy’s works death asserts as an inexorable force, where the characters are always haunted by the carnivorous glare of remorse and resentment.
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For Kafka, however, death is eternal freedom from the flaming shackles of life. In ‘The Metamorphosis’, for example, the death of the protagonist, sadly enough, brings relief to his family. Similar perspectives can be seen in most of his other works.
How one internalizes death is largely determined by one’s life experiences. Tolstoy lost his mother early in childhood. Mother, therefore, remained a sacred, inaccessible angel for him, and he never actually healed from the loss. He sought her everywhere, and in fact literature, of which he became a master, was a way for him to feel closer to her. Through literature he sought immortality, what had snatched his mother away, he wanted to crush through his art. His life, therefore, was largely a battle against death and this battle, of course, had been motivated by his inner conviction that death is tragic, that it steals one’s life.
Kafka, on the other hand, took death as a deliverance from the thorns and tangles of life. An unusually sensitive soul, he contracted tuberculosis early in his life. Unable to tear away from the labyrinth of middle-class, patronizing father, he found this disease a crushing burden. For this reason, he often felt that death would be an eternal relief from life.
Though Tolstoy and Kafka hold a diametrically opposite perspective, both loved life with passion. Even Kafka, who often was gripped with suicidal desires, wanted to live and live he did until tuberculosis took him away. No matter what perspective one holds on death, the reality of death wrenches one’s soul. The first time I experienced the loss of someone close I was in grade nine. Of course, my grandmother had died even before, but then I was barely one year old. Anyways, it was the death of my childhood friend that cut my soul with those wintry blades. It took me months to grapple with the new reality that never, never again will Roshan, who used to call out for me every time I came home during Dashain break, now be there, peering joyously from his verandah and, in a blink, running to meet me.
It hurts to think that one day all our loved ones will be gone. One morning we will wake to find our mother, without whom we have not taken a breath, no longer there on earth to press their loving palm over our sickly forehead. Decades from now even we won’t be here. This is the brutal reality of death. Everything dies, the rhododendrons that embroider our mountains in spring, die, leaving the hills desolate and lifeless. But spring comes again, and rhododendrons bloom again, fresh ones, vibrant ones. Our death too is of that nature, we die so that a fresh and new generation can get space to decorate the world. Yes, it is sad to die but it will be sadder, if we really think thoroughly about it, to live forever.
Had the groom been familiar with this wisdom he would have, I would like to believe, gracefully faced death in the market instead of hiding away from her in the mountains. That might have transformed his tragic fate.
