Thoughts of Suicide

I lack the audacity to commit suicide—perhaps I never will. But today, for the first time, I found myself truly contemplating how one might do it! What would I do before dying? First, I'd delete my Facebook account. I certainly wouldn't leave that behind! Facebook is such a thing that it won't even let people die in peace. Good thing I wouldn't write any suicide note. I'd want to savor that final moment before death—why get caught up in the hassle of writing? What work is simultaneously more joyful and exhausting than writing? There's no point putting that much pressure on the brain before death. Besides, I know that leaving something written behind would only mean post-mortem wrangling over it. What's the use of writing a final letter? I'm someone whose inner thoughts no one understood while I was alive—I don't believe anyone would understand me after death. I don't want those who failed to understand me during this 'long duration' of my soul being trapped in this body to understand me after I'm gone.

My family would get caught up in some pointless troubles. Right after removing myself from Facebook, without delay, I'd swallow a bunch of sleeping pills. If I survived and ended up fighting death in a hospital, my sister would see my condition and wail. Watching her, tears would stream endlessly from my eyes too. And after I recovered, I'd surely get plenty of slaps from my sister—that's certain. Well, would I want to see anyone before dying? I don't think so! Even knowing I was about to die, I wouldn't want to see Sagar! Someone who has erased me from his mind—there's no point wanting to see him one last time. It's even possible that seeing his dying ex would merely annoy him!

Yes, there might be some incompleteness in not being able to see you face to face. You sometimes feel like someone very close to me. Among the few people outside my family who have understood me even a little, you are one. Of course, this is my personal perception—I could be wrong. I've already imagined Brother Hridoy's position if I were in such a state. After not finding me on Facebook for a few days, he might call. If fortune smiled, my sister would answer. Would he be anxious after learning of my suicide? I don't know! One thing though. You might not even know that I was gone. But if somehow you got the news after my death—perhaps Brother Hridoy inboxed you to let you know!—then you'd feel very sad. Just sad? Or would you feel some pain too? Or a lot of pain? Or none of that at all, just a kind of indifference, detachment, impassivity? Perhaps you'd have to write about death again on Facebook. People have to write about people's deaths. Can you imagine what helpless creatures we are! By dying, I would have put you in some kind of trouble, wouldn't I?

Sufia Apa loves me most in this world. She has been in our house for more than thirty years, meaning she was there even before I was born. She raised me with her own hands. We share no blood relation. She came to work as a domestic helper in our house. She has served my mother, father, and sick elder brother more than I ever could. For this, I am indebted to her. I quietly accept everything about her, good or bad, bowing my head. Well, is such acceptance called love? I don't know. She has no one in this world, no one to pray for her, no one to hold her close. Whenever I pray, I pray for her. Before my elder brother died, he said about Sufia Apa: "Having lost one mother, I found another. Alas, now I myself am disappearing, and losing that mother too! In this life, I couldn't hold onto anyone, not even myself! What could be more painful than this?"

This woman lost her father in childhood, fell into hardship, came to Dhaka city out of necessity, and worked in this house and that. As a child, she was married to an old man. She didn't stay there. Growing up, she tried hard to remarry. It didn't happen. Actually, domestic happiness wasn't written in her fate. When something isn't written in one's destiny, no amount of effort can make it happen. So there's no lamp of her lineage either. Well, does a person's life become incomplete without children? Are childless people then failed people? I don't think so. Someone without children may have many sorrows, but why should there be failure? The phrase "lamp of the lineage" seems strange to me. This lamp is such that whether it burns or goes out isn't in our hands. Why do people worry so much about light whose coming or going, or even coming and then leaving, isn't in human control? Actually, such thoughts keep people unhappy. Why can't we move away from thoughts that increase the mental suffering of some childless people?

How old might Apa be? Fifty? At most fifty-five! Before her death, Apa will never know anyone's touch. She'll never be able to cry while embracing someone. No little children will ever part her hair. When sick, she'll have to lie in her own bed by herself. Who in this world has greater sorrow than someone who has no one to embrace and cry with? I do try to serve her when she's ill. Sometimes when storms rage deep in the night, she has to pull her quilt over herself alone and overcome fear by herself. Seeing her causes me tremendous heartache. Otherwise, I don't really love anyone. No one loves me as intensely as she does. Seeing Apa love me so selflessly like this makes me feel remorse. I can accept that no one loves me. But knowing that someone exists who loves me so deeply, while I cannot love that person even a fraction of that love in return—accepting this is terribly, terribly painful.

