Missing in Spades

 Terry Pratchett said that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken and I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote for a few days now. Names have old magic to them – they tell you who you are and they tell you who you could have become maybe, because sometimes the name people bestow upon you is the one your blood family answers to and sometimes there’s a name that you’re called out of love or because you like to eat something all the time or because you happen to stink a lot, or fib a lot.

My name is Ashesh Mitra from the first poem in Rabindranath Thakur’s collection Gitanjali and sometimes this name feels like a blessing because I stylize myself as an endless friend, (and that happens to be my Instagram handle – friendoftheendless) while at other times, the name Ashesh, meaning endless in Bengali fills me with sorrow – I have lost so many people – people whose time has come to an end, while I keep going and going, on and on and on –with just the memories of those people ratting around in my head to keep me company. It’s a bit of a chaotic place in my head sometimes as you can imagine with so many dead people, quotes from dead, tattooed trees and images of good food and fun times rattling around in it.

The other day, my friend asked me how I happen to remember, almost verbatim, something that I had happened to read ages ago and we got into an interesting little discussion about how, for me it is the words themselves that herald the magic and for him it’s the details in what he has read and chosen to retain. That got me thinking, literally just now as I got a WhatsApp about something a brother of mine shared a few days back on his Instagram which was all about how we remember the places we’ve been to because of the people that we meet there – the shopkeeper who served us good coffee and sold us biscuits, the homestay owner who decided to give us an extra blanket and celebrated her birthday with us in the room or the curio shop owner whose son pressed a fridge magnet in our hands and told us it was on the house. This got me thinking about how, sitting to lunch with a dear friend of mine, I’d stated that if she was not available on the dates I happened to be travelling, I would have changed my flight plans.

The thing is, I find that a lot of me is sculpted out of the people who made me and make me who I am. Living or dead, sympathetic or intolerant, loving or hating or just calling me when they need to talk (or I do), I am an atlas of all I see and all the people I’ve found ways to connect with and have lost.

And it’s okay to miss the people who harmed me. Its okay to feel overwhelmed when I hear a song that I last heard while dancing with a person who is no longer of this plane. As my friend happened to text me just now – people often miss people, even their toxic exes, but that has nothing to do with love or hate.

And that reminds me of another little poet, Leonard Cohen who happened to write

“I’m good at love I’m good at hate

It’s in between that I freeze

Been working out, but its too late

It’s been too late for years

But you look fine, you really do

The Pride of Boogie Street

Someone must have died for you

A thousand kisses deep”

Thank you for patiently reading something my ADHD mind just cooked up to silence the chaos in my head.

The Bilge Master