Our aunt, Bharti Masi, passed away last month, almost by choice.

My darling sister, a little rattled by all of it, texted me:

 “Taking the decision to die because it’s better for you, I cannot imagine what Masi must’ve been going through.”

*****

Bharti Masi, one of my mother’s many little sisters, was born into a house mainly full of women and girls. Her mother, my grandma, was best described a little whack, but her grandma – Baa – was the stalwart of the house. A woman of strength and wisdom, unafraid and unabashed, loved and trusted. Universally respected.

Growing up, it almost seemed like Bharti Masi contested with her sisters on who was the prettiest of them all. The Katbamna girls were the talk of the town, a bunch of beauties to behold. My father and his brothers had hit a little jackpot, living in a tiny, rented space in the same building below these beauties.

And just as if intelligent design was real, the Bollywood script of the girl next door came to life. Bharti Masi’s elder sister became my father’s wife in a love story for the ages, still going strong.

Bharti Masi, on the other hand, would never get married.

Amidst all the beauty, what set Bharti Masi apart was her razor-sharp mind – unafraid and unabashed.

But at the age of 20, she was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disease that can rampage through your body like a cyclone but still be “managed” with modern medicine.

The disease is death, but this ability to “manage” it seems like absolute psychological hell – unnecessary yet necessary. It’s as if the Devil is right around the corner, don’t tempt him to come around, but try as you may, he might just come along anyway and take it all away.

This constant fear of impending doom must be crippling, with the hope of survival serving only as salt on a wound that will never really heal.

When her body first attacked her at the age of 20, the entire clan – her family and her future family – came together to save her, quite literally. Her sisters and her brothers, and my father and his cousins all gave her blood, pumping life into her, in what now seems like a ceremony of kinship strengthened by tragedy.

She pulled through that first wave but was shaken.

She had lost her hair because of all the steroids but she gained a strong desire to conquer survival.

She tried everything to keep the Devil away, even engaging in Urine Therapy. She drank her urine every morning and saved some to massage her skin at night before falling asleep. The stench didn’t seem to matter – not to her, nor to the ones that loved her.

When people made fun of her baldness, she stripped off the scarf that covered her scalp in a rebellion that would be symbolic for years to come.

And then she fled.

She left for a land with seemingly greener pastures booking a one-way ticket to the United States of immigrants. She felt modern medicine might serve her better there. She went on to get her PhD in Audiology and became a tenured professor in a quaint little town in Michigan.

When I was 11, we all went on a family trip to Australia. She had come along as the ninth wheel with two families of four.

And boy, I hated her guts.

My rebellious eleven-year-oldness collided with her fearless reprimand. She always seemed to kill the buzz, snapping if the volume was too loud, pointing out all the dangers of a simple canoe and cutting through me with her stern scolding when I squeezed a ketchup sachet too hard.

I didn’t get it back then. And many others didn’t either.

She pushed away more people than she pulled in.

Our evolution doesn’t allow us to understand the depth of a person just by looking at them. Survival mechanisms are often masked by negativity and there’s no time to empathize with the rude, however broken, brave and beautiful they are underneath.

When I moved to the US for my undergrad, my mother forced me to reconnect with Bharti Masi. With my prefrontal cortex still figuring things out, I took it on as an errand to please my Mum, with an eyeroll or two that was still cool back then.

But the offshoot was a pleasant relationship. How can someone I used to fight with all the time ship me home-baked cookies across the land? And ever since, she followed my journey. Our relationship was punctuated with sporadic conversations and emails about plastics and photos and pain.

The more I learnt about life, the more I admired my Masi’s courage and the love that lay underneath.

It all started to make sense to me: she had been cursed with a deck of cards that had very few trumps, but she was a fighter. It was almost like all the trump cards she should have had, had slipped into the decks of people like me, and the Joker cards were replaced by the Devil. And yet, she kept playing.

While I made sense of all that unfairness, she battled with the senselessness of the condition she was a slave to.

In the years to come, the Devil kept showing his face – poking at her, and then going away and giving her hope, only to sneak back up again.

She would have some years of goodness, and then something would go wrong. Sometimes it was the disease and sometimes it was just sheer bad luck – like the time she slipped on ice outside her house and fell, breaking her arm that took ages to heal.

Then, a few good years later, she had a stroke which left her vision severely hampered, recovering slowly.

But she did recover from that, improved her already-great diet, retired from teaching and started embracing still photography while writing a cookbook. She seemed in high spirits and the final stretch seemed like a happy ending worthy of a Pulitzer.

Amidst all this rejuvenation, one day she found her arm had swelled a little. She delayed treatment because of the innocuousness of the swelling until it swelled more.

4 months later she was fighting for her life in the ICU. A couple of weeks after that, she died.

She died because that was the better option.

Almost all her main organs had failed but her brain and her heart were still churning. If she wanted to live, she would have had to be bedridden on a ventilator all her life, coupled with regular dialyses. Who wants that life?

“I don’t want to be a burden,”  she said.

My mother could barely see her in that state. It’s too much pain, Anish, it’s too much.

Bharti Masi wasn’t alone when she passed away. Her partner, her best friend and some of her family were with her. No children though, nor any of the clan that had once given her their blood all those years ago. And that was that.

My mother says that she had many good years, but all I see is the unjust, uncontrollable tragedy of her circumstances, and her relentless courage to struggle through it right till death, with hope showing its worst face.

Maybe I’m being too negative about this. Or maybe, my mother’s love for her sister wants her to believe it was all worth it.

Who knows, my mother says. Who knows.

All I am certain of is that I cannot be certain about anything. And that as hard as I might try, I might not be able to make sense of everything.

I am not much of a quotes guy, but these days, this quote from the mighty Mr Chesterton keeps coming up:

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

*****

As my mother and father mourned through this loss, I have been caught up in the cyclone that is social entrepreneurship. Just when I thought it couldn’t get more intense, it has picked up a notch.

The thing about cyclones is that people run away from them, even though that’s not what cyclones manifest for.

Entrepreneurship is pushing everyone you love away from you for “something bigger”, “something bigger” that wise people don’t really understand.

Social entrepreneurship is pushing everyone you love away from you for something bigger, but the difference is that the wise people who love you fully understand this “something bigger”, and that’s almost worse. Because they won’t stop you. Because it just might be worth it.

The ferocity of this cyclone has made me claustrophobic, running amidst different intensities of chaos while getting trapped in my own wind, without any space.

So much so that I felt it was time to move out from my parents’ home, in search of the eye of the storm.

With a little help from my sister, I told Mum and Dad that it was time to move out. Despite the grandiose gesture of “moving in with the ‘rents” a couple of years ago that garnered plaudits from the mothers of all my friends, my parents were as supportive as ever of this senseless retraction.

So much so that I wished that there was more drama. That they were angrier. So, I’d feel less spoilt. But that’s the irony of the support system I have, it’s almost senseless how supportive it is.

Even in the tough sport that is entrepreneurship, I feel spoilt. As a Shark mentioned on TV not too long ago: Anish, you’ve not gotten enough “dhakkas” (punches) in your journey.

While I make sense of this entrepreneurial cyclone that I’ve created for myself, my aunt, Bharti Masi, was born into a cyclone full of dhakkas. A cyclone she could barely make sense of. A cyclone devoid of any trump cards. Her last words were, “Modern medicine has failed me. Now go enjoy my money.”

But both these cyclones have one thing in common. They both seem to push people away. One has found its peace. The other is still searching for the eye, hoping that when it’s found, he has not pushed everyone away.