The day my last cuff — The Conspiracy of Timekeepers, was published, time ran out on my cousin. He was 34.
At 34 years of age, a resident in the UAE is busy making their way up the career ladder, getting ready to face the week and all its challenges every Monday morning but begin planning for the weekend with friends by Tuesday evening, share your hearth and roof if you are lucky to have found a partner who can tolerate you and all your eccentricities as much as you are willing to tolerate theirs, worry if you had your share of fun and plan on checking most of the boxes on your bucket list before you hit middle age between trying to settle down.
Having been born and brought up in Dubai, he was no different — from being ambitious and planning to relocate to the UK while being apprehensive about leaving fond memories, friends and family in the country he called home, to getting married to his best friend; from spending weekends in the company of friends to playing the cajon in the music band that he was part of.
At 34, having no ailments, neither he nor we had anticipated that he would be enjoying at a friend’s wedding one minute and succumb to a heart attack the next.
It was while we were mourning his death that we got to know about the sudden demise of the Indian singer, KK, whose voice had coloured the childhood of us millennials. At a time when the only screen we owned was a television that did not require a remote to switch channels simply because there was only one, when getting to both watch and listen to a song on this only screen happened on Wednesdays and Sundays — his Hindi album ‘Pal’ was a melodious hit.
A time when I had needed a week’s worth of persuading to convince my parents to use up the pocket money that I had managed to save to buy the cassette and then finding absolute joy in listening to it first before showing off and reluctantly agreeing to rent it to friends in exchange for a cassette with a popular hit that they owned.
But those were different times, times when there was only lifestyle, not lifestyle diseases, times when our screenless indoors made outdoor play absolute fun, when eating out was a rare treat on birthdays and anniversaries, when cancer was a disease that belonged to another planet, when the only reason you visited your doctor was for a fever or a fall and when you almost always had to at least cross 60 years of age to suffer a heart attack.
Like the television without the remote or the word ‘stress’ that belonged to a dictionary and had little to do with life or its living, life was simple and so were our problems.
But when did it all change?
We all want perfect endings, preferably for it to not end at all. It is when we stumble upon a lesson that shows you that not all poems rhyme and not all stories have fairy tale endings — often times even a rude, abrupt and unexpected one. It takes losing someone close to you that forces you to take a closer look at life and the many complicated labyrinths and complex mazes we have manifested into its otherwise simple course.
To me, this was a reminder that we need to better respect and listen to our body, that our vivid sense of memory together with our extensive power of imagination that we use to overthink can be put to better use and that irrespective of who we are, the only thing we own is this moment.
Take care!
Pranitha Menon is a freelance writer based in Dubai. Twitter: @MenonPranitha
