If only...

Regret has a bitter aftertaste...

I NEVER thought I would ever have to write a requiem for one of our girls. Nafisa Joseph's name would never have come to mind if someone had suggested that she would, one dark, rainy night, decide to end her life.

IT has yet to sink in... the fact that she could waste her life so. One small mistake on her part, and it is too late to shake her out of the mood, to take her by the shoulder and say, snap out of it; no life is worth living or wasting away for someone else. But then, I suppose it is easy to say such things when one looks at it from a distance. In the thick of an emotional upheaval, who knows how any of us would react?

YET, to think that Nafisa had always had so much going for her. Right from the time she stood in a line-up as an aspiring candidate for the Femina Miss India Contest. We were in Bangalore, conducting the eliminations. And looking at the tense faces of the girls waiting to know their fate, made us sure that in Nafisa, there were the makings of a star.

NO tension in her at all, she stood there, quietly glowing, confident that she had what it takes. And sure enough, she proved it. With everything she did.

THEN, what is it that would make a confident, good looking, popular woman in the prime of her life and with her career on a seemingly endless upward curve decide to end it all? Was her joie de vivre a façade then that none of us could see beyond? Surely not.

ONE moment of insecurity then, a feeling that whatever one is or does, there is no real soul mate and every bridge of life must necessarily be crossed alone? Is that enough reason for snuffing out one's life?

THE answers are Nafisa's secret. For us, she has left behind a deep feeling of regret. If only, we murmur, if only she had talked to us, if only she had asked us, if only she had reacted differently to the stress that forced the decision on her....

For while we are alive with the blood pounding in our hearts, we all tend to take death lightly. Death is something that happens to others, and death by our own hand... well, we talk about it, we might even threaten it, but of course we never quite think we will resort to it.

YET so many of us do; Nafisa did.

AND even to the fatalists who say that the means of death do not matter, death comes when it has to, we respond, but it was a waste of a life. It could have been prevented.

Fate might have been thwarted. She could still be with us.

IF only...