Page 4 - Qavah

Eulogy

I’ve never been one for remembering details of sermons. I remember, however, a curious one he gave on
one of the four Good Fridays he was with us. He talked about an untranslatable Arabic phrase Ya’aburnee

literally meaning “you bury me”. It meant the hope that your loved ones would outlive you so as to spare
yourself the pain of living in a world without them. He didn’t like to dwell on the morbid unless the
situation absolutely called for it; not in casual conversations, nor in his often-profound sermons.

Which was why this particular part of his sermon stuck with me for so long. That and how I’ve always

reflected on the possibility of it happening. An inevitability of life which can only be avoided if you die
young. And Fr. Anoop died young.

What stings more than anything else is the suddenness of it when it came. In most instances, you get the
luxury of expecting it, which may indeed come with its own set of emotional trauma, but isn’t nearly as
confusing and shocking as this. This was felt by all of us as an abruption, a tearing away of a part of
ourselves.

The gravity of the whole thing refused to register in its entirety for a long while. Hope that he might recover
continued to persist. The finality of his passing, a day after his thirty-ninth birthday, brought with it a flood
of shock and disbelief, which then gave in to sorrow and rage.

I’ve been around priests almost my entire life; churches and schools and even households. They were
people to be revered, not befriended. They were people to be listened to and emulated but never to be
engaged in pointed discussions with. Fr. Anup, I came to find, was of an entirely different stock. You found
in yourself equal measures of reverence and familiarity in the presence of the man. He’d walk with us

instead of ahead of us. He was receptive and not dismissive of retorts. This made conversations with him an
unusual delight and the banter often resulted in humorous conclusions; occasional frivolity wasn’t beneath
him.

He had the skill to tread that hazy area between propriety and levity with apparent ease. Never looking
down on you and yet a class apart. Full of empathy and fellow feeling, he used to be able to walk in
somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. I know this because he saw through mine. He could relate
to both the young and the old, a rare quality to come across, rarer still considering today’s sharper divides

between the two. He never exhibited any of the inexperience of youth nor its insecurities. He set an
example worthy of his position, wise beyond his years, in his speech, in his conduct, in his love, faith and
purity.