Afterlife of a Death: The Obituary That Took Me Thirty Years To Write

When most of us did not have even the slightest clue about our ambitions in life, Samaresh announced, one hot day in mid-April, that he would want to become a goonda (gangsta) when he grew up. There was a rare assuredness in his voice. We all swayed in agreement to his grand plan. But he neither became a goonda nor did he grow up. I have been writing his obituary for the last three decades since he left us.

Samaresh Maitra, my classmate and best friend, was a charming boy with big, bright eyes and an impending moustache. He had absolutely no interest in either studies or sports. In the afternoons when all his friends played either cricket or football, he would wander around the periphery of our triangular playground, sulking.

Samaresh’s singular indifference to anything sporty did not go well with his obsession with then upcoming Hindi-film hero Akshay Kumar, whose professed passion was sports. Our Samaresh made up this lacuna with his growing interest in the martial art of karate, which was spreading like wildfire in West Bengal in the 90s. Akshay Kumar was a black belt holder in karate; and all Samaresh did day and night was to practise all the karate moves Akshay Kumar made in his latest films.

Our English teacher Bijoya Roy’s fondness for Samaresh filled me with corrosive jealousy. I thought, between Samaresh and me, I was better in studies; naturally I must receive all her attention. But alas, in class after class, Bijoya Roy’s liking for Samaresh was revealed to a very moping me. She started calling him ‘Sam’. She felt this shortening suited Samaresh’s irreverent persona. After that class got over, when Samaresh became Sam, another classmate remarked that Samaresh Maitra’s alias should be ‘Sam Goonda’. That stuck.

Samaresh and I were not alike, but we were very close. Unlike him, I was crazy about sports, chiefly cricket, and had keen interest in studies, especially those subjects that involved stories and natural phenomena. We used to go to school together and I let him into our thriving social group made up of neighbourhood boys and girls and some others. He quickly became a regular in our group, which involved a lot of playing (cricket, football, and on delightfully odd days, lukochuri (hide and seek). It was coming along quite nicely till August 30, 1995 happened.

I can now recall events from that day as if it were last week. Samaresh and I were going through the usual waxing and waning in our friendship. But this time it had stretched too far. The evening before, we had ended our three-month long spell of being incommunicado with each other. We fell out over whose Hindi film hero was better: his Akshay Kumar or my Ajay Devgan? But that wasn’t all. Samaresh and I could not be on the same page on the issue of our respective heroes appearing together in a film titled Suhag. How could they be long-lost brothers when we are such bitter rivals? This broke us up. We even resembled our respective heroes: his fair complexion with sharp features contrasted sharply with my dusky and blunt, which was how Akshay Kumar fared vis-à-vis Ajay Devgan. It was an important issue back then.

But hidden somewhere under these two macho Punjabi men was a tender girl from our class whom both of us liked. Named after a brisk river from the Himalayas, this petite girl was the apple of our entire section. I was ever too shy to go up to her and empty my feelings; Samaresh managed that somehow. And soon they started dating. That patch-up evening we got to talk about her as well. We seemed to have moved on.

The next day was Wednesday, our school Patha Bhavana’s weekly holiday. It was customary and binding for our group to visit our local attraction each year: which was a man-made irrigation canal that runs past our town Santiniketan, falling over the rugged landscape, constituting a mini waterfall. It was the fag end of monsoon, and the water level was expected to be dangerously high. I did not want to go this time since my dislike for one particular member from our group reached a point of no return. I, then, had to lie to my mother that her mother in Bolpur, which was four km away, desired to see her. I knew that this ‘urgent call’ would constitute the necessary force majeure which would pull my brother and me away from the non-compliance to group values. We started getting ready for the trip on a cycle rickshaw. While in the bathroom, through the opaque and partially broken hopper window of our Visva-Bharati quarter, I saw Samaresh on a bicycle, on his way to the falls with a part of the group. It was a fleeting glimpse.

Half an hour later, while we were on our way out, our senior-most member of the group came hurriedly to our house; she could not even park her bicycle in our courtyard, which fell on its side on a puddle. She crashed into our bed and started crying frantically. ‘Samaresh fell into the falls.’ She was inconsolable. My younger brother and I decided to rush to that spot immediately. When we got there, we saw a ring of curious onlookers surrounding the falls, which was swelling and gurgling impetuously with late-monsoon water. An official search party and several amateur ones were trying to find him. I met some of our friends. They were visibly distraught and could not recount what exactly happened. After an hour of comb-search, there was no trace of Samaresh.

It happened so that once our group went to the falls, everybody crossed the rickety bridge over it and went to its right bank. They were busy marvelling at this frightening sight of water rolling down, creating a deafening sound and lots of surf. Samaresh thought of upping the ante. He stood on the slippery bund in a moment’s bravado, and, before he could say or do whatever he had on his mind, he tripped and fell. The mouth of the falls was about five metres away. A panicked senior-most girl threw her dupatta in a desperate bid to save Samaresh, who also grasped it, but the current of the water got the better of this joint effort.

