A THIN LINE ~ Sushant Singh Rajput

There lies a peculiar panic in the mood of the present-day man — a panic more profound and paralysing than any spectre of death or poverty: the dread of one’s own self. Not merely the horror of solitude, nor even of failure in the world’s eyes, but the subtle, gnawing terror of confronting the depths of one’s own feelings — the very heart of reality as it pertains to the inner life. We are trained from infancy to take flight from discomfort, to sidestep sorrow, to consider pain a form of fallacy rather than a solemn instructor. And so, when love — that wild and untamed herald of joy and hardship alike — visits us, we stand ill-equipped, too frightened to fully receive it.

The world speaks of love in rhapsodies and songs, books and sermons, as though it were a gentle salve, a warming light, an unbroken arc of sweetness. Yet this, as the poet Jim Morrison so unflinchingly declared, is nothing but a convenient illusion. Love does not merely uplift; it wounds. It disturbs the soul to its foundations. And the fear of this disturbance, the mortal dread of woe, causes many to seal their hearts behind iron shutters. They flee from the only thing that makes life worth the trouble: the full and harrowing experience of being alive.

Psychological gloom, contrary to the thin advice of contemporary living, is not an enemy to be eradicated but rather a messenger sent from the innermost courts of existence. It is, as Morrison wrote, meant to awaken us. To numb it is to deny life its meaning. To shun it is to exile oneself from one’s own essence. For despondency is no mere bodily sensation; it is the crucible in which the soul is refined. To carry cerebral misery, not as a burden to be banished but as a companion, even a teacher — this is the heart of what it means to be human.

And if one dares to hide it, to disown one’s own anguish, as if the very act of feeling were shameful, one surrenders their own soul to the frosty machinery of societal expectation. The world demands from us the pretence of composure, the mask of indifference, the convenient fiction that “time heals all wounds.” But there are wounds so cavernous, so searing, that time is powerless to dull their edge. These wounds become part of the very constitution of the self. They shape us, mould us, and at times, leave us burrowed, scraped and changed beyond recognition.

As I scrawled these rudimentary words, I realised that they now live within me, as they must in anyone who has stood face to face with grief. Words, as I have learned, are astonishing things — they can build worlds, mend hearts, and just as easily destroy them. But feelings, ah, feelings care little for the establishment of language. They arrive unbidden, raw and elemental, rendering all speech clumsy and insufficient. They leave you standing like a wanderer in some vast, uninhabited desert, isolated, bereft, and cold. Like some silent predator, dolour strikes in the unguarded hour. It disorients, abolishes the boundaries of time and space, and hurls one into an abyss from which, at first, there seems to be no returning. And in this abyss, the only honest response is not the stiff upper lip, nor the counsel of false expectation, but the most human act of all: to cry. Whether in violent torrents or soft, unbidden tears that come without warning — to cry is to give vent to ruth, to acknowledge its rightful place in the human heart.

I cry for Sushant. My brother, my fellow pilgrim of thought and wonder, my soulmate — not in the shallow, romanticised sense of the word, but in the truest and most unadorned fashion: the companion of my mind and my heart, one with whom the silent things could be spoken aloud.

He was a man driven not merely by ambition, but by an unquenchable thirst for the infinite — a seeker, in the grandest sense. His strain, I believe, arose from that most peculiar affliction of the human soul: the longing for what cannot be. The longing for impossible things. For a world just beyond the reach of fingers or fate. Nostalgia for a past that never was, yearning for a future that might have been, regret for roads not taken, and the bitter dissatisfaction with the world’s faint imitation of the true and the beautiful.

In the twilight of such longings, he and I would talk — about art and literature, science and sex, philosophy and music, the aching beauty of Rodin’s sculptures, the fathomless verses of Rilke, the delicate brushstrokes of Monet, the infinite skies above and the restless earth below. His mind was a constellation of these things. Our friendship was woven of words, of handwritten letters, of books exchanged, of midnight phone calls that turned into dawn. I remember, as if it were yesterday, those nights when the world was silent and he would call me: “Bhai, neend nahin aa rahi, yaar, chal baat karte hain, yaar.” (Brother, I am not able to sleep. Would you care to indulge in a spot of conversation, mate?) And the thought that I will never hear those words again shakes me to the core.

The world will speak of closed doors and the opening of others. Sushant himself once counselled me not to take the world too seriously, not to despair when it seemed the universe had bolted its doors against us. How then, I ask myself, could such clarity of thought not have shielded him? The answer, I know, is simple and yet unspeakably sad. He was human. No more, no less. And no fortress of intellect, no army of admirers, no gallery of laurels can fully armour the human heart against its own silent wars.

His demand for perfection — both in himself and others — became both his shield and his scourge. In a world awash with mediocrity, as Anand Ranganathan so aptly put it, he was a man searching for a library in a fish market. It was an impossible quest, and perhaps it broke him more than the world could see. The digital age, with its venomous chorus of anonymous detractors, drew his temper and wounded his spirit. I would often call him, urge him to disengage, to turn away from such trivialities — and like the gentle, trusting brother he was, he would say simply: “Done.”

And so, the haunting question lingers: Did we fail him? The human mind is fond of postmortem heroics, of believing we might have altered the course of providence if only we had acted sooner or spoken louder. But the unpleasant truth, one that I have come to accept with both humility and dread, is that we did not fail him. None of us could have saved him. His own strength, his own intellect, his own vulnerabilities formed a storm cloud so vast that no earthly hand could reach him in that final, fateful moment.

Fate — that old and unyielding master — called him home. Some will think this icy or unfeeling, but it is, I believe, the clearest truth. We do not choose the day of our departure any more than we choose the day of our arrival. When the hourglass empties, it empties. Whether in triumph or in despair, the journey concludes.

The film world, as I have heard from those who knew it intimately, is a strange and cruel playhouse where rejection is a constant companion. To dwell too long in that world can convince even the bravest soul that they are unloved, unwanted, and unseen. When such beliefs settle upon the heart, they shape sensibility itself, turning perception into prison. But Sushant — the Sushant I knew — was not a man who took surface voices to heart. He was too much a student of life to let the unlettered judgments of small minds steer his course. The world did not take him; destiny did.

And so, I find myself repeating the plain, terrible truth: I have lost a confidante. I have lost a part of myself. Words like “condolence” and “acceptance” mean little in the face of such a loss. Until now, I had thought I understood the bereavement of others, but the experience itself renders all prior sympathies hollow. There is no preparation for such a vacuum. There is no cure for such an injury. And though the living will carry him in thought and memory, none of us will ever be the same.

Loss, I have learned, is a dual ache. First comes the knowledge that the much-loved is no longer suffering, and yet, this brings no true peace, for we do not know the fate of souls beyond the veil. The second, and sharper, is the anesthetising absence in the world we still inhabit, the recalling of their voice, the void where once their laughter dwelled. We weave hopeful fictions to ease the agony — that they are “in a better place,” that “time will heal.” But beneath these phrases lies the unaltered twinge, which only faith and time can alleviate, never erase.

As Dickens wrote: “The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.” And so I cling to that hope, dim and distant as it may seem.

I now reminiscence the haunting confession of Poe, another man who knew too well the cruelty of memory and the desperate escapes it inspires: “It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” These words, I believe, fit Sushant’s heart like an epitaph, for he, too, lived by his own laws, indulged in his own beautiful strangeness, and ultimately could not outrun the shadows within.

So go, my dearest brother of the soul, and regale the world that now holds you with the richness and boundless love you so freely gave to us here. You are, and will forever be, that very love, wherever you roam.