Suicide
of a Highbrow
VP Gangadharan
Echoes of distant past haunt me…
March 12, 1974.
Tucked in the envelope was a pink paper with little scrawls that shook me to the core.
Sam expired!
– My brother.
It was the incredulity of the untoward that gave me the real shock rather than the earthly evanescence of an Adonis. How on earth could I believe it?
Hardly a month passed since I had his last letter which as usual carried his sentiments of affection and the sudden emergence of a fretful concern – a letter that he used to ride roughshod over to the proposed engagement of our youngest brother John and his fiancée Rita, a Hindu girl who had chosen her career as a professional model. Though Sam had spent the last few years of his studies in the States, his intellectual pursuit did not yield to recognise his brother's engagement with a modelling lass. This relationship appeared to have been thus taken by Sam: "The culmination of a cavalier's delirious chase for owning a curvaceous product that has been whimsically displayed in commercial market places" – scribbled across the page in a few lines were a brother's disgruntled, noiseless utterances which irrefutably projected the profile of a moral zealot. In his last letter he mentioned he was grossly engaged in the preparation of a thesis on Genes, specifically on 'Dominant inheritance', which he expected to complete by the end of September in the same year. This was his second major work since he obtained a Doctorate in Genealogy from Harvard University.
With fairness and decency my commonsense ceaselessly maintained an impartially moral housekeeping. Therefore, when they announced their wedding I made a point of sending a greeting telegram to John and Rita:
Now you are one
In love
In laughter
In living
And everything in life
Becomes twice as beautiful
Congratulations for your sublime union!
The telegram had hardly reached my home town in Kerala and here came an implacable note of death with a gentle tap of a postman at my apartment door.
Solemnisation of marriage was to be held in Thiruvananthapuram, the death occurred in Mumbai, and I was in Singapore. Both the deceased and the bridegroom are my brothers. We were more like friends than siblings since we stood apart only a couple of years by birth.
Rather preoccupied with my work commitments, despite my earnest willingness to accept his persistent request, I was unable to attend my beloved brother John's fondly awaited wedding ceremony. Notwithstanding, I proposed an elaborate celebration with carousal at my residence having invited a select band of friends and distant relatives. I drove home with a variety of foreign liquor to boost the evening party on the day of marriage. Surprise gifts for my wife and daughter had been included in my prioritised shopping list for the resplendent celebration of the big event. A flicker of astonishment rose and died in her eyes when my daughter gleefully received my gift. With her usual giggle she said, "I wish there were many a marriage to come…"
Up came the lunch call. At the lunch table mother and daughter were engrossed in their waggish discussions related to their gorgeous new dresses I bought for them.
My thought, however, took wing gliding merrily up and away right across the ocean, the tiny rivulets, the stretches of lush green pastures and the coconut palms. The chimes of the church bell with its rhythmic hymns echoed in my eardrums. Amid the glow of countless candles, on a flourishingly decorated wedding chamber there stood my brother dressed like the prince of a province. Sporting a radiant smile he held his fiancée who stood beside him gracefully reciprocating with her professional charm inflated with ornamental opulence…
Notwithstanding, I had been fluttering in the lambency like a firefly with no sparkle left on its own wings. Astonishingly though, incidents foreboding danger were quirkily happening in my phantasmal mind…
A quaint knock at the entrance door of my apartment gave me a jerk to my dazed dreams.
I grumbled: 'May be a friend of my daughter, or that nosy Chinese couple in my distant neighbourhood.'
Irresistible to a thrust of ire, I murmured to myself on my way towards the door: "Who the hell is that?" And I sprung open the door.
The rumbling gave way to an instant silence.
A grim-faced Chinese bloke in khaki uniform stood right in front, stretching a pink sheet of paper. Seemingly unperturbed and winking one of the shrunken eyes, he said in Malay, the local lingo: "Ma'afkan saya untuk manggangu tuan. Telegram untuk kamu. Salin di sini." (Sorry to disturb you, Sir, here's a telegram for you. Please, sign here.)
He didn't know he had a melancholy duty here to deliver with a melancholy note.
