Death Be Not Proud

It was close to midnight when I found out that Mani had died. I was puttering around the house, trying to avoid going to bed as usual. The one line e-mail from Lahore seemed incomprehensible at first. How could that be?
Manaan or Mani, was my wife’s first cousin and one of my childhood friends. We had grown up together, though he was five years younger than me. Nevertheless, he had been part of our clique. We had played hide and seek, tag, cricket, football and hockey, gone to the mosque together for Juma’a prayers, flew kites together on Basant. Although we had lost touch over the past decade since I had moved to America, we would usually meet once a year and pick up where we left off.

And now he was dead, his young life cut cruelly short, a year after he got married, and a month after he became a father for the first time.

The details of his death, I learned later, were depressingly familiar. He had been hit by a van on one of Islamabad’s busy intersections, the driver of the offending vehicle had fled leaving it behind. Mani’s car, almost demolished, had laid in a field near the road, with him in the driver’s seat, mortally wounded, his life ebbing away with each breath, until some good Samaritans got up the nerve to extract him from his mangled vehicle and take him to the nearest hospital. By that time he was beyond help.

The familyhad fallen back on the familiar religio-cultural rationale: It was ‘his time’, God wanted him back etc. I couldn’t help thinking though whether the outcome might have been different in there had there been an emergency rapid response system in place so he could have been attended to while he was still on the road. Beyond our fatalistic rationalizations “he’s better dead than in a wheelchair” etc, I daresay his wife, his parents and his, now orphaned, daughter, if she could express an opinion, would say unequivocally that they would rather have him alive, regardless.

Mani was from a modest background and he had come a long way in his short life. His father had retired from a stable, if unspectacular, job as a low level military accountant.

His family had always been far from rich. I still remember his father commuting to and from work on a bicycle while we were growing up. His mother was a housewife and they lived in four rooms on another relative’s property. It was only after Mani and his brother had grown up and had careers of their own that their father finally managed to build a house for the family.

None of this seemed to faze Mani in the least. He was always a high achiever. Unassuming in manner, with a slight stutter, especially when he became passionate about something. He was a hard worker. Growing up, he had been the butt of jokes. He was the youngest in our group of neighborhood children, always the last to be picked for a team in any game. In cricket we used to call him the ‘underground bowler’. Because of his height, the ball never used to rise up above ankle height and if you made the mistake of lifting your bat even slightly, you were liable to find your wickets upended.

Later, after he sprouted some inches, he became enamored with hockey and was on the school team that went to the divisional championship. He was not from an academically inclined family but had a flair for mathematics and science that lead eventually to a career in Computer Science. By the time he was in F.Sc., he was already tutoring younger students to make extra money for books, clothes and what not. He went on to get a graduate degree in Mathematics and eventually made his way to Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, where finished with a Masters in Computer Science. He stayed on in Islamabad after graduation to work in a start-up company set up by one of his teachers. The last time I saw him, he told me his dream was to set up his own software company to compete with the global giants. A long shot perhaps, but my money would have been on Mani.

I remember our last meeting. I had gone to Islamabad to meet someone. After the meeting I called him and he came to pick me up in his shiny new car. We went to a trendy café where the waiters seemed to know him. We had lunch, he insisted on paying and we talked about the past and the future. He was tall now, slightly graying at the temples with professorial glasses. He was also, wonder of wonders, developing a slight pot belly. It was obvious marriage agreed with him. He seemed self assured, confident about the future and where he was heading. Every now and then, though, when talking about subjects he felt passionately about, I could still hear a slight stutter. I found it endearing. At a time when every computer science graduate was being recruited by Silicon Valley, I asked him why he didn’t jump at the chance to take an $80,000 starting job in America or Canada. He told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he was waiting for a $100,000 offer. I like to think that he was just fiercely loyal to his first employer and didn’t like the idea of abandoning his employer and his country for money in the West, like so many of us.

This, by my reckoning, was also the cause for some heartache for him. He had fallen in love with someone when he was still young. In fact, she was one of his students who later followed him to Quaid-e-Azam University. I was delighted to hear of their engagement and taken aback to hear about their break up. Apparently, her parents, who lived in Canada, wanted him to move and work there. He declined, of course.

Nevertheless, by all accounts, he was happy with his wife who he had met at work and who had just borne him a baby daughter.

And now, because of a rash driver and a cruel twist of fate, he was dead. A promising career, a happy family, a productive life had been cut brutally cut. Left behind was an infant who would never know her father, never play on his lap, never come crying to him when she hurt herself. He would never hold her in his arms, watch her take her first steps, go to school, put on lipstick, marry and have children of her own. I thought of his wife, a widow and suddenly a single mother whose life now came to a standstill. I thought about his parents who must live with the unimaginable grief of having lost a grown child.

As I drove to work that day, all I could think was: what a waste!

Goodbye, Mani. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. And may those you left behind find the courage and fortitude to go on without you.