Diminishing Death

“ I have to be aware of my own irrelevance and fight it” – Satyadev Dubey.

I stared at this quote on the pages of a Prithvi Theatre Calendar 2009 ‘Mad Mad World of Satyadev Dubey’ with a strange discomfort, a stirring of a hidden resonant chord, an uncanny feeling of an unacknowledged self stepping out to confront me. The calendar pages carried stark B&W images of a man, beautiful, virile, arrogant – the mad SD. I sat mesmerized in the darkened office, flipping and staring at the images and quotes of a man who is considered by many as father of modern Indian theatre.

A year back, maybe a couple years back, I was at Rangashankara for a performance of a Greek tragedy. Besides me sat a well dressed man, old, silver hair, frail. A friend whispered to me “ That’s Dubey – the director”. I shrugged – uncaring. I am not a theatre buff – give me music anytime, especially long solos in vocal Hindustani and I cannot imagine a better treat. So, I was fairly unimpressed with a famous director sitting next to me. I remember exchanging a few pleasantries – nothing memorable. Now the same face was staring at me from a desktop calendar, decades younger, stronger bearing, glint in eyes, full of energy, power, fire, proclaiming arrogantly “ I am the best, its not an act, it’s a fact.” I am hypnotized, captured – by these images, this man that was, as also the echoes within. What happens to that fire, that blazing energy that vanquishes impossibility? Where is that person, once captured and immortalized by a lens, and the spirit that proclaimed these words? How did that person become this person that sat next to me?

It occurs to me that death comes to us in tiniest, immeasurably small measures, in every moment lived, with every inhaled breath. Death is not a curtain call to a grand production called ‘Life’ which is lived out to a grand climax – it is imprinting, tagging us as we journey along, either plod or dance, in diminishing moments towards a certain finality, a death. The curtain begins to fall even as the play begins. Now death is not a finale to living, but an end to a cumulative process of ending – more approachable, acceptable, familiar, and even comfortable. No need to fear swimming dark currents of an unknown, we are already swimming, unaware, in an unknown towards an unknown - and it is easy. In living, we are dying and it is as it should be.

What would be frightful, unbearable, would be a curse of being eternal – to have infinite leisure to do whatever one wants, without a certainty of an end – of an undefined culmination that hides, plays, diminishes slowly but can finish in a fierce crescendo or a gentle, hauntingly prolonged note. To have the possibility of an unexpected thrown in to every moment makes the journey worthwhile, the impossible worth conquering, a moment rapturously lived.

So in this play the life proceeds – in an ever engrossing time-pass, irrelevant and therefore amusing, a play between rights and wrongs, just and unjust, black and white. I stand in front of a mirror and stare me down – I try to seek death hiding and diminishing me in diminutive measures - the disappearing light from my eyes, the grey in my hair - and I laugh! Death is revealed in hundred lines that my face breaks into, webs about my mirth. I have tagged death!