How was your week? I counted myself lucky that I did not have to answer that in five bullet points to please the fleeting whims of some insecure and cruel man!

The speed at which we seem to be collapsing into either the great unknown or singularity is too much for me to make sense of. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, I find myself becoming a longterm-ist. I find peace in knowing that this too shall pass. I find myself drawn, after decades, to sci-fi novels. Ones that talk about futures beyond our comprehension, because God knows it’s hard to extrapolate from where we are headed today.

After reading Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest trilogy, I recently finished Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. It too looks “beyond” humanity as we know it and reveals a universe filled with sentience, magnificence, and terror. There’s something strangely comforting about imagining post-human futures. It’s just a much longer and collective arc of what various cultures and philosophers tell us about ourselves: that once you accept your mortality, you begin to lose fear of death. One day, there will be no humans too.

A few days ago, as I was taking Gabru for his morning walk, I walked past the graveyard that’s on the small road leading up to the neighbouring lake. Yes, it’s an active graveyard, meaning that people still get buried there a few times a year. Our suburb, like many others across India, grew out of and around a neighbouring “halli”—village. The graveyard belongs to them. I am not quite sure who is allowed space for new burials.

There was a fresh grave as Gabru and I walked past. The mound was decked in garlands made of marigolds, roses, and jasmine.

But there was also a large family of free-roaming pigs at the base of the grave, greedily eating the food offerings, including numerous shelled coconuts broken in half, that were left at the end of the burial. There must have been at least a dozen pigs, including many that seemed to be just months old.

Once upon a while, I might have been disgusted by such a sight, and perhaps even tempted to shoo the animals away. But this time, I felt a strange calmness in seeing humans, animals, customs, food, death, and life all connected in that moment.