Two spitefully dolorous words pierced my eyes, ears and throat: "Sam expired."
I felt a blow of a chilling wind, strong enough to extinguish the glow in my spirit. All my dreams tumbled!
Suddenly I felt bewildered and lost as if the ground beneath my trembling feet had been cut off. I stared out into the street until the outline of the messenger's moving figure on a motorbike dissolved into the density of the buzzing city street.
I sobbed like a child. My wife and daughter soon joined me wailing uncontrollably.
We quickly started for black clothes. I was precipitated into a sentimental idée fixe to dress myself up head to toe in black.
Certainly death follows birth.
But, should the pall of destiny befall this handsome intelligent young man so soon? And, should it be on the eve of an auspicious event of nuptials that was scheduled to be celebrated?
Message was immediately sent out to all my locally living relatives and friends. Arena of a forthcoming celebratory dinner party suddenly looked like a funeral parlour waiting for the arrival of dead body.
The noiseless corridor of my apartment was starting to fill with gentle footsteps of grim-faced visitors…
A requiem mass was arranged in Queenstown Sacred Heart Church.
Calling by the name of the deceased the church priest Fr. Martin, I imagined, would recite:
Grant that we who are nourished by His body and blood,
May be filled with His Holy Spirit,
And become one body, one spirit in Christ.
Through Him,
In Him,
In the unity of the Holy Spirit,
All glory and honour are yours,
For ever, and ever –
Amen.
Condolence message was published with an obituary in the late edition of a leading newspaper.
What might be the reason of his demise?
The reason really did not matter.
– Sam is no more!
The quietude of the following days had been unendurable…
Ever since that staggering untoward befell, it had been as if everyone in our apartment had forgotten to talk. An eerie silence was creeping through every space of it and holding back every pace…
Unabatedly I thought of Sam who once held all the hope which a gift of intelligence ever proffered, from whom all our family members expected a groundbreaking future…
All at once, instead of holding the embodiment of his knowledge up, he frivolously surrendered his whole being unto a graveyard-pyre…
Over the phone, my uncle's crackly voice fumbled. He was straining heavily to summarise the dramatic episode in his laconic way. Stifling his ageing mind he spoke:
"One cannot survive the stakes of God's penultimate punishment, for we are to face the consequences of our own deeds. The marriage had to be postponed indefinitely due to the unexpected end of Sammy. Johnny and your sister Martha have taken the next available flight to Mumbai to collect the dead body."
The very thought of his mortality gave me the air of a great loss that of someone who personally meant a lot to me. All my frantic efforts failed miserably to shake off the macabre sight of a silent journey of someone very close to me in a long box to oblivion…
Sooner than expected another call came from home. This time the caller was the bridegroom.
"Thank God…" He was speechless for a short while. Dear bro, believe me! Though the purpose of our flight to Mumbai was to pick up Sam's body we were utterly astonished and boundlessly rejoiced to find him alive. This most weird exploit had been a wangle Sam orchestrated to have had stopped my marriage…"
"What?" Taken aback, gritting my teeth I bellowed back in the face of paradox.
It's an outrage to my sense of being.
"Disgraceful! An orchestrated madness," I rebuked.
It summed up the whole picture of a brilliant academic's coruscating future into an absurdity – pitiless and beyond redemption!
Wasn't it a theatrical presentation of a body of knowledge to the world of social science from a genealogist, rather an enactment equating his entire genetic profile to a bundle of scarred tissues? While he performed such an odious act, what sort of neurological signals he might have received in his brain? Was he carrying a Pandora's Box in his zany head while he was morally bound to be a rousing healer to raise the newlywed couples' human spirit with his benign blessings, at the least, being an elder brother of outstanding credentials?
I could not name my sudden emotion and had no words to state its elemental cause.
The sea breeze started picking up its momentum. I got a glimpse of those thin branches of a pine tree in the distant park being waved like jubilant arms.
Surprisingly happy though with such a fortunate upshot, ironically I felt hollowed in mind.
Strangely, I received an unexpected stab of agony…
Sam is alive, no doubt now.
