Chapter 4

The setting sun had always seemed more beautiful to P_ than a rising one. He often thought about this while he sat alongside bustling roads watching the tired sun disappear sadly behind listless buildings. And then he used to rationalize this opinion of his to himself. The beginning, rise or creation of a thing, he thought, was something that is significant only in a retrospective sense. In the moment, it is generally absurd and meaningless if one thinks about it. It is really the end that determines the worth of anything. The all-encompassing end that has in it the meaning of everything that has been, has not been, could have been, or had to be. The end of something, he used to tell himself, is a practical and truthful outcome of the coalescence of all the activity and material things that surround, constitute, impact, or relate to it. What made him perceive it as beautiful was its completeness and impartiality.

In time he became subtly obsessed with this theory of his. He made himself watch dying insects. He bought packs of candles and watched each one of them burn till its end like reading a novel or listening to a story and then waited for it to burn out before summarizing its existence by the patterns of wax it left behind on the floor and the shapes he made out of the slender whiffs of smoke they gave off as their last signs of impactful existence. He, in his moments of seizure, made out that he realized these skewed thoughts and representations were in all probability useless and won’t lead him anywhere but usefulness was a concept he had liked to despise as often as he could. It vindicated his actions and inactions. Though in recent times he was getting weary of these rooms of thought of his in sporadic moments, he treasured them as his precious personal belongings. The beauty he had found in the stories of these candles was something he had given birth to. They were his stories since he had discovered them. And this made him treasure them all the more. Like his work of art. He decorated them with metaphors he would find in the streets watching people and things. And what was inevitable was that so much contemplation about the end of everything would lead his thoughts to that of his own. He reached a point one day where he decided to deliberately fantasize about his own end. How beautiful it would be. Like one thinks of his moments of love or matrimony in retrospect, he wondered about his moments of conclusion in foresight. And the beauty of them. After sometime he realized that it might be unusual for a person to try and fantasize about the beauty (and it was beauty, not magnificence which is commonplace of people to attribute to their end) of his own end. He rejoiced in the idea that something about him had become unusual. He decided to dedicate his life, in bits and pieces, to getting prepared for his own end. He realized that people generally are so overwhelmed by the awareness that their end is near that they are unable to manifest the beauty of it. The emotion,feeling and clairvoyance it accumulates and the meaning it gives to their life. It dawned on him that how meaningless anything would be if it did not have an end. Like the space. He resolved to think of all the possible ways he could die time and again so that when confronted he would be able to breathe it in like a moment to cherish even if only for a second. He imagined that if in that moment of his end he could fathom things in proper light it would give an all new meaning to his having existed. He thus imagined himself drowning and simulated the thoughts that would arise in his mind and how his having considered them would help him overcoming them. He interviewed people with such past experiences. He imagined himself dying in an accident or because of a disease. He sometimes even wrote about these ruminations to save himself from forgetting them. And he read and re-read these.

Apart from these spiralling self-catalogued thoughts and mannerisms his life went on as usual. No different to anybody from what it had been a week or a year earlier. He happened to pass through a time when his workplace remained closed for about a week and one day as he woke up he realized that for about that time he had seen only R_ and C_ around him. He began to find himself a part of their story somehow as the obtrusive glances and eye contacts became more frequent. He had begun getting comfortable with their presence like one does unconsciously with a ring in his finger. And of that unusual effort of his that he had contrived in relation to his own end, let it be said that after some months, though trying hard, there was one aspect he could not get used to. The possibility, though a ridiculously irrelevant one, that he might be murdered.