The conclusion called death

I lay there, passive, staring at the ceiling fan which made an occasional rumbling noise in the quiet summer night. June’s death left me in a strange numbness for the next couple hours, which I was unable to comprehend. I felt like I am living in a state of eternal coma ever since I have arrived to this city, suffering a series of hallucinations and illusions. Nothing was real. Nothing is or will be, ever again.

I didn’t know whom to blame for her death. Was it Babu, who’s child she was supposedly bearing? Or Sindi, who’s so called detachment, had been the root to all that followed? Or was it June herself, who was too weak to move on? Who loved a man who couldn’t belong to anyone, and tried to be with a man to whom she belonged not out of love but out of pity?

My thoughts stayed jumbled in my head and tormented my soul, while my body lay in a still undisturbed state. When I was exhausted, I dozed off. My lights were still on.
I don’t know the time, when I was woken up by a call from David, a friend in Fermilab. I had asked him to call me about some official documents that should be coming to my mail stop in Fermilab. He apologized for being so late, and said, there had been a strange accident at Fermi. Someone had been killed. Some woman’s body had been found at the Wilson Hall cafeteria. Might be some high school girl who fell from the high floors, he added.

The third death in a span of less than twelve hours.

I sat up in the bed wide awake. My roommates were still away and would be returning early next morning. A strange emptiness and silence had swallowed my whole apartment. And it spoke of death.

May be there was no other escape. There was a big hollow in my heart, a feeling of purposelessness, and I realized lately there had been too much going on, to even stop and feel through the pain. I felt completely lost among the series of events ever since I stepped to Mumbai, and it seemed Akash among all of these has become a distant memory, that rendered a nagging pain somewhere. It is this illusion of love and belonging, lust and longing that leads to destruction. Destruction of one self, and destruction of those we want to possess.

Contrary to what I expected, I found I haven’t recovered in the morning even. I made my routined journey to the laboratory, yet the whole time the events of previous day tormented me. Somewhere I have been integrated with their lives, I thought and the loss seemed too real. I thought of the dead girl at Fermi, and I knew it wasn’t an accident. A strange restlessness engulfed me- it can’t be someone I know. Jane is in Moscow, and no one I know could be insane enough to do so…right? There are thousands of people in the lab.

Reaching the lab, I quickly finished some work my advisor asked, before dropping some lines to Jane about the news. She has been busy off late with her exams and her trip to hometown, but we still manage to talk quite a bit. She came online in the afternoon, I felt a bit better to find someone alive amidst the world of dead I was living in. She was a bit taken at the news. I left my office, and came back, and found her message which was mail from her advisor George. The girl was Maria, with whom Jane shared the office.

I am scared, she said. I wondered how she would feel to go back and be in the same office. I hoped she would be okay.But even before that she had one more exam to go through.

And yet I wasn’t. They were all young. Like me, Crystal or Jane. Did they ever know about their untimely consequence ? I wonder....and do I? I have accepted it.

At sunset, I sat on a rock at the sea face. The only place I loved in my campus that felt too much mine. I watched the waves crash on the rocks and break over and over again, with an irrepressible desire to conquer, but ending in failure. They were like those waves of emotions in me struggling to win over the agony and pain and render me some peace and happiness. But they too fail everytime.