#scurf95: A note on one year of Irrfan's passting

From the archives

One year on since irrfan’s passing....

I’m surprised how my own emotions, feelings and thoughts about him have changed. All not for the worst thankfully though. I’ve come to see him in a more humane and fully earthy, rooted, corporeal entity, than the aloof, floaty, Demi god-ish one I had ascertained to him earlier. Now, he’s a part of my everyday, when I look at him, his eyes take me to the places he had been to as a person. I don’t jump directly into the fantasy land of dreams and conjurings and fascinations. His language, the words he spoke or didn’t so as an actor, fix me for a moment, but then I’m also able to see him as a flesh, bone and skin being, beyond his mythical, mythological entity as an actor. In coming to terms with his passing I’ve also surprisingly come to accept my fullness, my frailties and the fraught ways in which I deal with being human everyday. I’ve come to see myself as a human being, more myself than ever before. This might also be the half perfect, constantly failing, fragile ways in which we work as humans. But it’s certainly taught me to not see everything through a smokescreen.  Life as it’s lived in very precarious, and not always will things be in our hands. One year on, if theres anything I learnt from irrfan’s movies it’s that a fuller, rounded and more raw acceptance of life alongside death is a good approach to have. I wish he was with us, for a much much longer duration. But the teachings he leaves us with, his ever so mature, seer-like, ephemeral performances, leave us with a lot, lot more than we can imagine, to unpack. Every movie of his, now looks more prescient, agile and pressing onto us from beyond the ether. Every single dialogue he spoke, with those hooded eyes, that half smile playing havoc on his face, those quirky one liners, have made me think a lot more about the smallest of things that life offers us. I know better than to be hasty, I know the importance of pausing, speaking slowly and of taking ones own sweet time. Now some of you might say that this also a doing, a function of our very haggardly times, the ferocious lockdowns, the deaths, the sadness heaping upon the other. It might be. But I know for a fact that the fact that all his movies suddenly seem more mature, heavy handed and full of life wisdom is no casual coincidence. He aimed for it to be thus. He wanted us to take joy in the small things before the horror of the big ones sweeps it all off. I have so much more to write, but I should pause now. It’s late in the night and I have mg physically tired body to take care of, and anyway I have a habit to go on writing. But the flow is beautiful because the motivation behind my writing is Irrfan. I should pause and come back to the screen once the day is alit, and irrfan’s thoughts strike open a new batch of musings. Let’s remember him in peace today. With a moment or two, of grace, and love and joy and death. He’s finally made me want to write about death too, in his all pervasive worldly wisdom, the only one friend I never met but know so well — Irrfan, fair thee well, friend!