I am free. There is no God!

I have proof……… There is no God!

There is something rotten in the state of affairs in this world.

May 2014 is one month I would like to erase from my life if possible.

I lost two friends.

That by itself should not have brought about such a drastic realization.

Like someone said, in this world people die every day.

Whoever is in charge of these matters has no fucking business to take these two people away.

What is He up to?

Is there an urgent requirement to lower the average age of residents of Heaven?

Some new last minute requirement that needed to be fulfilled on the eve of some audit?

Would heaven have lost its ISO certification if the numbers were not tweaked with the addition of these two souls?

Balderdash!

The first was my friend Mrs. Meera Colaco.

How can one even begin to describe this wonderful human being?

She was straight out of a Marvel comic.

Was there anything that she could not do?

Did anything scare her?

Can I think of someone who would manage to do half of what she had done?

And was she humble?

We met each other, surprisingly, over a quarrel.

I went to meet her with a fight on my mind, and we did fight. Sarcastic comments were made, hot words were exchanged, and we concluded the first meeting with as much acrimony that two individuals could dole out in such a short time.

Such a meeting should have had only two outcomes:

1.       No further interactions.

2.       A plastic sorry, insincere patch-up and then no further interactions

As it turned out, neither happened.

How we became what we were to each other would remain a mystery to both of us as well as the rest of the world.

We never needed to meet regularly, exchange mails, and talk over phone and many other usual things that friends usually do to stay in touch.

We were friends since 1989.

Neighbors for 10 years.

Only 160 kms separated us for the next 7 years.

Regular meetings dried up after that but the relationship continued.

Whenever we met we continued as if we met only the previous evening.

If she was an Angel, her husband and daughter went on to prove that there is nothing like too much goodness.

She went through phases in her life that countries usually experience over few generations.

At times she was filthy rich, at times completely bankrupt, at times bordering on penury but her composure never changed, the smile, that beaming ear to ear full laugh, never left her face.

She gave with gay abandon.

She cried when she was alone.

If there is a scale to measure the inherent selfless goodness in a human being that scale should be Meera.

My dear – you have left us in a hurry – you will enrich the places that you visit but we will forever be incomplete.

The second was Satyajit Mookerjee.

Unlike Mrs. Colaco I had known him only for the last three years.

Our relationship is a little difficult to describe.

We did not meet regularly.

As a matter of fact I remember only one informal meeting when we, along with two others, met one evening for a beer. 

Beer for us and tea for him!

If I count, maybe I would arrive at about a dozen occasions in a year when we met and talked.

The quality of the interaction and the respect one can develop is not necessarily proportional to the number of the meetings or the total time spent together.

We had discussed about probably as many disparate topics as possible without once talking about work, which brought us together in the first place.

He was a prototype of grace and elegance.

He was probably incapable of raising his voice.

The most arresting feature, which shall now continue to haunt me forever as it is gone with his life, was his Mona Lisa ‘esq smile.

There was something about that smile which defined him, in my opinion. It was not fake, was not condescending, was not a smirk, was not mocking, and was not plastic.

If I could use one adjective to describe his smile – I would say “sincere”.

Now that smile is gone along with him.

Satyajit was proof that a deep friendship and admiration can form in the shortest time.

Now coming to my realization:

I had been a fence sitter for too long on the topic of GOD.

Enough is enough.

If this is the best He could do, He does not deserve to be there pulling his strings.

So dear useless God, Goodbye. It was nice believing in you for a while.

I am free.