Even Gandhi has been forgotten. Yet, you think you are important?

As the story (sub. reqd.) in the New Yorker came to an end, I could not wait to see how the author, Yiyun Li, tied everything up. I remembered one of her stories in the same magazine a couple of years ago--it was awesome. I was confident, therefore, that she would do justice here too.

Boy has she crafted some sentences together to end the narration:

She could become a fugitive from this world that had kept her for too long, but this urge, coming as it often did in waves, no longer frightened her, as it had years ago.  She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself.  She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate.  When she moved to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.

A chilling sentence that is: "no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her"

As I lay wide awake, after reading that, the  "no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her" reminded me of John Updike's Requiem:

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!"

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."

For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

Most of us ordinary mortals are forgotten even when we are alive. We matter not.  As BB King so emotionally put it, "Nobody loves me, but my mother / And she could me jivin' too."

Today was another day.

The sun was out in all its glory, and after temperature over the past few weeks in the 40s, the 60-plus today under the sun felt like an Indian summer.

I was walking towards my car when a female student waved at me. I am too old to fall for this--I know well by now that when a young woman waves at me, there is somebody else behind me and it is not me that she waves at.

But, she kept waving and walking towards me and stared at me. I politely smiled. I had no freaking clue who she was.

"You don't remember me?"

I wonder if there is a polite way to state the truth. "You are ... "

She then (re)introduced herself as one of the students who met with me a few months ago when preparing for their trip to India.  Now it clicked.  "Oh yeah, I remember now."

Meanwhile another young woman joined us. She too was in that group.

During the conversation about their experiences, the second one said, "I am so much a fan of Gandhi and his non-violence.  When I was in India, I tried to talk to people about Gandhi and his ideas. But nobody really cared to talk with me about Gandhi."

I know what she means. It is a land of a billion-plus, but there are fewer and fewer, it seems like, who genuinely appreciate, respect, and discuss Gandhi and his ideas.  I didn't have the heart to add to that youngster's disappointment. As we parted, I told them that I wanted to hear more of their stories of India. "We want to hear your stories too" they said.

If a Gandhi, the father of the nation, could not leave behind a living memory of his life among his own people, no wonder then that Auntie Mei in Li's short story feels that ""no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her."  Or, at best, as Updike writes, a couple of them might shrug their shoulders and comment "I thought he died a while ago."

Such is our fleeting existence on this planet.

It is no wonder then that we turn to BB King for comfort!

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