Going home without my sorrow,
Going home sometime tomorrow,
Going home to where it’s better
Than before,
Going home without my burden,
Going home behind the curtain,
Going home without the costume
That I wore.
These lines by Leonard Cohen is the emotion that “LOSS” by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi begins with.
LOSS is nothing but an array of emotions within conveyed by a man without who experiences three extremely painful departures of closed ones. When a circumstance as painfully phonetic as death knells outside your door, that too, three times, you start filling in your empty canvas in order to reflect every single crayon regardless of whether it renders a grotesque or an aesthetically-sound feel.
Between 2008 and 2018, the author loses his father, mother and his beloved dog, Bruschetta. The introduction commences with this line which instantly triggers sympathy but hinders you from digging deeper with the very second line saying, “This was sad but not tragic”.
Since our birth, quite naturally albeit not logically, our minds are injected with the very fact that death is painful, nobody should be okay with it, perhaps because life turns out to be anything but okay. Eventually, every remarkable bit fades and as we approach the end we start to process insights out of our greatest wins into ourselves.
With this, Siddharth takes you through a journey that you all will experience at some point in your lives. As John Donne rightly believed that death was nothing but an attempt at ascending to a better library, the author coherently infers death from this very sentence as a circumstance which frees you from language and traverses you to a world where everything was already known, deciphered, felt without subtext, an awareness without comparison.
From his father experiencing painful rounds of chemo due to brain lymphoma to Bruschetta, a dachshund contracting lung cancer to his mother, Padmini waking up every single day with a fresh new determination to fight an excruciating battle with rheumatoid arthritis, Siddharth Shanghvi lists down every single emotion that envisaged a soul from the view of a backstage artist trying to process and understand the various reflections at one go.
There comes an instance in the book where Shanghvi tries to explain the absurdity of entering the years of one’s life that would be lived outside of time; a time characterized by vigorous imagination and an instinct for love, which is fine until life makes you a witness of your own erosion where you realize that you are in a game where all the rules are wired against you, and even if you win, you will still die.
Personally, the chapter Bruschetta steals my heart. An emotion that explains how similar is it when it comes to grieving a human or a dog’s death. He exemplifies this emotion beautifully with Thomas Merton’s perspective that we do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone, we find it with another, how presence is the only real gift we can give one another.
In the entire book, Shanghvi mentions the word “LOSS” exactly five times. The number five has huge significance in the Bible and numerology in general. For centuries, angels and spiritual authorities have used the number as a message to speak to humans about their lives. The ten commandments are divided into two parts of five commandments each. One part is related to man’s relationship with God while the second part is related to our relationship with other people which takes us to a very important inference that the number renders- Balance.
In the Bible, balance is reflected in creation. All humans have five hands and five fingers, as well as five senses. This very concept of “Balance” is also what LOSS propagates. Death not only resonates with the end of a life, but also the beginning of an undying emotion; an emotion concocted with the beauty of reflections and realisations painting the future ahead.
There is an instance where Shanghvi wonderfully explains how dominant culture celebrates those who ‘fight back’ and ‘overcome’, while surrender and submission are too often mistaken for defeat.
All in all, LOSS is a 130-page experience that every single individual must contemplate on. It’s an experience that shows you the reality as you stand before the mirror of life while constantly making sure it doesn’t push you to give up.
A must read!
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