The obituary

---Sunil Sharma

The man, in his late 30s, wrote his own brief obituary, before dying.

“I know nobody is going to read this last piece composed by a young man going to die soon. Alive, he was useless. Dead, he is like a roach. Absolute human trash to a society geared to respect power and money. Nobody will miss or cry for this retrenched man. It is rather good riddance for others. Life: What a sheer waste of human resources!”

Then, the thin nervous young man, living in an airless attic in old Prague---with a pale resemblance to Dostoevsky and Allen Ginsberg---took out his borrowed pistol and shot himself in the head that, said the few surviving pals who came for a brief funeral, always teemed with new ideas and voices.

“He was sensitive,” remarked the long-haired male friend to his bearded companion, in the funeral parlor. There were two others there: a black janitor and an aged blind woman who lived just below his attic.

“He wrote poetry,” said the bearded one, in a dry staccato of a voice that grated on the nerves of the blind woman who flinched.

“That nobody published or paid for,” said the long-haired, derision in voice.

“He was funny,” said the bearded one.

“How?”

“He thought he was the Unseen of this system.”

“A what?”

“Yeah. The Unseen. That was his word.”

“What does it mean?”

“What does unseen mean? It means UNSEEN only.”

“He must be nuts. How a man can be unseen?”

“Well, he thought so. Said that wherever he goes, people fail to see him. They do not recall or recognize him. That is what!”

“Oh! The Ralph Ellison thing!”

“The guy was sure crazy!”

“Sure he was! People do not shoot just for being Unseen.”

“People do that crazy stuff.”

“I do not know who did that.”

“Hemingway did that.”

“Oh!”

“Virginia Wolf did that. Sylvia Plath did that. Monroe did that.”

“Oh! The Howl!”

“What is that?’

“Ginsberg. Let us talk something else. Suicides are a turn off for me.”

“Let us talk sex then. It can turn us on and make our daily dysfunctional lives more spicy and interesting,” said the bearded one, adjusting his frames on his flat nose, and, peering over them to look at the two other mourners busy chatting in the corner of the dark small room.

“Good idea. Sex talk in funeral parlor! It is cool stuff!”

They both laughed a small laugh.

“One thing is certain. He has finally found peace…in death.”

And both the middle-aged friends of the failed artist agreed. Then, the long-haired one lit up. The bearded one continued to stare at the funeral box…the way you stare at the afternoon gleaming railway lines at a country deserted railroad station, in the Chekhovian Russia…