While We Were Young

While we were young we were the smile on the face of the earth. We were the sparkle of dawn that each dewdrop held prisoner. In the world, we were the new introductions to the stage upon which people walked about, strangers going their busy ways.

Those days weren’t easier than now, those nights no calmer. There were questions then. Questions about who we are and where we were and where we were going. But back then, questions without answers weren’t disappointing. They were just little puzzles that needed solving. The little stream that trickled past and disappeared we never knew where. We were sure we’d know someday.

We had to be introduced to the value of hard work, to the importance of not telling lies, to the race against time and the scheduling that goes with every activity that went on around us. But it was all fresh, the wonder of this new world, the mystery of being here and now. While we were still young.

We were politely told to be polite. We were politely told to slink out of the way when people walked their different ways. And then, one day, we were introduced to this parent of ours called Growing Up. Growing Up taught us when to laugh, what selective stuff to frown at. We were gently told to behave, because people who were here longer than us could no longer remember innocence. We were told about the mandatory concept of context. Context was a must in conversations. Also, we were told to hold back a yawn when what we heard weren’t the answer to our questions.

Growing Up taught us the different arts. Like the people who were here longer, we asked only the questions that had answers. We were fed reasoning and religion as mild anesthetics to relieve the discomfort of transformation. So we learned to acknowledge a God we would never meet. That was important. Knowing and loving an invisible God. Now we could wake up in the mornings knowing there was nothing new about this sunrise. It would come again tomorrow. The reasoning was that it had come yesterday, the day before and ever. Thank God, sunrise was no mystery anymore!

Then Growing Up taught us to live with the question. Normal life, it said, was all about not chasing the answer. It was about going our ways. Like everyone else. Curiosity died silently. We were free from it. We had grown up, like them.

And since it is necessary to be happy it was necessary to still laugh, or at least smile. The mornings may not be rapturous surprises but they were dependable alarm clocks. They woke us out of dead slumbers. And when that new entrant, emptiness, hits us sometimes we take what we call vacations. We take breaks. We escape, so we can come back fresh and go our ways again. And anyway, some questions are negative so why ask them?

Like the one about nostalgia. Isn’t that emptiness only a little nostalgia that will pass? It is only a sense of loss at time passing, life slipping by. It goes away when you bury the questions once and for all. Sure, stop to smell the roses if you like them, but move on. Don’t leave the herd to keep smelling them. That’s called abnormal. Never revisit old mysteries. That’s negative. It causes regret. At time passing. At being nowhere near some answer that might not exist anyway.

But there’s one thing about growing up. We’ll never stop doing it. Even though it might mean we’ll stop walking before we see the end of this journey.

And sometimes, very rarely, the questions we buried will break the surface and bloom. Like it is doing now, when I write. Their beauty will haunt us again. There’s no burying for good the question why the sun rises every day, and why we’re sure it will again tomorrow.

Very rarely, we’ll stop to ask again why we are here. On our separate ways, we’ll share the beauty of those questions again. And like a forgotten tune, like the sweet smell of certain wild flowers that once grew in the backyards of our minds, we’ll share a pain no anesthetic can kill. No matter how old we grow up to be, there will still be things we’re seeing for the first time.

For you see, we were once young too.

The Garden of the Dead

My first walk through a graveyard was during my early days as a bank clerk. I found the place horrible; the lonely road from one end to the other, the eerie crosses on either side, and the bitter cold in the evening air, all added to produce a kind of evil hue. I had vowed never to take that route again, but I think I was forced to take it twice more. Each time there was the same morbid hate about which I still wonder.

Years passed. I married, had a son, educated him, and he went to America for a job. Gradually a lifetime rolled by. I was now a pensioner living in my home village with my wife Martha. Our son became an occasional visitor, until finally he married an American girl and settled there for good.

And so Martha and I welcomed old age with peace and joy. We strolled along the mountain roads and she enjoyed the evening breeze and the evergreen flora. One day we decided to go picnicking over the hills. Martha was delighted. She packed some tea and snacks as I took out the car. We set out just after lunch and had parked in a lush green area, near the summit, by early evening. As she laid out the tea, I walked around breathing the crisp mountain air.

Reaching a small ridge, I suddenly saw a beautiful burial ground sprawled before me with several crosses mushrooming out of the grass. Little wild flowers formed random designs on the green carpet of grass. Far beyond was a valley studded with small huts.

I told Martha that our picnic spot was in the neighborhood of a cemetery. Curiously, she seemed delighted. “It is not every evening that you have tea with the dead,” she said. In fact she made me move over the things to the ridge so that we could actually see the graveyard – and the valley beyond – as we had our tea.

I still see her in my mind, standing with a cup in her hand, staring with feeling at the crosses. “This is not a graveyard,” she said. “This is the garden of the dead.” I agreed with Martha. People are born, live a life, and then die. They are buried and then merge with the soil. Little flowers, ever so lively and beautiful, spring up in the same soil. And the beauty and joy of a lifetime lives on.

Suddenly she took my hand. “You know, Mark, these people lying here… we are closer to them more than we are to the living.” She was probably thinking of our son. “When we die there will be two more crosses with only the grass and the flowers to separate them.”

The breeze was getting a little cold. I said: “You think we’ll die together?” It was stupid to ask that just then. “Do you doubt it?” She asked with tears in her eyes. “It will be one such evening and they will bring us both up here, all the way from the village, and they will bury us side by side.”

“And the flowers will live on for us,” I whispered, embracing her against the cold. “For ever and ever,” she smiled assuredly.
Fourteen years have passed. It is three-and-a-half years since Martha left this world. Her prophesy has come true; little flowers have sprouted all over her. There is a vacant place next to her. I mean to fill it up soon and let the flowers live on. As for me, I’ll follow Martha into the timeless world of silence and bliss.