The 146th death.

[Text by Bijaya Biswal; photo by Piyush Sawant]

22 years old Bijaya Biswal was found dead in her apartment on Good Friday, with her head buried in a book like a dried rose bud. The book was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which allegedly had begun a suicide epidemic in Germany two hundred years ago.

Ms Biswal’s doctor says she had a prolonged history of being easily overwhelmed by dreams, often mistaking it for real life. There have been days she wandered around the house swift as a gust of winter breeze, quoting “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace”. That day she was Wilde’s Canterville Ghost. On other days, she was Emily Dickinson, dressed in her grandmother’s tunic with her hair tied into a bun, sitting crossed leg at the balcony and re-writing “Because I could not stop for death”. The days she was Marx, she did not bargain. On others when she was Rahel, she searched for Estha.

Ms Biswal’s parents say her death was not a surprise. Lately, she had been reading Sylvia Plath.

Our Self-Written Obituaries invites people to write their obituary in 200 words. The idea is to share with the world how you will like to be remembered after you are gone. (May you live a long life, of course!) Please mail me your self-obit at mayankaustensoofi@gmail.com.