I haven't written here in a while, but it is not for lack of things to say. Beginning last summer, when I spent three undisturbed months reading reams of literary criticism, stepping out of the apartment for only the occasional burrito at Chipotle; through last fall, when I alternated between writing my novel and writing a nine thousand word report on `Protein flexibility modeling: a hypothesis'; and into the spring, during which the plans for my wedding, the unveiling of its subversive, caste-unconscious details, the numb reception and subsequent prompt rejection of its proposal, and the astounding, hardly credible, mid-April reversal of its primary antagonist's viewpoint, each took place in a chain of events that one might ascribe to the contrived plot-line of an otherwise distinguished `humanist' film; the past year has been eventful. But I'm not one to capitalize on the contingent nature of my existence (as some who know me might already know); I don't number among those who think that writing about one's experiences, as interesting as these may prove to be, could somehow serve to illuminate one's `self'. The self, alas, does not incandesce so easily; it is more like the gleam in a corner of one's vision that disappears when gazed at directly, than like some cave into which one can stroll with nothing but a lantern, held high, and a hesitant song on the lips.
Last Sunday, an IIT alumnus, Mahesh Mahadevan, committed suicide. I did not know Mahesh, though I may have known of him; I remember several of my IIT friends referring to a certain Dog, which seems to have been Mahesh's concise IIT moniker. But there was a bleak horror in reading of the circumstances that surrounded his death. No one in his friends circle was aware of any reigning unhappiness; he had none of the visitations of denial that plague the average Indian graduate student in America, lost, unhappy, far from home, a stranger to sex and love. No, he seemed content enough, in a recognizable, post-IIT way, with the vague pride of the dilettante that is the unique consolation of every socially successful IIT graduate: he was, by turns, Dumb Charades and quizzing champ, habitual punster, promising actor, professional joker, master of psychological analysis, linguistic pedant, sartorial genius, rap talent, skateboarder, Blackadder aficionado, irrepressible raconteur, and (of course) brilliant student. There was no doubt about his eventual success in whatever he chose to do. The news of his suicide, by plastic-bag-induced asphyxiation, a few hours before (or after?) his twenty-fourth birthday, came as an understandable shock to everyone. Why did he do it? A fund, to help transfer his remains to India, was instituted immediately; the page reveals, if nothing else, the sheer strength of a typical IITan's social network. A few blogposts were written, to which a few tens of commenters responded. There has been a silence, too, from people who have on the whole more to feel than to say; this is the silence that the majority of his friends, scattered as they now are among the continents, might still maintain when they come to confront the fact of his death. For some, it may be the politic silence such as that encountered at a funeral; for others it is of course the more personal silence of true, postponed grief. People in between may find themselves considering a third kind of silence, one whose breaking would out all kinds of horrific truths, voyeuristic truths, hateful truths, truths that are finally too individual to reveal.
I have thought of suicide in the past. What serious writer has not? In a culture increasingly given over to an overall numbness of feeling, the taking of one's life---or at least its serious, feeling consideration---begins to feel almost a necessary part of one's everyday. It has little to do with unhappiness; in fact, I could not be happier than I have been in the past few years. One suspects, instead, that suicide---in the abstract, at least----is a kind of referee to whom we can appeal, and in so doing feel better about ourselves. At least things are not so bad, we can say, that we have to end it all. It is at this moment that the devilish ``Or are they?'' might assert itself, timidly at first, like an arrogant schoolteacher deliberately lowering her tone so as to spite her noisy class. The ghastly but somehow romantic details of suicide come into focus---the rope, the knife, the failed sanguinary attempt by the bathtub---and even the most stoic of us are cowed. Of course we didn't mean *suicide*. For a writer, this process must go a few steps further, towards the imagining of a person who may be in such a despairing position, but the more one writes (and reads), the more one realizes that suicide is a duff, shiftless literary subject, with hardly a feature to recommend it to anyone below the calibre of a Graham Greene. There is very little that can be said about suicide, at least in literary terms, that has not already been said; it has the same trodden-upon quality as adultery, that other great suburban affliction. What squeezes, from the common man, a great deal of emotion, may nevertheless be unsuited for the purposes of art. Drama may well become melodrama.
