The news is distressing. As we write, an OceanGate Expeditions submersible, with five people on board, has gone missing. Frantic efforts are on to locate the machine, which was meant to carry those five people to the vicinity of the wreckage of the Titanic that went down on its maiden voyage in April 1912.
As many as 1,517 people on the Titanic went down with it. The ghostly remains of the ship have remained where it landed on that terrible night more than a century ago.
If now the submersible with those five persons is not located, it will be cruel irony at work. These five people went on board the submersible to have a glimpse of the doomed Titanic at close quarters. It is likely that they got nowhere near the Titanic but are on the sea floor hundreds of kilometres away.
The irony is heartbreakingly obvious: these five people, if they are not recovered, will have come to grief in the way those hapless travellers on the Titanic perished in the Atlantic.
Death comes to us in all its diverse forms. We are grown accustomed to death when it puts an end to life in its natural ways, through old age or ailment. And yet when death strikes at unlikely moments, those moments being cardiac arrests and strokes or brain haemorrhages, we are not prepared to regard them as natural happenings.
For such deaths break through the laws of nature, strip away our defences, and swiftly put an end to life. Or think of people dying at the hands of others, through that crack of the rifle or that explosion generated by suicide bombers or terrorists to derive as much of macabre pleasure as possible from murdering the innocent.
And then there is all the history of war through the centuries. In our times, millions have been silenced on the fields of war in the two world wars; millions of civilians have died in the crossfire and tens of thousands have been pushed to death by the cruelty of politicians determined to punish an enemy nation for pushing the world to wanton destruction.
Tens of thousands of Japanese died on improbable mornings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Millions have perished in Bangladesh and Cambodia at the hands of genocidal soldiers.
Death stalks us in many ways, across time and space. In May 1965, an inaugural flight of Pakistan International Airlines to Cairo went down moments before it could reach its destination. Save for a handful of survivors, everybody lost his or her life. Since that moment of terror, for terror it was, air crashes around the world have claimed many more hundreds of lives.
We do not know, but we can imagine the terror which gripped the passengers on those flights when they realised they were going down to death somewhere in a mountainous region or somewhere in the ocean. Civilian aircraft have been shot down over countries by governments that have had no qualms about murdering the innocent.
In Bangladesh, it is hard to keep track of all the men, women and children who died when the river vessels they were travelling in went down. Innumerable have been the casualties. Some bodies have floated up on their own; and in most instances recovery operations have yielded up the remains of people who till their final moments of happiness on the river would not and could not imagine that their end was so close.
It is in such dark moments that nature takes a battering because those responsible for the safety of people on their watch turn out to be callous in the extreme.
Dying has never been an art. It is the end of all aspirations and all dreams, in whatever manner it comes to people. A young man, not yet out of high school, decides to take his parents' new car and ride roughshod through the streets. Moments on, the vehicle is a crumpled mass of metal, the boy bloodied and dead in that twisted thing.
Or imagine a January morning, when a group of astronauts step happily into a spacecraft, their objective being to explore Earth as it appears from all that distance and all the elements it is encircled in. Challenger, the spacecraft, lifts off, with people on the ground cheering it on. Within moments, it explodes in a long trail of fire, incinerating its occupants before breaking up into ashes over the sea.
Death claims the great and the good and the powerful and the humble in suddenness we do not always conceive of. When buses collide on rural roads and collapse away from the road, it is the poor, innocent villagers whose remains are found scattered in the bushes and in the fields. Add to that the tales of those whose lives are claimed by murder and rape.
Young women almost always lead lives of vulnerability in every region of the world. They are picked up, subjected to unspeakable brutality before being silenced by those who have abducted them to satisfy their ugly carnal nature. Many of these tragic tales emerge eventually into light; many others remain forgotten, with the murdered women lost to their families and friends.
The spectre of death manifests itself on trains, as we observed only recently in India. Flyovers, badly built, tumble down on unsuspecting people below, turning them into dead meat. Road rages claim innocent lives. In America, no fewer than 300 people have been gunned down this year alone, most of them in shootings of pupils and teachers at various schools.
And yet the right-wing fringe in politics, speaking through the National Rifle Association, will do nothing to have guns brought under control. The culture of guns overwhelms all other cultures; it demeans politics.
In the course of the Second World War, the Nazi leadership went around celebrating the death of men and women in gas chambers. They would not imagine their own fate. And fate caught up with them in Nuremberg. Today, we mourn their victims. And we condemn these men who caused so much misery in Europe.
We condemn the Japanese soldiers who raped Nanjing. We do not pardon Dyer for his criminality at Jallianwala Bagh. Neither do we have any forgiveness for those imperialists who caused Bahadur Shah Zafar's lonely end in Rangoon and then sprayed his body with acid, to have it mingle quickly with the dust, before putting the earth over him.
Death occupies big space in the human imagination. In our walks through cemeteries and crematoria, along the rivers and the seas, we hear the voices of the dead.
From inside that submersible somewhere on the ocean floor, death just might speak to us yet again.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
