An Open Letter to the Sky
Three years and you still make it so difficult to write about you. Three years and you’re still the same; that same magical man with unforgettable eyes etched in my mind. How are you still here? How am I still there? How are you, Irrfan?
You have no idea how I waited for this day; the day I would muster the strength to write about you. There have been more than a thousand attempts to take out a sheet of paper and finally pen down all that went on inside my childish heart since the day you snapped out of all threads, but in vain. Nothing came out of me. Not a word. I simply waited and longed to take a look at those magical eyes peeping out of a droopy pair of sockets emanating a deep ocean of untold stories. I wanted to stare at them for hours without a word. I couldn’t. How could I? You left in a minute, without a word. Here’s yet another attempt to write to you, about you. Here’s to the man who taught me everything except how to let him go!
It feels like yesterday that I was on the phone with a friend, panicked and hustled. Both of us were dying to know what you had been going through. It was World Dance Day and I had prepared Eve Ensler’s “I Dance” to dedicate it to all the artists of the world. The video was ready and so was I to post it while celebrating the day when the impending doom took its shape. Your heartbeat stopped. You stopped breathing and I could almost hear the beeping sound of the Holter Monitor in your hospital room.
I felt smothered and disconnected the call. After a while, I stopped speaking. In fact, I completely stopped speaking of your absence until today, until now. I wasn’t ready for it, Irrfan. Your ship sailed through even before I had arrived at the shore. I am not angry, or sad or even disappointed. I am simply waiting; perhaps for that one peek of the ship that carried you away. I wanted to see you off.
Do you get a chance to see us? Think about us? How does it feel to finally be alone? Is it lonely or solitary? I have read so much about you for the past three years. So much to fill the hole you left my heart with; the void. I know I don’t need to read to keep you alive in my heart and yet I seem to involuntarily do it. I talk to you every day with every ounce of life in me.
In one such post about you, I read about your grave. I saw pictures of it. Oh how your full name sounds so royal! It still feels like someone is to cry out “Cut” and you’ll wake up from your disguised eternal sleep and speak out, “Bhai, achha khaasa toh tha! Yuhi jaldi uthha diya!” (I was keeping so well here! You all woke me up so early for no reason!). Well, I wish you could wake up and smell the flowers touching your feet. They would smell of the love that has nowhere to go. At least they could find life with you fondling them.
It is getting more and more difficult to pen down this letter with every second into it. With every word written, I feel haplessly short of words. What makes you so elusive, Irrfan? How are you everywhere and nowhere at the same time? It’s been three years and yet I fail to understand why I cannot let go of this pain in me.
You know, growing up, I have had several voids in my life. I was a child who would die for a bit of acceptance. I had an emotionally absent father all through my life. I am very grateful to him for the life that he has given me but I was tired of being grateful. Watching you as Ashoke ushering the purest form of fatherly love with great generosity upon Gogol in The Namesake (2006) made me feel complete. You were the father I deserved but couldn’t get. In the end, we are all so vulnerable. With you gone, I feel empty.
I wanted to take that rocky road to the sea and forget my camera. Only our eyes would bear witness to the moment. We would look up at the sky when it would get dark and find Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ painted above. But lo and behold! It’s only you who has managed to infiltrate that starry night while I am left alone on the rocky shore staring above. How does it feel to be a part of Van Gogh’s painting, Irrfan? Is it too peaceful there?
Watching you on screen makes me think how your entire life has been painstakingly construed by the Universe. All your films speak the tale that you lived. Sometimes you narrate it yourself. “I suppose, in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most…is not taking a moment to say goodbye.” You didn’t let me say goodbye to you, Irrfan! I am still holding on to you like a lost child because I found myself in you.
You said, “It’s important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.” It’s been three years, Irrfan and here I am to conclude things properly. No! I’m not letting you go. Instead, it is these tears that my eyes are filled with at the moment, this pain of not saying a proper goodbye, this remorse of the love that has nowhere else to go, that I am letting go of through this letter.
Today will mark a start when I cherish what I have of you because I would always “remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.” There is nowhere left to go except for looking up at the stars and smiling with the hope of spotting your constellation one day.
It’s been three years and you live on, Irrfan! You breathe in us, through us!
Here’s concluding my open letter addressed to the sky
From an eternal admirer of yours!
_____________________
