Death is definitely not a great leveler, as some would have us believe. It is a bloody cheat. A blood-thirsty, unrelenting cheat. It plays hard, it plays bad, and it plays foul.
A phone call arrived early in the morning, announcing the death of Bennet Kanagaraj, my first cousin and probably the first person I called annan. Older than me by a couple of years, he was ever present during my growing up years. My hireath certainly has Bennet annan in. He wouldn’t have been a day more than 8 or 9 when he learned to ride the bicycle. He would half peddle his cycle to run errands for his darling mom. I would always be a tad jealous of him, for his mom would be home when we arrived from school. She’d give him hot snacks and spoil him to no end. She was perhaps making up for the future when she’d be gone; wretched cancer took her when Bennet anna was merely 12 or 13. He was still a child when she died; he was in fact playing with us, younger cousins, when her body was being readied for the funeral.
I must have been in class 1 when I first discovered what a lipstick was; it was his older sister’s. They had an aunt living in Kuwait who would send them truckloads of gifts every now and then. This one had come that year. I still remember the shape and color of the lipstick. It was a bright parrot green one; the casing was made of steel or some metal with a bright golden dome shaped lid. I craved for it. Predictably, the sister refused to part with it. I went off to school crestfallen. During recess, Bennet anna came from class 3 and called for me, “hey mottai, inga vaa.” I went to him. From his pocket he took out the lipstick and gave it to me. He told me to try it and thrust it into my hands. The ground under feet just melted at that very moment. In no time my lips were red, but that also meant my teachers telling me to stand outside the class for that transgression. I didn’t mind standing outside on that happy day.
Annan always had an army of friends; friends from school, from the neighborhood, from church, and from family. Thanks to the property dispute between the families, we would have to at least put up a pretence of not speaking to each other. But then slowly it would all melt, and we’d be playing together. His fascination for anything mechanical came from the family. Both his dad and mine were ace mechanists. They would take apart anything mechanical (scooter, a toy car, machines, etc.) and put it back in no time. For years the family never believed in hiring electricians or plumbers. He’d go fishing in the nearby lake with his friends. Once I tagged along, but sadly we caught no fish that day. But I came home with tones of stories about how Bennet annan had built a boat out of thermocol all by himself and how he had rowed it back and forth on a very deep lake. He certainly had a way with words, even then. And he would easily fool us, little cousins, into believe him to be a super hero of some kind. Our friendship was abruptly cut off with the death of his mother and the prompt remarriage of his father. I can only imagine what a difficult life it must have been for him, grappling with the loss of his mother and coming to terms with someone else in her place.
Many, many years later, I saw annan in a family wedding. He looked dapper and handsome; just like the handsome men of the family. He was dressed in an off-white/peach colored shirt and bore an uncanny resemblance to my dad. I was jealous again, for I hadn’t inherited dad’s looks. He had by then married an equally beautiful person. The one who would truly complete his life. While I never had the good fortune of meeting her, it was quite obvious that she was his Godsend; the one with whom he would scale the heights and fulfill every single of his mother’s dreams.
Even as I write this, his body is perhaps being lowered into a grave. How could death be so ruthless and reckless? Snuffing out something so beautiful and wonderful. One can have no answers to such questions. Only more and more questions, and probably well-worded epithets to swallow the grief that keeps balling at the base of one’s throat.
Rest, Bennet anna. Rest for now. We’ll probably meet again, in another life, if there was one. Until then, good bye.
