Death on a Cold Saturday Night

He died on Saturday night, an hour short of midnight. A cold, painful death in that cold hospital bed on the eighth of April. Makes me shudder to think death can be such a lonely affair… for the one who’s dying. Nine years ago, on ninth April, my father had breathed his last in the same hospital. His younger brother chose the same month (and also almost the same date) to go into that deep sleep. And while mourning the newly dead, it appeared to me that almost everyone had forgotten that it was dad’s death anniversary the day before.

At the cemetery yesterday, I sat by his headstone and I could feel that the pain I had felt back then when I had just lost him renew all over again. But I guess that’s just the kind of price one has to pay for being a former prodigal child, a wild child who dares to go against the norms. And that’s a hell lot to pay.


A letter left on a father’s grave
Questions pile up like cold concrete,
building me a chamber of guilt.
Cold, vicious, unfeeling accusations
sting my cheeks, my life fluid drops
forming a maroon pool below.
Could have been,
would have been
had you been alive.
I should have, I could have
But isn’t it too late to speculate?

I try justifying things that went wrong;
my failures laugh at me.
I know I was brought up right,
but circumstances wanted an upper hand;
my life was twisted out of shape,
I digressed to the point of no return.
And they tell me the cold me
was the reason you left.
I know everything’s gone now
but I’m trying not to break.

This mark of prodigal child stamped on me
burns me like hellfire from within.
I regret saying those words,
may be I was out of my mind.
But regrets won’t undo the past;
no matter what I say now,
for me time won’t rewind.
And it is the thought -
that I failed you to the last -
I’ll take with me to the grave.