Why are you lonely?

We are comfortable with the familiar and the strange is like the havu, we never wish to encounter. We miss out befriending or striking a conversation with strangers.
Express Illustrations
Express Illustrations

BENGALURU: Last Sunday friend Kadriappa passed away. He died, all of a sudden, in his typical manner, in silence, in the company of his cows and with least fuss. He was known to me and my children for over 25 years as the person with the simplest heart, warmest welcome and most endearing smile. The caretaker of my friend’s farm in Bengaluru north, Kadriappa lived with his family; a wife, their three children, a couple of cows, some four-legged Indie friends, who would invariably saunter into the family groove and make it theirs.

Like his children, who were later married and went on to have their children, his family of four-legged companions also procreated as and when amplifying the Kadriappa household and its ever-expanding hospitality. On August 21, he woke up in the wee hours of the morning, much before dawn broke to milk his cows, when the Grim Reaper picked him up for his onward journey without a warning. Now why must I write about this dear friend, a humble village person with an affable smile and the simplest heart to you readers? I had known him since 1997.

His family had hosted us innumerable times at their humble abode in my friend’s farm with the most delicious food cooked by his wife Thiruvamma. We used to converse with the couple late into the night around the bonfire that Kadriappa used to light under the starlit sky and in the company of silver oak and eucalyptus trees. The myriad stories he would narrate about nature, manure, seeds and the saplings that had now blossomed into full grown fruits bearing and shade providing trees had in them the uniqueness of his experience.

There was invariably mention of havus (snakes), which were aplenty in the farm. “This is their land. They do no harm, amma. Only if we step on them that they bite,” he convinced me about the reptiles with his invincible smile. I remember struggling to understand what havu meant when Kadriappa curled his hand into a cobra’s hood to unfurl the mystery of this new word in my new language dictionary. I was new to Kannada and could not follow his narratives.

I am sure he also did not follow me and my broken Kannada either. But we used to converse, and with absolute ease. Our last conversation was 10 days before he crossed over last weekend. In his passing I have lost a friend, I could call anytime and have some random conversation. We often rue the fact that we are missing out on conversations, meeting friends because no one seems to have time for anyone else other than their mobile phones. We don’t stop feeling nostalgic about the good old days when friends were plenty, life was simple and there were great conversations with them; from the intellectual stuff to the most mundane and bizarre. Gossip (goss, for the comfort of the neolinguists) included. You and I know that none of this was absolutely true. Human imagination is versatile.

It creates artificial reality within nanoseconds and allows us to seek refuge in our most vulnerable moments. We are comfortable with the familiar and the strange is like the havu, we never wish to encounter. We miss out befriending or striking a conversation with strangers. The barriers of language, age, social, economic, literary and now, religious and caste status and structures prevent us from meeting new people and befriending them. Often, the joy of listening to the experiences of those, whose path we cross accidentally is simply beyond words. There are ways to come out of our self-inflicted loneliness if only we look beyond the familiar. There are human experiences that are unique to each of us. If we could listen to those stories and share ours this will not be a lonely planet.

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