Every once in a while, my brain decides to remember Irrfan and inexplicably, clouds of grief gather around and I have tears. Five years have gone by since he died, another "gone too soon" artist, and nothing makes sense — neither the grief over a stranger nor the incessant nature of it.
For all I know, I would have never met the man in a million years. But the loss feels intensely personal. On the day after his passing, Tamal and I were on a long-pending catch-up call. His voice almost choked as the conversation veered into Irrfan's death and he said, in what sounded like a poignant tribute, I can't imagine the sheer variety of roles we wont get to see anymore. Irrfan, the quintessential actor. Irrfan, the artist who just transcended time. Irrfan, with his bulbous, wavering eyes that would suddenly lock on to someone or something, adding immense gravity to that one last line, one last phrase in that scene.
My ego refuses to let go of the idea that there's a stark difference in how this grief feels to me ("a human poem died") vs. how it appears to the outside world ("my favourite celebrity died"). The latter feels normally irrational. I couldn't be associated with anything that normal or that irrational, now, can I? But there's no articulation possible to illustrate the difference.
Six years before that, Robin Williams died. It revealed an emotional pent-up in me that I had no clue of. Irrfan's passing away surfaced more of that.
Somewhere, this transcends the grosser notions of mourning the death of a celebrated movie star? Robin, Irrfan, Philip (Seymor Hoffman) were, in my world, not mere movie-stars or great actors. They had become very intimate, very personal people as we learnt more about them beyond their screen presence. A rich tapestry of their lives had woven itself into my psyche all the way from their childhood to their breakthroughs and the generous humanity of their souls. When Amy Adams fought back tears thinking of Philip, that grief escaped material and temporal laws of our universe and crossed continents to affect a random viewer in India. Or when Jignesh (my former boss from a bygone era)'s voice quivered as he relived his gloom after Jagjit Singh's death while Pyaar ka pehla khat played in the background, it struck an unknown nerve.
The greatest blessing in this grief is that there are folks like Tamal, like Jignesh, like my brother who are just as poetically affected by it. There is no isolation here, only camaraderie and a shared understanding of the inexplicability of grief. And it is true of a million others. In a weird cathartic way, the mourning sheds more light on the good fortune of having witnessed someone like Irrfan craft beauty in every way they could. Maybe mourning is another way of celebrating his lifetime.
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आप मरने वाले हो डॉक्टर साब, मैं नहीं मरने वाला ... मैं था, मैं हूँ, मैं ही रहूंगा |