Death is a funny thing.

Death is a funny thing. How does death pick its fate, and time, and manner…and how does it decide whether to gently knock, or barge right in? Why are old men lying for days in ICUs with not as much as a sound, machines struggling to keep them alive- and why are young children rolled out to the morgue, their parents weeping? Why does one girl die on a Bombay road attempting to cross the maze of traffic, and another live on in a hospital room- without will.

We cannot account all coming and going to God’s will, now, can we: for that cannot explain the cruelty of delayed demise, or of early death.

I have spent many hours mulling over the bewildering nature of life outside ICUs and hospital rooms, this year. Every now and then- an intensely happy or sad moment- takes me back to those hurried, strained moments:

Frantically calling the doctor, rolling the bed out to the intensive care unit, rushing to the oxygen supply, waiting the night out to know if morning will come?

I could have done so many things wrong. Fate could have so many other choices.

We can never know why, and perhaps, never understand how.