GULF-GOANS e-NEWSLETTER (since 1994)
Watching my own Passing Away By: Menezes George A strange thing is happening to me these days. Standing outside myself, I seem to be watching the last days of my life passing by like a large landscape banging at the windows of a slow train to nowhere. And I have no explanation for it. >From months of not being able to sleep by 11 p.m, as I’ve been used to for >almost a lifetime, I suddenly find that I can sleep at any time at all. And, >in fact, I feel sleepy right through the day. Not that I’m unhappy about it, but it is kind of discomforting for a type-A person who has to be doing something all of the time. Wanting to sleep during the day is not the only problem. I would have welcomed it. Three months to my eightieth birthday, most people have forgotten that I exist. And, to add to that, getting my writings published today is more demeaning than personally selling pirated copies off my old books at a traffic signal. Therefore, just sleeping in the armchair with my legs up with the latest newspaper carrying Barrack Obama’s picture on it covering my face, is not a bad existence after all. But then I suddenly realize that like a warning on a carton of medication “there may be side effects.” For example, hallucination. That’s bad. You mean to say I’m not really watching my quiet, slow and unheralded going away? That’s unfair. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time. Twenty years ago a friend of mine in Chembur had made excellent preparations for his own demise. He had tailored a nice dark suit, decided on the type of coffin and the undertaker, the flower arrangements, the choir and put everything down neatly on a sheet of paper which he kept in his cupboard accessible to the family. Charitably, he had sent a large donation to the Seminary on condition that at least 100 seminarians would attend the funeral. And he had had a grave freshly dug in our cemetery which he visited every day to ensure it had not been encroached upon and illegally occupied. Always a perfectionist, my friend visits the cemetery and climbs down into the grave he has reserved for himself to check the appropriateness of its size. The story goes that one evening a lonely widow was visiting the cemetery to lay some flowers on her late husband’s grave. Suddenly, she saw a man emerging from an open grave. With a shriek, that still echoes throughout that surburb, she turned and she ran. She is still running, I am told, since nobody has been able to trace her ever since. On the other hand my friend is still in good health and, poor guy, had to revise the list in his cupboard several times due to the untimely deaths of people whom he had assigned some funeral chores. I am not making such elaborate preparations. I just want to watch myself going quietly, as I’m doing at the moment. However, I must confess that in a moment of misplaced vanity and curiosity, I allowed a vague announcement of my death to be inserted in the Times of India. Just name, time and place of burial. At the appropriate time, wearing a large hat that hid my face, I stood at the far end of the cemetery to check on the attendance. I wept. I was the only one weeping out of a crowd of exactly three people. One a money lender, the other a woman I had jilted and had come to make sure I was really dead and gone, and the third a policeman who was wondering at the absence of a priest, undertaker and a dead body. Hallucination be damned. The reality is that I am “going”. Take body weight for instance.. I am losing weight. Slowly but surely. People envy me. Specially people struggling desperately to lose weight. They don’t know my problems. I am forced to take my trousers and shorts to a Bandra “alteration genius” called Bob. When the frequency of the alterations and the costs started to bother me I bought a pair of stylish suspenders. When the suspenders started to slip off my frail shoulders I finally resorted to the common Goan “badkar” solution. I used an old tie. Easy to knot and un-knot. The other signs of my being ready to go away are equally powerful. I wait till the old girl picks up the phone. I am reluctant to respond to the ringing of the doorbell. I haven’t sent any Christmas cards this year and did not go to Goa for the great big, fat family get-together at Christmas and the New Year. I have always had a problem listening. Now I have a problem hearing. I have accepted invitations to parties on the rare occasions that I pick up the phone and, much to the old girl’s embarrassment, have landed on the wrong day or the wrong place. I used to really enjoy socializing. Right now I leave a party early after quickly downing a couple of glasses of wine and a disgusting display of snack-gorging. As the great singer Harry Belafonte said in one of his immortal songs, “it is clear as mud” that time is running out for me. And the final sign. When I no longer cry bitterly watching scenes of genocide whether in Gujarat or in Palestine or Orissa; when I do not have fits of anger seeing mandate-less self appointed regional leaders take over and ransack my city and even experience indifference when not one goon is convicted; when I feel that walking in morchas and lighting candle for the victims of terrorism is an exercise in futility and when my blood pressure remains stable at the corporate anointment of a modern day Nazi as our future Prime Minister I think its time for me to go. See you at the graveside. Oops, sorry, YOU see me at the graveside if you are not too busy watching “Slumdog Millionaire” And even if you are, thank you and all the hundreds of friends and loved ones, thank you for the time you gave me all these years. More priceless than your presence now. http://georgemenace.com/watching-my-own-passing-away SAY A LITTLE PRAYER FOR A WELL-WISHER & FRIEND OF GOA-WORLD TEAM Goa World Goa Mog Goa SuRaj Super Goa (em Português) TGF Writers' Sketchpad www.colaco.net http://tonferns.blogspot.com/ http://www.goa-world.com/goa/music/ - The Online Music Station for KONKANI Mahableshwar http://www.mahables hwar.com St. Mary's School - Mt Abu, Rajasthan India http://www.abusms. com EXPRESSIONS - THE FLOWER SHOP http://www.goa-world.com/expressions/ http://www.w3.org/2006/10/SSML/papers/paper.pdf GOA MAG ONLINE http://www.goamag.net http://www.renewalsetc.com/renewals.htm
