Day-end. You’d have noticed that the word begins and ends with ‘d’. D. Death. Doomsday. Doorway. It’s not a coincidence that ‘end’ ends with ‘d’. Nothing can follow it — like it’s hard to imagine any kind of movement that follows, say, ‘thud’. The ‘d’ ensures that. To satisfy our need for continuity, for the illusion of continuity, to extend its life beyond an exit, we’ve added an ‘ing’ to the word. End. Ending, verb and noun.
Ending. Evening.
The eve of an ending.
These thoughts visit me as I look outside a window in Dehradun. The light is lying on the grass. It has fallen there, fallen from the sky, like something might from a high-rise. It hasn’t broken its bones, but it lies like one who has fallen flat. There’s an intimation of ending in its form. Having fallen like that, it has no energy or intention to move. It might have fallen like a feather, it might have fallen like a duce ball. ‘Poronto rod.’ The Bangla phrase for this kind of light records its fall. In the idiomatic is a calibration of the character of this changing light, like there is, say, in the different ‘prahars’ from which the different ragas were born. Immediately after this is the ‘kone dyakhar alo’, the light that makes every girl beautiful to the eye, the light that would make her look attractive to her future husband and his family, and, after it, ‘godhuli’, the dusty light of the cow-returning hour. The reluctance to let the light go, analogical to the many pushes and pulls of a couple being forced to part temporarily, is held in these phrases — an innocent turning to language to stave off the inevitable. The day’s end.
Day-end. The resistance to letting the day end is held in the hyphen that connects the two words, one beginning with ‘d’, the other ending with ‘d’. There’s no equivalent for it in relation to night, no expression such as ‘night-end’. D. Darkness.
Almost counter-intuitively, I begin to see things more clearly as the sky is bleached of light. Darkness begins making things visible. What seemed no more than a stale smudge in the sky a few moments ago turns out to be the outline of a hill. Darkness has pushed it into my eye. The lifting of this curtain of light brings the peachiness of the sky into view. The more anorexic the light grows, the brighter the sky’s blush — peach, orange, vermilion. Anything to seduce the day to stay, to defer an end. But some things become clearer or visible only towards the end. A little while ago, I could just see the grass on the hotel lawn. The receding of light’s authoritarianism has made the moistness of the world visible — I no longer see just the noun, the grass; I can see its quality, an adjective, its wetness. Perhaps that is what a meandering towards an end allows us, a compensatory parting gift?
The hill reminds me of Cézanne, myopic Cézanne who resisted eyeglasses, calling them “vulgar”; he who painted the same hill for the last twenty years of his life. The Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from more than one location. How can we say whether he was unconsciously recording the progression towards his end, as he moved through different techniques and styles, by painting something that, at least to humans, seems liberated from an end — a hill or a mountain? They say this about the living, that the desire for progeny is a gesture towards the urge for immortality, which is, of course, the freedom from an end. What about those without children, those of us without a hyphen to lean against?
D. Deceased. Date. Late. The ‘l’ of ‘life’ pushing the ‘d’ of ‘date’ to become ‘late’, someone who’s met an end.
Darkness has curdled. It’s taken away the shade and shadow of the trees outside; a faraway tree’s skeleton has become visible, its body blackened by the deprivation of light. Birds fly over it, lightlessness has turned them into crows. But they are closer to the light, from where the end begins. Perhaps that makes them closer to the darkness as well. Miles away, though I cannot see it from here, there is smoke — from clay ovens and chimneys they spit at the sky, at its air. Black, sometimes white — they are the air’s bruises. In them is the intimation of something ending — something is burning, losing form, giving away. D. Decomposition.
All through the day, light — life — stalks us. It’s the nature of its attention that turns our shadows long and short, falling in front of us or trailing us, to our right or left, like arms of a clock until, suddenly at midday, the shadow disappears completely, fooling us, that we took it to be an index of time. As if it’s rehearsal for an ending, like sleep seems to be an unconscious preparation for death. Then it grows limbs again, almost like human teeth that have two lives. Light, unlike the teeth, does not rot or fall out. It dims, disappears. D. December. We want to prolong light’s lifespan: we light lamps — the shape of earthen diyas like the shape of the flame itself — to delay the end, to give light echo.
How desperately we look for symmetry, for end to be like beginning. Why else would we use the same adjective for beginning and end, morning and night, to wish others? Good morning. Good night. But the ‘good’ of ‘good morning’ is not the ‘good’ of ‘good night’. Only for one of these do we, aware of an end, use the phrase, ‘failing light’, even though the quantity and the character of light in the sky at dawn and dusk might be similar. We might claim that the personality of our minds owes to our origin, but it’s through our relationship with the end that we define ourselves. ‘Madhyantar’, intermission, combines two words — ‘madhya’, middle, and ‘ant’, the end; marking ourselves with respect to an ending. It is only after having reached here, the very last sentence of this essay, that I realise that ‘good’ ends with ‘d’ as well, not ‘end’ alone.
Sumana Roy is a poet and author