Echo

Somewhere today a lab is out of order. People walk the hallways asking, "Have you heard?", "She was going to finish in a few months" , "She worked so hard.. poor thing."
A greying professor remembers her first emails to him. Enthusiasm bordering on desperation, the years she put into getting to a point where she could send him that email. He may even remember how he wondered at her perseverance as he presented her case to the committee, asking them to fund her graduate studies.

Somewhere, a brother takes the first flight available to meet his sister. There are anxious parental phone calls, logistics, endless paperwork and planning. This I cannot bring myself to imagine.

In frozen time-frames she walks into my room at night, after roll call, demanding and distributing her 'jaadu ki jhappis'. I hear her echo "-TA" when I call her Sanchi, completing her name emphatically. I hear her laugh and I see her dance, listen to her voice in countless conversations, real and virtual. What next, we ask and say, what next?
We've talked of plans, after hostel and after Baroda, what the US is like and the tedium of grad school, buying cars and non-academic options after a Ph.D. And each time our refrain, What next and what else?

Somewhere, there is an echo of our words that goes round and round the globe, a string of electrons magically dancing through cables under the oceans and continents. What next, it whispers, what next?

Even as the words bounce around, you are gone. In frozen time I feel the crash of metal and flesh and bone on a dark highway as it ripples under my skin, my fingers trembling in a mocking echo of yours. The smell of the fruit samples in your car and the sound of the sirens and helicopters and paramedic voices. Your emphatic ending of your own name resonates in emptiness and hits me harder than anything.

The words of our friend as she tells me you are gone. The way I wish for someone to hold her close through this.

Somewhere, shouldn't something be more ordered than it is here? Are the partings here balanced out by reunions elsewhere?

Or perhaps our echoes have no balance. Just the strength they find in their repetition as they bounce around the world, fading as we fade and revived by resonant times as somewhere, an advisor reads an enthusiastic email from a grad student. And somewhere, a brother flies out to meet his sister for a reunion happier than this one. And friends talk of things other than death when they say, What comes next?