At Mrs. Balraj’s gate, a small crowd had gathered. Neighbors in muted clothes. Her daughter, still in airport jeans, was crying into a paper cup of chai. No one looked at Amar. Why would they? He wasn’t dead yet.
He folded the paper, slipped it into an envelope, and addressed it to the editor of the Daily Excelsior . Not for publication. Just for keeping.
The obituary could wait.
He closed the laptop and walked outside. The lane was the same—the same stray dog, the same screech of auto-rickshaws, the same smell of frying samosas from the corner shop. But everything felt like a photograph. Flat. Finished.
He wasn’t looking for a stranger. He was looking for himself. Daily Excelsior Epaper Obituary Today
Amar Nath clicked the mouse for the hundredth time. The Daily Excelsior epaper loaded, its familiar blue-and-white masthead glowing on his screen. But his eyes didn’t scan the headlines about the border tensions or the budget session. They went straight to the bottom-right corner of the front page, then to the inside pages—the small, dense box of text bordered in black.
“I, Amar Nath, aged 63, resident of lane number four, do hereby declare that I am not yet an obituary. I still misplace my glasses. I still argue with the milkman. I still owe the electrician two hundred rupees. Today, I ate a jalebi and it was excellent. If you are reading this after I am gone, know this: I lived past my expiration date. And I waved back.” At Mrs
Amar sat back. Sunita Balraj lived three doors down. He had seen her just yesterday, hanging bedsheets on her terrace, her silver hair catching the afternoon light. She had waved. He had waved back. Now, between the rising of the sun and the loading of a PDF, she had become a noun. A data point. An obituary .
The next morning, he opened the epaper again. The obituary page was there, as always—a fresh crop of names, a fresh geometry of loss. But Amar no longer looked for himself. He looked for the living. Her daughter, still in airport jeans, was crying
Aged 58. Left behind husband, daughter in Canada, and a loyal pug named Kulfi. Cremation at 4 PM, Shamshan Ghat, Jammu.
Obituaries.