But, to me he is dead-meat.
March 12, 1974.
Tucked in the envelope was a pink paper with little scrawls that shook me to the core.
Sam expired!
– My brother.
It was the incredulity of the untoward that gave me the real shock rather than the earthly evanescence of an Adonis. How on earth could I believe it?
Hardly a month passed since I had his last letter which as usual carried his sentiments of affection and the sudden emergence of a fretful concern – a letter that he used to ride roughshod over to the proposed engagement of our youngest brother John and his fiancée Rita, a Hindu girl who had chosen her career as a professional model. Though Sam had spent the last few years of his studies in the States, his intellectual pursuit did not yield to recognise his brother's engagement with a modelling lass. This relationship appeared to have been thus taken by Sam: "The culmination of a cavalier's delirious chase for owning a curvaceous product that has been whimsically displayed in commercial market places" – scribbled across the page in a few lines were a brother's disgruntled, noiseless utterances which irrefutably projected the profile of a moral zealot. In his last letter he mentioned he was grossly engaged in the preparation of a thesis on Genes, specifically on 'Dominant inheritance', which he expected to complete by the end of September in the same year. This was his second major work since he obtained a Doctorate in Genealogy from Harvard University.
With fairness and decency my commonsense ceaselessly maintained an impartially moral housekeeping. Therefore, when they announced their wedding I made a point of sending a greeting telegram to John and Rita:
Now you are one
In love
In laughter
In living
And everything in life
Becomes twice as beautiful
Congratulations for your sublime union!
The telegram had hardly reached my home town in Kerala and here came an implacable note of death with a gentle tap of a postman at my apartment door.
Solemnisation of marriage was to be held in Thiruvananthapuram, the death occurred in Mumbai, and I was in Singapore. Both the deceased and the bridegroom are my brothers. We were more like friends than siblings since we stood apart only a couple of years by birth.
Rather preoccupied with my work commitments, despite my earnest willingness to accept his persistent request, I was unable to attend my beloved brother John's fondly awaited wedding ceremony. Notwithstanding, I proposed an elaborate celebration with carousal at my residence having invited a select band of friends and distant relatives. I drove home with a variety of foreign liquor to boost the evening party on the day of marriage. Surprise gifts for my wife and daughter had been included in my prioritised shopping list for the resplendent celebration of the big event. A flicker of astonishment rose and died in her eyes when my daughter gleefully received my gift. With her usual giggle she said, "I wish there were many a marriage to come…"
Up came the lunch call. At the lunch table mother and daughter were engrossed in their waggish discussions related to their gorgeous new dresses I bought for them.
My thought, however, took wing gliding merrily up and away right across the ocean, the tiny rivulets, the stretches of lush green pastures and the coconut palms. The chimes of the church bell with its rhythmic hymns echoed in my eardrums. Amid the glow of countless candles, on a flourishingly decorated wedding chamber there stood my brother dressed like the prince of a province. Sporting a radiant smile he held his fiancée who stood beside him gracefully reciprocating with her professional charm inflated with ornamental opulence…
Notwithstanding, I had been fluttering in the lambency like a firefly with no sparkle left on its own wings. Astonishingly though, incidents foreboding danger were quirkily happening in my phantasmal mind…
A quaint knock at the entrance door of my apartment gave me a jerk to my dazed dreams.
I grumbled: 'May be a friend of my daughter, or that nosy Chinese couple in my distant neighbourhood.'
Irresistible to a thrust of ire, I murmured to myself on my way towards the door: "Who the hell is that?" And I sprung open the door.
The rumbling gave way to an instant silence.
A grim-faced Chinese bloke in khaki uniform stood right in front, stretching a pink sheet of paper. Seemingly unperturbed and winking one of the shrunken eyes, he said in Malay, the local lingo: "Ma'afkan saya untuk manggangu tuan. Telegram untuk kamu. Salin di sini." (Sorry to disturb you, Sir, here's a telegram for you. Please, sign here.)
He didn't know he had a melancholy duty here to deliver with a melancholy note.
