‘I Resemble Everyone But Myself '

At 4 am on June 16, 1993, A.K. Ramanujan wrote an unpunctuated paragraph of what he called ‘free writing’: ‘Whatever comes to your mind consciousness epiphenomenon Bosnia Mogadishu children with problems Chinese immigrants . . . pain in the ankle arch instep acute as sting diffuse as a cloud of poison emitted by a savage squid cyclical is a phonograph stuck on a phrase’.

- Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

This goes on for several more lines, describing vividly the pain he had been experiencing. Four hours later, at 8 am, he started another: ‘Pain in the leg, sleep still in my eyes, waking up in childhood with conjunctivitis’. He then went on to remember his mother and the Mysore house he grew up in. The same evening, in a separate entry, he wrote, ‘To write continuously like the trickle stream of thick honey from a slanted bottle.’ His preoccupations over the decades had not changed: memory; a sharp awareness of suffering; a desire to write, continuously. Less than a month later, as he was being prepared for a spinal operation to relieve the pain in his leg, he was dead. The University of Chicago, where he had taught since 1961, lowered the US flag to half-mast.