An Appetite for Death
Prose
The old cemetery in Landour made even death seem inviting. The cold gravestones were lined up neatly under the clear blue skies, warmed only by the faint winter sun streaming in through the canopy of the towering deodars. The graves were shrouded in comfortable silence, pierced only by the occasional chirping of a blue magpie and the soft rustling of dead leaves under his own feet.
As he strolled amongst the dead, he found himself wondering if this sunny serenity was a reflection of the lives they had led or merely a consolation in the afterlife — the belated balm of a soothing obituary for the miserable and tormented. Like himself, they were once flesh, blood, and frailty. But now they were nothing, floating in an ocean of nothingness.
He came across the gravestone of one Mary Ann who had died in 1923, at the age of just 28. An entire life that once pulsated with the wholesome tragedy and drama of existence was now not even a memory. He knelt beside her grave and felt a tender curiosity and sense of kinship. Like everyone else before her and since she had traded in the currency of meaning to sustain herself. She would have gone through her fleeting existence seeking, creating, and even imparting meaning to the world around her — a phantom currency with no value outside of the collective human imagination.
In a year, maybe two, he would join Mary in this ocean of nothingness. But standing there amidst the overlooking snow-clad mountains, and surrounded by deodars like stolid and benevolent grave keepers, the death sentence he had been handed didn’t seem all that bad.
Life, he thought, was an absurd project to begin with — a struggle for meaning doomed to end in the oblivion of meaninglessness. Having glimpsed this philosophical abyss at a rather young age, he now found himself without the energy, curiosity, and naivete one needed to navigate another few decades of this absurdity. The burden of thought, choice, and consciousness itself would soon be snatched away from him. And other than the fact that he would be dead, it seemed like a pleasant enough prospect.
He felt a hollowness in his stomach. It was fifteen minutes past eight in the morning. This encounter with mortality had whetted his appetite for breakfast. He looked up at the blue expanse of sky above him and then at Mary Ann’s gravestone by his feet. He felt suspended between two inscrutable infinities. He got up and walked out of the cemetery. The only thing that made sense to him right now was the prospect of a bread omelet at Chaar Dukaan.
It seemed to him that one could question, endlessly, the pain of existence but pleasure required no explanation at all.
