The document discusses the author's reflections on death and impermanence. As a child, he saw his aunt Savitri die unexpectedly by falling into a well. His other aunt Vinodini lived with a cancer that eventually took her life. Throughout his life, he has experienced periods of existential dread and fear of his own mortality, seeing himself as just one small consciousness in a vast, uncertain world. He recalls vivid nightmares of dying and has come to appreciate death as a natural part of life.

1. Fear of Death
In Berhampur the tall silk cotton tree was in full bloom with eccentric -smelling flowers whose scent
haunted you for a furlong as you walked the road. In the evening his friends used to gather near the
lake for gossip. The water glistened with lights from the nearby garden restaurant where he and his
friends used to sip coffee and if the money permitted , some pudding or other snack. Nothing much
happened .The water in the tank stayed still with an occasional ripple caused by a dry flower from the
acacia tree .What was his mission ? Sit still on the cement benches with his friends wisps of whose
chatter entered his ears like the occasional breeze which rustled in the leaves of the coconut tree in our
village? There was this danger of the dream coming to a close as the lights went off and the curtains
were down. Did he come here for nothing ? For two months the typhoid worm cornered him and
excised him of the devils that had taken permanent residence in him as he went through the labyrinth of
his experiences The temperature would not go down despite medication as his body emitted a warm
charcoal-burning glow which he started celebrating as though he was basking in the December sun.
The body did not matter ; the after-glow of 102 degrees of temperature mattered . A sort of catharsis
happened . Nothing really mattered , not even the rumble of the large intestines leaving behind a
disgusting feeling in the pit of his stomach or the autumn-fall of thick dark hair . The smell of the slept-
in pillow with strands of fallen hair mocked at the very basis of his existence in a most overt manner.
When the time came the physical existence came unstuck like so many hairs uprooted from your scalp.
What was there for him to do ? He drifted rudderless in the high-seas of uncertainty and pointlessness .
There was this double-think which gnawed at the very vitals of his soul. He laughed at himself , at his
own essential stupidity which formed the logical basis of his daily transactions. The thought meandered
; the dichotomy between thought and “under-thought “ was growing as dialogue proceeded. The soul
fizzled down in thin slow-flakes of rationalism . Nothing was certain ; not even the perceived solidity
of the three-dimensional world . Then , one day , as he lay supine facing the greyness of the September
sky he thought he was slowly sinking into the viscous blood-and-sand , his own breath becoming more
and more difficult with the vital fluids draining away from his blood vessels. He lay there , alone ,
living the horror of the nightmare as women opened his clenched fists forcefully and thrust a bunch of
steel keys into them.
Years later , when poetry came to him , he recalled the nightmare :
“Lying supine
I experience fear-pain
Passing through death-tunnel
Oxygen-drained, slowly
Embedded in whirl-pool
Of viscous blood-and-sand
Clenched fists
Cold sweat
Horrific visions
Of tail-dropped lizards
Existence-erasing
Fear clutching at the throat
Draining the last drop of blood

2. Slowly snuffing out life.”
He started to love death . He wanted to die slowly entering the darkness of the death-tunnel savoring
every bit of the delicious self-obliteration .It was a dream within the grand dream . There he saw the
floating aura of his own soul escaping its physical bondage through the half-open window of the bed
room .He saw it as a flickering oil-lamp slowly burning like a floating paper lantern in the sky above
our mango tree.
In Berhampur Savitri-aunt never gave even a hint of the unceremonious way in which she would leave
this world. Her eyes were confident and full with a power of which she was deeply aware , the
arrogance of a dignified woman who mastered all the rules of the world . In life she complemented her
husband as if they had come into this world together. Who would imagine that one day she would trip
on the moss-laden surface of the well in her backyard and slip into the twilight world of sleep from
which she would never wake up ? Sleep became her in life , as it became her in death. Nobody ever
thought that there was any need for any ceremonies preparatory to her final journey. It was natural that
she died , something as natural as the fact that she had lived . When he heard from her children that she
had passed away he merely said quot;oh , she has gone !quot; as if she had gone to a relative's house in
Sompeta. That was how everybody who knew her reacted to the news of her death.
His own aunt Vinodini lived full forty five years of her existence on the surface of the earth as if she
had come here with a clear mandate for a life of that many years. When she laughed the sound came
from her deep throat so tragically that he thought she carried death with her as though it was a part of
her existence. He knew that she would one day be struck by a cancer of her innards . It lay encrypted
on the copper-plate of her destiny that she would go it alone in the vast wild wastes of her terrestrial
existence. She laughed at the thousand and odd trivialities of life including the volcano in her stomach ,
which would eventually erupt and overwhelm her , obliterating her existence. Deep inside he wanted
her to make a difference to the world not because she mattered to him so much but merely because he
was afraid that she did not matter to the world .Once when he was traveling , as a 12-year old , with the
family to another town to attend a marriage he slept on the bare wooden bench of a third class railway
compartment with his head in her lap. She mattered to him then very much because he needed her , as a
child ,as an extension of his dead father who had existed only in his dreams. She had come from the
same womb from which his own father had emerged .He believed that she carried something of him
having shared the same dwelling for nine months as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of her mother's
womb.
How long would the dream last ? He thought , again and again , that it was drawing to an abrupt
close .He had sat on the low guava branches in Srikakulam , at the age of sixteen, and looked into its
sky-spaces , terrified . The changes that had come over him overwhelmed him and convinced him that
he was not different at all from other specs of consciousness that roamed the world . There were
millions of those tiny luminescent particles , each one of them so much like him, floating about in the
ethereal world like multitudes of flickering fireflies on a moonless night . For a brief while the idea that
he was the chief protagonist of the dream-play that was being enacted receded to the background and
was replaced by a terrific fear of the whole show coming to an abrupt end .