The feeling of pain from being unable to love anyone, compared to not receiving anyone's love, would require a great writer to explain—it's absolutely impossible for me to do so. I think a person who cannot love anyone is the saddest and loneliest person in this world. Someone who isn't loved by anyone is a thousand times less lonely than someone who cannot love anyone. Alas, even lonelier than that is the person who is loved by many but cannot love anyone in return! Their very existence is challenging! They burn constantly in some kind of torment of conscience! If you investigate properly, you'll find that though their physical death hasn't occurred, out of guilt for being unable to love anyone, they've mentally hanged themselves on the gallows lakhs of times! When I see before my eyes that a person loves me madly—without any reason, without any self-interest, even sometimes enduring my neglect and mistreatment—whom I cannot love back, sometimes I feel like committing suicide. I think there's no greater helplessness than being forced to silently endure this obstruction in my heart regarding loving her, day after day!

Let me clarify that this writing is completely irrelevant, because what I'm writing about is perhaps impossible for me to carry out—I'm not that reckless—yet I'm writing it. Why am I writing? People get a kind of satisfaction from doing in imagination what they cannot do in reality. But there's another aspect to this. Before my mother died, she held me close and said, "All my life I've thought that there's nothing more peaceful than death. Death means liberation from all the world's sorrows. I lived all these years yearning to embrace death. Yet at this moment, why do I keep feeling that I should cling to all these sorrows, pains, and sufferings and live a little longer?" My mother breathed her last while holding me close. Before dying, my mother had held me very tight. My mother's death taught me that no matter how much a person tries, they cannot hold onto anyone by any means. Either they themselves depart, or the one they're holding departs. Accepting this inevitable defeat of the future and continuing to live—that's what life is. To live, one must learn to bid and accept farewell. There's no greater art than learning to accept farewell with an easy heart. I have no one to say these things to, nowhere—so I'm saying them by writing.

What I don't have, I dream about a lot too. Yesterday, for instance, I had a strange dream that gave me satisfaction. I saw that I was fifty or sixty years old. I was in Africa. I had adopted two Negro children. I was their mother. I was completely outside the network of the civilized world. For twenty or thirty years, no one had known any news of me. I lived on a very high mountain. Every dawn I'd set out searching for food. I cultivated potatoes and other crops on the mountain slopes. I was living the completely primitive life of the forest. After evening, I'd light a fire and sit by the fireplace writing. I'd write fragments of my autobiography, which I might never be able to organize and piece together in my lifetime. Every day I'd write a little bit. In the dream, I suddenly saw that my writing itself took the form of a novel! Scattered, fragmented, but it came together. Somehow my novel even got published! My book became a bestseller. BBC printed my interview! The first words I spoke in that interview were: Life introduced me to death...

Dreams always remain dreams! Whether they are sweet dreams or nightmares! The One we call Providence did not grant me anything good or a beautiful life; but neither did He give me anything terrible, like death by accident—so what should I expect from human beings! Hearing this, the Creator, perhaps angered with me, might say: Listen, O ungrateful human, I could have made you born in the waterless, starving deserts of Africa. I could have sent you as a sick dog eating filthy scraps from garbage heaps, or as a helpless crow. Now I have given you the ability to fulfill your small desires. You can eat whatever you wish whenever you wish, you can procure what you want to eat. You can buy that dress you fancy. Yet the amount you spend daily cannot be earned by some orphaned boy in North Bengal even if he sweats blood from dawn to dusk. What crime has he committed that you have not? What merit are you enjoying the fruits of, from which he has deliberately stayed away? Everything you consider your achievement is my grace—think it through carefully!

In this world, countless children have not even a single person to stroke their heads, let alone parents! Innumerable people are rotting away with cancer, writhing in agony. You have no disease in your body; you are a healthy person. What greater wealth is there than a disease-free body? Talk to any sick person and learn what sorrow truly means! Why don’t you think about what I have given you? Why do you only lament about what I haven’t given, or what I have taken away from your life after giving? Until you can achieve complete faith in me, until you can accept all your sorrows and afflictions and surrender yourself to me, until you can govern your mind instead of accepting slavery to it… until then you will live in this artificial misery, never able even to die in happiness!

Thinking all this, I then understand that though the mind is given by Providence, the work of shaping it in my own way, in a way that allows me to live well—that work I must do myself!