The many sketches of the sunset
Muammar is dead! His journey of sixty-nine years has ended in indignity of the grossest nature. He was hunted down by the sworn enemies that he had created during his 42-year rule. The widely held perception is that he was a despot marked by eccentricities and hubris. When he took power by ousting King Idris in a military coup in 1969 he was young and effervescent only 27 years of age. He drove the Italians from Libya. With Libya's oil money he started building his international profile with his bluster and bounty. He is known to have given former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gifts valued at 200,000 dollars. Among his fond projects in his shining days were Pan Arabism and armed struggles of secessionist forces. The western powers were understandably annoyed with him. His fortune started declining after Libya's complicity in the Lockerbie plane crash. His Libya was a pariah state for a long time. The vision of Pan Arabism did not materialize. He tried to endear himself to Africa. By that time his shine was gone and his sun was setting. And the sun ultimately set in Sirte where he was born. He was not without his share of good work and yet he perished in a most brutal killing. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy summed up the irony : 'Sic transit glory mundi' (thus goes the glory of the world).
The lives of human beings are indeed an enigma. Aeschylus sadly pondered, 'Lives of men! When prosperous they glitter like a fine painting; when misfortune comes a wet sponge at one single blow has blurred the picture'. Saddam was ferreted out of his dugout and later hanged as a sacrifice on Eid. Mubarak is on his death bed. The embattled Najibullah of war-torn Afghnistan was openly hanged. The Shah of Iran, who prided himself as the successor of a 2500 year-old empire was hounded out by the rage of Ayatollah Khomeini and later succumbed to cancer. Nicolai Ceausescu of Romania on his fall was executed by a firing squad. King Faisal of Iraq, a young monarch, along with his entire family was cut down by the revolutionaries led by Abdel Karim Kassem in 1958. Adolf Hitler chose his own death when his Third Reich perished. Italy's Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were shot dead and their bodies were put on display. Indeed, a change of fate can make the high and mighty topple like earthen idols.
Mankind as a whole gets a common gift at birth time. The measure of the gift is, however, a matter for providence to decide. The business of living is so pressing that people in general carry on oblivious of the end. Besides, who wants to die in this world except the pathologically depressed? The time given is so capricious in its design that even a child who has not seen much of the world succumbs to leukaemia or any other hunter that preys on life. Even a young boy in his prime, pursuing benign pleasure, is hunted down by the primal fury of his fellow human beings, who descend on him demon-like. The end can be sudden and remorseless. A young man but two days married, travelling in a three wheeler, meets his end impaled by a bamboo being carried in a rickshaw van. A happy family with an industrious husband, a loving wife and fine children and dreams underpinning their bonding, is struck down by the discovery that the man does not have much time to live because of a dreaded disease in his system. He wants a few more years for his family but he is gone within months. The wife, the mother wants to enjoy the success of her husband and the brightness of her children and wants to perform Hajj. One night when she is peacefully asleep beside her husband the end comes. Her heart no longer beats for her. She dies in her sleep. Time is nobody's keeper.
Bangabandhu struggled for nearly two decades and braved an autocrat, a tyrant and a scheming politician to found a country. He ruled for less than four years and was killed along with his entire family in a brutal manner by errant forces in arms. Thus the people who saw the glories of his legendary courage were also witness to his tragic end. The blood that was shed devoured president Zia when he fell before his brethren in arms. The svelte Catherine, from America, carried dreams in her eyes when she clasped the hand of Bangladeshi filmmaker Tareq Masud. In her dreams never did she contemplate such an early and tragic end for Tareq. The sunset of Tareq Masud and Mishuk Munier's lives are drawn in such brooding colours! The gift of time in life scripts such tragic tales.
It is not death but dying that 'puzzles the will'. For death is 'an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns'. The physically perishable nature of death is scary. In its barest form there is no knowledge of how life will be in the grave or for that matter after cremation. There was a time when the Eskimos used to leave behind their old in the icy wilderness to face death. Life after death is a matter of faith --- a faith that provides sustenance against the 'whips and scorns of time'. It is a protective mental shield of assurance against the probing thoughts of fear of dying. With old age and with the onset of middle age with many debilitating ailments, faith in an afterlife and the reckonings that will come with it possess the mind. However, faith has no limit; it can calm the spirit even at a younger age.
A very poignant thought that comes for the dying and as one gets older is a sense of dispossession --- that of leaving behind a beautiful world, of leaving dear and near ones and the awareness that the world will go on without the one about to depart. A Persian poet describes the loss with such profound sadness: 'Alas! Without me, for thousands of years, the spring will bloom, the rose will blossom . . .' The poet Shamsur Rahman in his last days shared his pain of leaving his grandchildren and his family behind. Tagore saw so many deaths in his family that it became his life long pursuit to seek the meaning of life and death. A few days before he passed on, he wrote, Rupnaraner kule jege uthilam janilam aye jibon satya noi, rokter akhkhore chinilam aponr . . .'
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