Death. Again.

There a bunch of apartment complexes on our road. These were converted from individual small houses into apartments some decades ago. The relative narrowness of the road and the odd-shapes of these old plots ensure some interesting layouts of the complexes.
Although city laws mandate that no apartment can be more than 3 floors, nobody pays attention to that and most of these apartment complexes are 4-6 stories high. Again, very little attention is paid to strictures about wall heights and so on and perhaps building contractors cut corners, but it's not surprising to see fairly low walls even on the higher floors.

You see where I'm going with this, don't you?

One young man today, when leaning over a wall to grab a towel from the clothesline (no, nobody thought that perhaps the clothesline should not be at that particular place) leaned a bit too much and fell and died. Two of Durga's young friends happened to walking on the road at the time and jumped out of the way just in time to see him land with a thump at their feet. He apparently blinked at them, and then faded out of consciousness and died before the ambulance could get there.

Who was this poor man? Who are his family? What a senseless, pointless way to go.


What makes a person dead? And what is that spark that makes them alive? Life and death. What great, inexplicable mysteries they are. All the stories we have about resurrection, medical miracles, zombies, and even reincarnation- aren't they all just ways for us to try to wrap our heads around these fundamental concepts? We make death a little more understandable by giving it names: The Grim Reaper, Yama on his bull... the fact that any of us can die any time due to any reason is a horribly scary truth and we try to make it a little less scary by making up stories around them. After all, if Savitri could negotiate with Yama to bring back her husband, if Bill and Ted could play games with the Grim Reaper and rescue themselves, if some medical miracle can pull people back from the brink, then perhaps we too will be saved from a sudden, inexplicable end.

What about those two kids at whose feet this guy fell? What a horrible experience for them. How will this affect them?  Though, knowing the kids on our street, they probably will be just fine. Somehow, what would seem a terrible tragedy that would elicit hours of reflection and many articles about the dangers of construction and perhaps a couple of bills on safety being passed in the US, seems pretty commonplace in India. Maybe it's because kids face death in other forms every day- an unlucky dog with a crushed skill on the road, a crow pecking at a rat carcass, a goat being bled before it gets cooked.... what is neatly sanitized in the US is very in-your-face here in India. So maybe kids are not exactly unfamiliar with death.

Still.... that poor man and his poor family. My prayers with them. May they have the strength to go on.