Two spitefully dolorous words pierced my eyes, ears and throat: "Sam expired."
I felt a blow of a chilling wind, strong enough to extinguish the glow in my spirit. All my dreams tumbled!
Suddenly I felt bewildered and lost as if the ground beneath my trembling feet had been cut off. I stared out into the street until the outline of the messenger's moving figure on a motorbike dissolved into the density of the buzzing city street.
I sobbed like a child. My wife and daughter soon joined me wailing uncontrollably.
We quickly started for black clothes. I was precipitated into a sentimental idée fixe to dress myself up head to toe in black.
Certainly death follows birth.
But, should the pall of destiny befall this handsome intelligent young man so soon? And, should it be on the eve of an auspicious event of nuptials that was scheduled to be celebrated?
Message was immediately sent out to all my locally living relatives and friends. Arena of a forthcoming celebratory dinner party suddenly looked like a funeral parlour waiting for the arrival of dead body.
The noiseless corridor of my apartment was starting to fill with gentle footsteps of grim-faced visitors…
A requiem mass was arranged in Queenstown Sacred Heart Church.
Calling by the name of the deceased the church priest Fr. Martin, I imagined, would recite:
Grant that we who are nourished by His body and blood,
May be filled with His Holy Spirit,
And become one body, one spirit in Christ.
Through Him,
In Him,
In the unity of the Holy Spirit,
All glory and honour are yours,
For ever, and ever –
Amen.
Condolence message was published with an obituary in the late edition of a leading newspaper.
What might be the reason of his demise?
The reason really did not matter.
– Sam is no more!
The quietude of the following days had been unendurable…
Ever since that staggering untoward befell, it had been as if everyone in our apartment had forgotten to talk. An eerie silence was creeping through every space of it and holding back every pace…
Unabatedly I thought of Sam who once held all the hope which a gift of intelligence ever proffered, from whom all our family members expected a groundbreaking future…
All at once, instead of holding the embodiment of his knowledge up, he frivolously surrendered his whole being unto a graveyard-pyre…
Over the phone, my uncle's crackly voice fumbled. He was straining heavily to summarise the dramatic episode in his laconic way. Stifling his ageing mind he spoke:
"One cannot survive the stakes of God's penultimate punishment, for we are to face the consequences of our own deeds. The marriage had to be postponed indefinitely due to the unexpected end of Sammy. Johnny and your sister Martha have taken the next available flight to Mumbai to collect the dead body."
The very thought of his mortality gave me the air of a great loss that of someone who personally meant a lot to me. All my frantic efforts failed miserably to shake off the macabre sight of a silent journey of someone very close to me in a long box to oblivion…
Sooner than expected another call came from home. This time the caller was the bridegroom.
"Thank God…" He was speechless for a short while. Dear bro, believe me! Though the purpose of our flight to Mumbai was to pick up Sam's body we were utterly astonished and boundlessly rejoiced to find him alive. This most weird exploit had been a wangle Sam orchestrated to have had stopped my marriage…"
"What?" Taken aback, gritting my teeth I bellowed back in the face of paradox.
It's an outrage to my sense of being.
"Disgraceful! An orchestrated madness," I rebuked.
It summed up the whole picture of a brilliant academic's coruscating future into an absurdity – pitiless and beyond redemption!
Wasn't it a theatrical presentation of a body of knowledge to the world of social science from a genealogist, rather an enactment equating his entire genetic profile to a bundle of scarred tissues? While he performed such an odious act, what sort of neurological signals he might have received in his brain? Was he carrying a Pandora's Box in his zany head while he was morally bound to be a rousing healer to raise the newlywed couples' human spirit with his benign blessings, at the least, being an elder brother of outstanding credentials?
I could not name my sudden emotion and had no words to state its elemental cause.
The sea breeze started picking up its momentum. I got a glimpse of those thin branches of a pine tree in the distant park being waved like jubilant arms.
Surprisingly happy though with such a fortunate upshot, ironically I felt hollowed in mind.
Strangely, I received an unexpected stab of agony…
Sam is alive, no doubt now.
But, to me he is dead-meat.
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