Thinking about glorious decay

Leaves of Devil’s Ivy do not resist the gravity, the ivy’s roots accompany the leaves and forbid them from falling to the ground, and disobey the law. The roots move their tentacles, and cling to anything they can find, guiding the fresh generation of leaves to rise up to the light. I am a witness to this interplay between obedience and disobedience that takes place in my living room, as the Devil’s Ivy that sits on my study table creeps and trials on anything it touches to reach closer to the light. This wave of interplay now floats above my sofa that sees the first light of the day.

At 4:30am, my idea of snoozing the alarm is to come to the living room and lie down on the sofa — It offers a tenth of bed’s comfort, and makes napping more than fifteen minutes impossible. Before 5am, I am out, running. One morning, amid this ritual, a heavy dew slid through the ivy’s leaf, and crashed on my brow. Between wiping it off and getting up, I had forgotten everything. Was it 5? The pulse was in my mouth. I was forced out of a dream, and there was a voice in my head: was I slapped? I squinted my sleepy eyes into the dark, and listened to my breath. I wore shorts and shoes, and left.

Although I had just started, my pulse conveyed I had completed five miles. My rhythm was sloppy, as if I was running through a meadow. To continue running I closed my eyes to gather whatever awareness I could, but a part of my mind remained in a nest of memory from school. Listening to the history teacher talk about the Indian independence movement, my friend Vicky and I planned to escape the dormitory for a night out. This wasn’t the first time, and we knew the drill: we start at 10pm, carry the gumboots, descend four stories using pipes, and walk to the wall in a line. The moment we touched the ground, the sounds of the night pushed our thoughts into murmurs; we became one, in a line.

Vicky was leading, and as the tail, I was looking around to spot anomalies worth ducking. It had stopped raining, and we were walking through a knee-high grass field. The deafening chirps of crickets eased our heartbeats, and as we neared the wall, we started pacing….I almost crashed into Vicky as he stopped, and before I could learn what had happened, Vicky had fallen with his back on my foot. I couldn’t move. I shot a glance at the wall to find what had caused this, and found nothing, then I saw Vicky: he was sure he’s going to die.

I grabbed his shoulders and tried to get him up, but he couldn’t find his feet. As I bent my knees, and pushed him forward, I saw a palm-size head of a snake at Vicky’s feet. I had forced him to step on it. In silence, he stamped his foot on the snake’s skull — seven times. I could see parts of the snake, still moving, but I couldn’t recognise Vicky. He refused to step away from the scene so I stumbled toward him, but he held me off, and slapped my face.

Somewhere into the second mile, and after more than a dozen years, it was revealed to me that I was still recovering from the slap, and emerging out of an uncanny slumber it had sent me into.

I still had many miles ahead of me, and nothing about the route was new.

In the embrace of familiarity, it became clear that this was not the emergence of some new self, but of a yet another, much recent memory; I felt no desire to recall. I thought may be if I could run faster, I would escape it.

I was half right. I grew unconscious about the memory for a while, but it remained in the air, and as soon as I slowed down around the sixth mile, it had formulated itself: It was a funeral.

I was at the feet of my friend Ritesh’s late father who was resting on a pyre. He had become a message in his last few moments as a matter, and his family and friends had gathered to close the envelope. In a queue, people acknowledged his testament, and touching his feet in supplication, many agreed with whatever had become of him. The crowd was a poor measure of who he was, except for one man who was in his 60s; wearing all loose denim, he dragged his left arm and leg in colourful sneakers to reach the pyre. It seemed the man had left the house for the first time since the stroke.

Worrying he might fall, I rushed into pulling him closer to the pyre, and as I was trying to figure out an easier way to hold and guide him, he slurred many words. I tried piecing them together: he complained that his friend lay dead ahead on the pile of woods. As we neared, he forced himself out of my help, as if realising that he had come to a wrong funeral. His colourful sneakers stopped a foot away from the pyre.

The pundit announced the final rite in the ritual. Half a dozen men assembled for the service, and before people started closing in, the man lurched ahead and slapped the still face of his late friend twice.

The assembled men pulled away his body that was shaking with sobs, and I was surprised to see that no one meant any harm to the man — violence around death was not a surprise.

While ruminating a foot away from the pyre, before the final rite, may be the man didn’t see his dead friend, but witnessed death of his own future as he knew it in that moment. May be the final message he received was to reconstruct his own future without the desired help; without the friend. He succumbed to violence may be because his friend’s death had weakened the relevance of the future they had planned together. I wondered. One of the reasons any desired future remains so elusive is because people die.

But a large portion of living involves imagining and planning for the future. And having forced Vicky to kill the snake, I had jeopardised the future of our friendship.

A part of me knew that the source of Vicky’s violence was not the realisation of the lost future, but killing and death, which failed to slow down our speed of planning for the future. And a part of me warned myself that planning for the future is better incentivised than living in the moment.

I was stuck in a rhythm into the eighth mile as the warm wind announced the coming of the Sun. All the trees well worth seeing became visible.

I headed down the path toward a field of wild ivy and stopped at the edge of the field, and obeyed.

It became evident that I was obeying the trend by incessantly planning for the future, and I was making decisions in the long run under the pretence of survival. Caught in such a distorted vision of life, thought of death became an act of disobedience. The knowledge of the glorious decay brought the present moment under spotlight.

So I returned to the wild ivies.

In the middle of the field, a two-storey electric pole remains covered with a thick blanket of ivies, resembling a large living thing. The pole supports more wild ivy leaves and roots than it lights houses. Every morning, the leaves carry dews, each different in size, with a hidden willingness to invoke awakening.