Apple and the worm

'Eat, drink and be merry' seems like a good piece of Epicurean advice. But if the sages are to be believed, the good news implied in eating and drinking merrily is only half of our existential story. The bad news usually comes in with the bills; when one has to grapple with the costs of one's revelry; in the morning after.

That's when Sant Kabir's advice may come in handy. "Eat, cook and loot ( Khai, pakai, lootai- kai)," says the mystical weaver. "And do your thing ( karlaiapnakaam)," the medieval master adds, "just remember the funeral procession man ( chaltibiriyarenara), which won't allow you take along a single dime ( sanganachalechadam)!"

Thus, we are forced to confront our ultimate fate: the ticking away of our personal doomsday clocks. This starts with the moment of one's birth only to wind down completely at the instant of demise.

But such intimations of mortality notwithstanding, "there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation," writes thenoted essayist Joan Didionin Blue Nights, the haunting memoir about the death of her daughter at 39 from an infection that began just before the sudden death of Didion's husband at dinner table.

So how does one bite into life's juicy apple, without gagging over the prospect of the worm that is constantly eating it away? As she chronicles her loss, Didion offers no consolations or palliatives. But her changeof awareness turns out to be the ultimate prophylaxis.Her daughter's death does bring her wisdom about the 'cruel reality of mortality'.