But suicide also has an original appeal, one that stretches beyond its nebulous artistic merits. Recently a friend was telling me how, as a child, on train journeys, she would stand at the the perpetually open door of her bogie and, hypnotized by the immediacy of the ground moving past her, think of jumping off; only the tiniest of internal voices prevented her from actually taking the step. Or, consider this story, told to me by one of my IIT friends: There was once a Tambram surgeon, a man whose provenance, from a wealthy and educated family, seemed in retrospect to guarantee the sort of success that he was eventually to experience: a beautiful wife, doting children, a flourishing practice, a worshipful community of patients. He was about to buy, with his massive inheritance, the hospital at which he worked; he spoke of this takeover to his wife every evening, before bedtime, with an air of reverence. One evening, a few weeks before the momentous purchase, he finds himself yearning for the cool air and solitude of the nearby beach. He drives there, anxious not to miss the sunset, but is disappointed to see that it is high tide, and he can go no further than a few feet into the rinse. He moves forward anyway, captivated by the sun in the horizon, feeling the cold, swirling water rising higher and higher, to his knees, his waist, his chin. He takes one last, deep breath, and goes under.
Seen this way, suicide comes less to seem the last recourse of the depressed or disaffected. Neither the girl watching the landscape rush past beneath her feet, nor the man too much at peace with himself to balk at being taken over by water, could be said, in any sense, to be unhappy. One was curious, the other simply unprotesting. Both had much to live for, and, if interrupted from their reveries, both would have snapped back into shocked awareness. To each the thought of suicide, in all its cultural glitter, did not intercede in what was an affecting personal experience; they were, in some primal sense, unconscious of the consequences of their actions. It was as though each moment gently, incontestably, led them on to the next one, until they reached a point from which jumping off, or drowning, seemed not only reasonable but inevitable. They were victims of the coercive present, people who had spent all their lives being who they were, characters with hopes and motivations, bearing no more or less than the average person's crosses, but whose journey into a particular point in time had proven irrevocable. Their deaths---one real, the other imagined---were not so much the culmination of a steady accumulation of despair as the result of a single, heedless idea, executed with abandon.
Mahesh's family and friends, in the wake of his suicide, might ask themselves: did we then know him so little? Was he frustrated by something in his life, maybe a girl? Who was she? Was it something else, his studies? (But he was doing so well.) Why didn't he tell us? These terrible questions carry with them the equally terrible implication that Mahesh was cordoned off even from those who were the closest to him; a secret loner, with a private life that remained wholly disjoint from the public. Mahesh's last blog post, written just before the incident, encourages such conjecture; a story can be built around it. It was a girl after all, someone he had known for years, and to whom he sprung the question, only to find out that she was already committed. Devastated by the rejection, coming as it did just before his birthday, and having no one to talk to, he took the drastic final step.
In our bereavement, we can excuse ourselves the air of compromise in such explanations, which involve an effect by which successive conclusions are reached on the basis of head-nodding at something culturally familiar but otherwise questionable. Would a twenty-four year old graduate student, however sexually and emotionally lonely, be led to suicide at a girl's rejecting him? Wouldn't such an event, to most well-adjusted young men, lead instead to a doleful few days spent in wistful and self-conscious mediation, with only the rarest of images of self-pity leading to thoughts such as ''what if I were dead? That'd show her''? Maybe he wasn't a well-adjusted man, then. No, no, that can't be, maybe there was some foul play. We cannot ask ourselves these questions because, as pertinent as they are, they do not participate in our grief. They are more like the equable private detective at the scene of the crime, glaring at the `facts' presented to him in suspicion, than like the uncle who silently unhooks the phone after the first condoling phone calls. By expressing doubt at what happened, and how it happened, they defer acceptance of the fact of the terrible happening, and, inexcusably, proffer the existence of an alternative world in which grief is indefinitely suspended in the service of a putatively greater, logical purpose. It is no wonder that the funding page warns us: ``communications that seek to investigate the ``case" will be summarily rejected. Please do not waste our time.'' The value of an investigator at such a difficult time is dubious.
At the heart of all questions---raised or left alone---that follow unexplained suicides is: did we know him at all? What does it even mean to know someone? There is a hint of a shimmering self, unknown and perhaps unknowable, that lies just beyond the grasp of things that can be spoken of. We may have seen him every day for the past three years, but in some important way he was not only distant, but schooled in concealing that distance; we thought we knew him better than we actually did. If only he had shown himself! It would have taken only an instant of admission, an incongruous sigh or a shake of the head. We would then have crowded around him, and his secret, terrible by virtue of its concealment, would have begun to seem harmless, would have disappeared in the bright light of our sympathy. We may or may not have succeeded in bringing him out of his misery, but at least he wouldn't have gone as far as he did. Surely not.
Thoughts like these are a way in which the mind, grieving as it is, prods itself into a sensitive examination of its own workings. Questions about another are bound in the end to questions about one's own self; an (im)pertinent look at the facts is supplanted by an anguished survey of the internal. We become emotional investigators, hunched and driven on by questions whose answers must resonate rather than explicate. We learn to wait in silence... the gleam caught in a corner of the eye grows brighter, not through external decree, but by its own agency.
