Vanished.

A few days back my sister sent me a message – “Chordadu passed away today evening, sometime back. Just letting you know.”
I didn’t react to that message much, probably because I did not know how to. It is not like I was particularly close to him or anything of that sort. Often I thought he was vile and old and how he should just die. But then he died and I was not even sure that I really wanted it that way. For the 22 years I have lived there I had nothing to do with him, rarely interacted with him and it never mattered. So why now?
I remembered his wife telling us when we were small that he sat around all day like a barn owl. And now that barn owl was dead, his wife finally managed to coax him away.
He hated my dog. Every time my dog would decide to act like a complete stubborn mule and sit pert in front of the main door and bark like a rabid cretin- he would unleash the wave of choicest vernacular abuses. It made no difference to my dog. When I read the message it did hit me once that now the dog could bark to glory. But then I thought- did I really want her to bark like that?
Today I am feeling sad about things. Today I feel this vacuum. Not that some special memory came to mind but suddenly death seemed too real to pretend that it had not affected me this time.
I have just been to the cremation grounds once. That only time being when one of my friend’s fathers committed suicide. I remember crying after I got home not because I saw anything that scared me but rather for he suddenly came to mind. I had not even seen the dead body. I didn’t want to see it. He was this sarcastic and brilliant man who just jumped off the 7th floor one day after fighting with his family. When I came home – he suddenly came to mind.
But today- Chordadu just didn’t come to mind. He came to mind with a volley of feelings that I could not handle. The feeling that I could not lose anything that was mine, anything I knew, anything I know. For if I did, a part of history and just goes missing. In a story of everyday- some lines stop running. I am going to tell these stories to someone one day and I cannot have parts missing. How can you make do with characters that vanish? Does it not change everything even if he didn’t matter too much?
Chordadu just vanished, like Dadu, like didima, like Bodhi’s father...like Raman’s mom...and one day...like me.