Death of a Virgin by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Bonikbabu visits me once a year, usually on a wet July morning. On these occasions, the small, dark man carries with him a file, politely accepts a cup of tea, watches the rain appreciatively for a few minutes before taking out some papers. Bonikbabu is a life-insurance agent, and he drops in when it is time to renew a policy. This policy — a printed piece of crisp, white paper — promises me a tidy sum in the distant future. Bonikbabu assures me, every time we meet, that I will live to see that day.

I find Bonikbabu, and his optimism, fascinating. Unlike other salesmen who tempt you with their corporeal ware, this man trades in something that is truly ineffable: death. The benefit of an insured life, of a secure future for dependents of the insurer, or a tidy sum in the case of survival, appears insignificant in the face of the enormity of death. Expectedly, Bonikbabu sounds reverential about death, rarely mentioning it in the course of our conversations. While discussing the clauses and benefits of a particular policy, he uses neutral expressions such as “mishap”, “accident” or “in your absence”.

Perhaps his aversion stems from his inability to make sense of a finality of this nature. Death can appear to be different things at different times. I remember the time immediately after my father died as a series of neatly accomplished tasks performed by me: ordering flowers, calling for the hearse, pleading with the doctor so that she arrived on time to sign the death certificate and so on. I also remember the incinerator door at the crematorium opening with a loud, clanging noise, and the scalding heat that emerged from the scorching, orange orb that lay humming beyond it. It was in that moment of the opening and closing of the incinerator door that I realised how death changes life. I carry the weight of that change. It makes its presence felt even as it lacks a definite form or substance.

At the same time, very little changes after a death. I recently read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. In one of the stories, Hema continues to mourn for Kaushik long after he is swallowed by a raging sea. Hema, who loved Kaushik, had chosen to live with another man, and it was the other man’s child that she carried. Yet, even during her wait for a new life, she could not quite forget an earlier death. Kaushik’s death, the irreversibility of the event, had made it impossible for Hema to change the life around her: each day comprised solitary moments spent in acknowledging a departure. Even though it has been two years after my father’s death, I still have no difficulty in understanding why Hema felt this way.

I have known Bonikbabu for over two decades now, but I still don’t know whether I loathe or like him. He and his file (full of policy papers) remind me how transient our lives are. Sometimes, I dread watching the slow, moving hands of clocks. They remind me of my family, friends, some of my colleagues, the people I have met only fleetingly, and the things that still remain unsaid among us. Yet, the sense of an impending, final effacement that Bonikbabu brings with him can be strangely alluring. At times, it reduces the business of living to something comfortably trivial: the loving and losing, hopes and disappointments, triumphs and setbacks.