Hours later, we got to know that Samaresh was found a kilometre downstream. He was badly bruised but was alive. All of us gathered back at the senior-most girl’s house, our usual hang-out, and went into a huddle. We were trying very hard to keep our spirits up and were desperately hopeful that our dear friend would come back alive. To lighten the already glum mood, I even said that I was planning to tease him about the fallibility of Akshay Kumar. But around 2:30 pm, an uncle, who worked at the Visva-Bharati hospital, broke it to us that Samaresh, despite all the efforts of resuscitation, was no more.

Samaresh’s untimely death added to the eeriness that had already prevailed around our school those days. His was the third apomrittu (uncanny death) of students in our school. The other two were Anirban from our class who nosedived from a mango tree onto a metalled road and died, and Samrat, a kid of class IV, who committed suicide because he was scolded by his hostel warden. Both the deaths took place in our school complex. All this got our school a very bad press, which eventually compelled our principal to step aside from his job. There were even rumours that it would soon be shutting down indefinitely. In any case, restrictions of movements were wrapped around us by our parents. Their glee in doing so was apparent.

The tender-girl from our class was inconsolable when she reached the hospital after word got around that Samaresh had passed away. She went past me howling; a classmate was accompanying her, keeping her steady. I was astounded at the profusion of grief from someone who was not much of an emotive person. It made me even sadder. I thought of sharing our grief with her many, many times, but had to balk at it. What if she thought I was taking advantage of the absence that had been created? After all, my feelings for her never went away. This created a dilemma that gnawed at my heart for a long time. But I decided to keep my impulse in check, for the sake of our departed friend. She and I would spend the next decade together studying until postgraduation, but I never got around to discussing this with her.

Conspiracy theories around Samaresh’s death started to spring up soon after his death, and they hung around for a very long time. There were quite a few of them, but the most potent of them — which caught people’s attention the most — was a salacious piece of forbidden romance. It was rumoured that the senior-most girl, a rather plump girl on the verge of womanhood, who was six years senior to us, was in an illicit relationship with Samaresh. That she was also involved with a lot of pretty boys from that group. That she was a real witch.

I continued to feel Samaresh’s presence in his wake — many times. The first time it was in those days when I used to visit my estranged mama (maternal uncle) who lived near his house. The by-road to it looked as crooked as a boomerang. At its bend was the small alley that snaked down to his house. Once when I was going to my mama’s house in the evening, at the beginning of that road, I felt someone hop on the carrier at the back of my bicycle. There was nobody, just the weight increased. Just when I approached the bend on the road where Samaresh’s house was, the weight came down: somebody hopped off. I was petrified. I halted to see if anybody materialised. Nobody did. Samaresh and I used to play this game quite often whenever I used to give him a lift to his house; I was gratified that it was still remembered.

He even saved my life once. On a rainy evening, I was coming home from somewhere on my bicycle. In front of me was what seemed like a two-wheeler coming on the right side of me at a brisk pace. I heard a voice calling my name on the left — it was Samaresh’s. As I steered my bicycle towards that voice in frightened glee, I realised that the oncoming ‘two-wheeler’ was actually a lorry with one functioning headlight. Had I not heard my best friend’s beckoning voice, I would not have been writing this.

Samaresh’s death proved pivotal in my life. Our social group disbanded shortly. Everything was not the same anymore. But he has always been on my mind in the last thirty years. All our memories would come to a halt on that day of late August 1995. It has not been easy missing him.

But I did what life stipulated for me: grow up.

A few years back, while browsing social media very late at night, the thoughts of Samaresh again came to me. I was on Facebook wandering from profile to profile. That night was dedicated to my classmates from school, Patha Bhavana. I was looking at photos, searching for posts, judging their politics, and the whole lot. All of them had layers that life had put on them. It struck me that Samaresh Maitra did not have a Facebook profile. Neither did he have an Instagram account. All this spiralled into an exploration of counter-factuality.

The fact that Samaresh Maitra never grew up to see social media (or its excesses), or even the internet, computers, smartphones, fascinated me whilst making me solemn. I kept on thinking about what subject he would have chosen to study, what would have happened to his relationship with tender-girl that ended untimely. Would he have still followed Akshay Kumar who still shows no signs of letting up? What about his obsession with karate? Sometimes I was overwhelmed by so many imagined scenarios where I put Samaresh in. But the biggest fear was: Would he have leaned towards the right and become insecure majoritarian as some of my friends, and many of my countrymen, have?

Counterfactual history, as serious historians tell us, is a complete waste of time. I agree. Although in popular imagination it has a thriving future. In fact, Quentin Tarantino, one of my favourite directors, made a late career out of counterfactual history: upending slavery in Django Unchained, rewriting the Manson Family murders in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and torching Hitler with his ilk in a Paris cinema in Inglourious Basterds. But personally, I am absolutely obsessed with ‘What ifs’since it’s the only way I can connect to my very dear friend and perhaps allay my long-standing guilt of not being there for him on that August morning in 1995.

In a world saturated with audio-visual content, especially photos taken on smartphones, there is only one photo of Samaresh that survived. Bijoya Roy, our English teacher, took that photo of Samaresh standing in a line along with other members of our section. I am not in that photo.

Tathagata Mandal is a freelance publishing professional based in Santiniketan, West Bengal

This article appeared in Outlook’s April 21 issue, 'I ran to bomb Iran, but instead I ran' which looked at the US-Israel war on Iran and what it means for families living through it and what is at stake in the states going to elections in the first phase