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No One Dies on Facebook
I logged on to my Facebook page in the middle of August and was greeted by a note on the right-hand side
urging me to get in touch with Dilip Chitre. Say hello, it said, send him a message, write on his wall.
This was standard practice on Facebook -- a way of getting active users to prod their more sluggish friends
into revisiting a site they had either forgotten or voluntarily abandoned. Not everyone is enslaved by the
gossip highway, not everyone needs to go goodwill hunting.
Only in this case, Dilip Chitre, Indian poet, scholar, sculptor, film-maker and life-seeker extraordinaire,
had been dead nine months. He had suffered for years from a "nasty cancer" that made it impossible for him
to even speak on the phone, and then, on December 10, 2010, he gave up the ghost in his Pune home. When
I heard about his death, I thought immeditaely about a despairing poem he had once written about being
in an ambulance: "I remember the ride/My lonely half of it/My desperate half/My quiet half/My empty half of it."
Obituaries blossomed in mainstream newspapers and on the internet. The 70-year-old really was a renaissance
man - not in a smart, multitasking way that the term has come to be used, but in the classical sense.
Intellectual curiosity and a spiritual toughness had stamped his functioning through dreadful episodes
of personal loss -- losing a young son to the poisonous gas leak of the 1984 industrial Bhopal tragedy
-- and, in his later years, living with right-wing death threats for daring to defend the freedom of speech.
He was also an indefatigable mentor, a guru in a rakish beret and khadi kurta, whom young writers flocked
to with their bad verse and good intentions. He was patient with them, he did not tell them to perhaps
try pottery. Like Gandhi, he travelled widely, read deeply and championed the cause of the low-caste Dalits.
And since he was so widely travelled, he had friends in all parts of the world. Many did not know that he had
passed away. How would a man in Romania know? He was dead in December but his Romanian friend wished him a
happy new year in January. Two months later, after the vicious February Pune bomb blasts, another friend
from Europe wrote worriedly on his page asking if he was safe.
The response to these messages of goodwill and concern was a touching silence -- no chirpy emoticons,
no thank yous, no sparkling status updates. Baffled, Facebook, whose genius software understands only
intimations and not mortality, was urging his friends, like me, to write to him and force a reply. Our
job was to stir him out of his stagnance before it thickened, to reclaim a fellow Facebooker from months
of blankness. Don't let him migrate to Twitter or Orkut, seemed to be the quiet fear behind the corporate
nudging. Tell him to come back to the primal world of voyeurism. If enough people contact him, he won't
be able to ignore the writing on his wall.
The irony, of course, was that the dead poet was no Facebook sluggard. He was if anything an addict,
frequently sending out virtual bouquets to his 1,146 friends, throwing sheep at people, poking and
waiting to be poked back. He seemed to revel in the more juvenile features offered by the site.
I found this embrace of cheesiness by the cerebral Chitre both mystifying and endearing. It was
as if he was gleefully indulging a childish caprice of his autumnal years which he expected his
friends to put up with and understand. But although he poked hard and played scrabble, what he
did not do was post his poetry here. He had a separate and serious site for his writings.
Facebook was for fun. "I don't post my poetry here," he told a journalist who was interviewing
him for a piece on OFFs, Old Folks on Facebook. "My poetry is not frivolous."
Facebook may be frivolous but it is also forever. The undead keep their own wake in the vast digital
wasteland that flourishes behind our computer screens. Soon, there will be more corpses on Facebook
than in the graveyards of our cities. There is no decomposition in this wilderness, the maggots of
memory are defeated here. Family and friends are permitted, indeed, encouraged by company policy,
to water the shoots of a life that has passed to the other side. We are expected to be the constant
gardeners of a ghost who may not be able to accept new friends but can hold on quite tenaciously to
the old. It would be churlish to ignore a friend merely because he or she is dead.
I returned on September 17 to Dilip Chitre's page. This time because Facebook asked me to
wish him on his birthday. I got a bit of a shock. It was plastered with birthday messages
from friends. Almost every message ended with a "We miss you". Several friends recalled
that last September, Dilip had been around to celebrate his birthday. These posthumous birthday
messages were so fresh with grief that they were startling. One person quoted a line from his
poetry -- The future dances around you like a butterfly -- and another said that it was fitting
that a tech-savvy artist had an online memorial.
I began to wonder what would happen next year. When would it become absurd to wish him on
his birthday? When would his page be abandoned and be overrun with weeds like the colonial
graves in Bombay? The Hindus burn their dead and leave behind no tombstone or epitaph,
and the wisdom of this practice is infinite. The butterfly has no use for the split cocoon.
But now there was a place to go, to weep, to remember. It also struck me that his page was
unguarded. He could not delete a comment, protect himself from praise. What if some pervert
thought fit to leave a nasty note on his wall? Would it be preserved forever?
The thought of online memorial shrines is at once comforting and unsettling. Ultimately, they
are a populist and artificial life-force where the dead cannot defend themselves against random
acts of kindness or flattery. Dilip Chitre did not post his poetry here. His soul he stored
in another jar. We should turn to his essays and poetry, his films and art, his magnificent English
translations of the saint-poet Tukaram. But the real irony of our unlettered times is that the paths
of glory lead but to our Facebook page.
Dilip Chitre
Nina Martyris
Email: Nina Martyris
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