life or something like it

I never thought I'd be writing this. But you never think you'd be doing many things you do. I lost a friend to cancer the other day. Amit passed away. When I texted these three words to another friend, it seemed so off. So weird. It's still not comprehensible. How do you comprehend someone's demise? In old age maybe you know it's coming. But when you are young and feel there's plenty to do. I don't get it.

Amit had a good life, I think. By normal standards he had done most things that people only wished for. Him and Meenu had cycled across Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, China and Hong Kong. They had bag packed across Scandinavia hitchhiking their way through and camping in random spots. Recently they went to Scotland. And in 2018 Amit was crazy enough to convince a few of us to walk from Bir to Leh crossing three high altitude mountain passes, which I thought wasn't a great idea at all with our level of expertise in trekking the Himalayas. The rest of us were done after crossing the Zanskar twenty one days later but he and Meenu continued till Leh. I still remember him being so lost after we had just crossed the Kugti pass. Him and Meenu sat down on the morraine at 5050 metres eating something out of their box while we were barely catching a breath and doing us best to escape the snowstorm. I saw an avalanche on the mountain in the front. My instinct was to get the hell out of there. But Amit and Meenu sat there holding each other like kids. All they had was each other and it was always evident.

What will Meenu do, we wonder. She will figure it out. She always has. She literally taught me how to put one step in front of the other when we were crossing a tricky patch on a glacier. Me and Amit were stuck. She got us moving. 

We never ended up going to Bara Bhangal. Amit would ask me 'dude lets go this year' and that was many years ago now. That year I wanted to do a solo trip so I went elsewhere. But now I wish we had gone. I wish we could have done another trek together. 

We did our first mountain trek together which in hindsight was more of a prolonged hike. It was the four of us - me, Chaos, Amit and Meenu. I remember seeing the joy on his face when we pitched our tents in Palachak. I also remember him coming to my tent occasionally asking, "beedi piyen kya?" Like a kid he would be excited to smoke. We would share a beedi together and go back to our tents.

Most of my deeper Himalaya time Amit and Meenu were around. In fact most of my Himalaya life, Bir life. It was always an assurance to know they are there, whether to take my pile of clothes to wash in their washing machine in winters and spend  the day with them while the bed sheets dried or randomly show up at their doorstep in the morning for parantha and chai. It was a constant for me in Bir - Amit and Meenu.

And now Amit is not. I have been lost since that day. Unsure of how to process, I texted one friend, he called. I had nothing to say to him and neither did he. So we hung up. Since then I called another friend, then another hoping someone will help me make sense of this. But it hasn't. May be there isn't anything to make sense of. It's life. Death is a part of it. So I have heard.

Amit went away in an ICU. All it took was six months since they found out. I found out two months back. I hadn't spoken to them actively since I left Bir in 2018, since that trek. We had a fight during the trek. The last I remember seeing him was while the Zanskar. Him and Meenu briefly met us and then we parted ways in those arid mountains. I remember I couldn't stand the sight of him that day. 

I wouldn't see them again till 2022, when I went back to Bir four years later. I went to their house unannounced like always. It was as if nothing had changed. We laughed and talked for an hour or two catching up on old stories, never mentioning the trek though. They were leaving for Scotland the next day so had lots going on. But it felt like home. They were both always home, allowing me the space to write, think or just be in their house.

Meenu says she had to tell him that he is not going to make it. She had to prepare him. I wonder what he made of all this. Sitting in pain in the hospital, a place he completely dreaded and hated. He didn't want to do chemo. But towards the end he was ready to do chemo. He hoped to survive. Meenu says that sometimes he would say he wished he had more time so he could do something worthwhile with his life. I wonder what that meant, what was worth his while that he hadn't done.

The last I met him was a couple of months back. They had moved out of Bir for his treatment to Gurgaon. Him and Meenu had both lost weight and had greyed profusely. But he was joking as usual. We made fun of each other, played Ludo and left. I thought he'd be fine.

"Who does this happen to" Meenu says! Dude how could any of this happen?" She is still shocked by all of it. Although she says a deep peace has set in now that Amit is gone. "I couldn't see him suffer day and night," she said. "It's better this way." How do you live with so much pain I wonder? How do you cope with your own looming mortality, which in a sense is looming for all of us. 

It could happen to me, I say to a friend. "It will happen to you one day," she says. "It will happen to all of us." I know those words are true. Death will come for all of us, people that are close, people that are unfamiliar, other creatures, birds, stars, the planet, all of it. It's one long sunny day in the looming darkness of a night.