The telephone rang incessantly. Will it make a difference if I picked it up, will the news be any different? Will there be a miracle? I don’t even know if a miracle is needed at all!

I remember, many years ago in Ranchi, I was perhaps 10 or 11 years old, you had come down to visit us. You patiently sat with me and showed me how to answer my English papers. That was one of the turning points in my life. One of the reasons I enjoyed the language… the way you taught me to approach it. It was so simple, yet so powerful. Much later, when I started working you told me time and again, not to spend everything but to save up for a rainy day. I didn’t heed that. Don’t heed it now either, but everytime I am in trouble I remember what you had told me.

The incessant rings brought my reverie to a halt. I looked around me, nothing had changed. Nothing will change. The sun will rise and set at precisely the time its suppose to rise and set. Not even a nano second will it wait and mourn you. The moon will be as radiant as it was yesterday. It will not turn down its brightness to show that you meant something. The flowers will bloom with all its gusto, the clouds will sail and play with the gentle breeze like it was just another morning.

Nothing will stop because you have left. Life will go on like you never existed. Your little possessions will be the only witness to your existence in our lives. Memories of you that we hold dear or will hold dear for a while, will also drown under the everyday rigmarole of our struggles, our joys, our tears, our laughter, our successes, our failures.

Maybe once in a while, perhaps when we are driving back home, or when we are washing the dishes or cooking something that you liked or watching that TV series that we once upon a time enjoyed together; there will be an overwhelming gnawing pain, a sudden feeling of emptiness, a void, a desultory loneliness. You will be remembered like a conversation forgotten mid – sentence suspended in time, waiting for a conclusion.

It’s not you, we are all heading for that same fate, some rushing to it and others traipsing along. But YOU mattered, in your own small way, you meant a world to some people around you. And what is worth Stephen Hawkins will be waiting right there opening up doors to several universes only for you.