Dear Cheeku,
The earth circles around the sun and like each year, today is 1st May. You have gone now for nine years and at this moment you may be sitting in some corner park, your new Alpha Beta point, with a bunch of close friends scheming how to ‘suck marrow out of life…,’ as the poet Walden would say. You would have rolled out the Honda City car quietly in the dead of the night and then driven off collecting some your friends finally reaching the point of rendezvous. For you it is business as usual, isn’t it?
Last night we met too, your old friends, sucking marrow out of life, seizing the moment the way you taught them to. And I became like always the witness to the wit, the laughter, the joy that you have imbibed in each one with care and without let. It is as if you bought an insurance for eternity that those who will stay back to hold the fort while you travel through the creation, would unfailingly reflect what you were, what you stood for, what you mean to them. You are a master crook, Cheeku, the greatest master of them all!
We celebrated you. We always celebrate you. Whether we talk about you or we don’t, the joi d’ vivre you have filled us with drenches the evening. As always, last night, as we celebrated you in our own way, you were very much present amidst us, or weren’t you? Were you, with your friends watching us from afar in great amusement seeing how you could be and not be at the same time?
It is so.
And yet, I remember a poem I read so recently so vividly that describes how being but not being is so omnipresent:
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colour..
W.S. Merwin
Stitched with your colour…
Be.
Love
Dad