Recently, a friend lost his daughter. She was in her early thirties, brilliant and beautiful, dearly loved. My friend had lost his wife during the pandemic. The father and daughter were particularly close; they became closer after the friend’s wife died.

They were struggling together, trying to cope, when this deadly disease seemed to come from nowhere and struck the girl down. My friend was in the hospital day and night, outside her ward, hardly eating, not sleeping, living on hope alone, for months.

The death of a child is possibly the hardest thing to bear. I think the only comfort my friend found, even as grief crushed him, was the immense support he received from family and friends, both his and his daughter’s. They were there with him, some travelling from other cities, holding him up, at times, literally.

A WhatsApp group that was formed for updates on his daughter was also a strong support. The group, which with more than a hundred members, was a constant source of encouragement for my friend. Yes, I felt what was being said often was quite trite, with most people who were posting asking my friend to keep his faith in god, to pray to Him, heart and soul, as they were praying on his behalf. They also told my friend repeatedly that his daughter would come back home soon, “sampurno sustho”, completely recovered.

I felt that though platitudinous, these messages perhaps cheered my friend up a little. Hope is a strange thing, nourished by strange things. Everyone knew how ill my friend’s daughter was and every time such a hope was expressed, I was filled with trepidation. My friend, though, responded to each message, warmly and gracefully.

Then his daughter passed away. The group responded with a stunned silence at first. Then the most bizarre thing began to happen.

The person who posted first began by saying that she had nothing to say as she did not have any words for consolation. It was, however, followed by a burst of words, saying she was praying for the girl’s soul, that she should attain peace wherever she had gone, that my friend needed to be very strong.

This was the cue. In the next 15 minutes, 32 messages sprang up, almost identical, all starting with the disclaimer that the speaker had nothing to say, followed by the brief torrent of words on the girl’s soul, her attaining peace and my friend’s need to stay strong. A few were accompanied by the namaskar icon or the abbreviation, ‘R.I.P.’.

I will not get into the obvious contradiction of being wordless and being able to speak at the same time: it must be a manner of speaking. But I was reeling under the impact of the messages. I did not know which was more brutal: the fact of the girl’s death or the instantaneous acceptance of the death and an appeal to her father to do the same.

I am not saying that the wishes with their high expectations were insincere. I think they were heartfelt. On such an occasion, however, truly no word suffices. Silence is better sometimes than words. But for that, you have to be present in person with the grieving.

But on social media, you feel obliged to speak. You post, therefore you exist, however hollow, even false, the words may sound. The messages that poured in did not even look like words, so little did they mean. They looked like an image forwarded many times.

Which took care of the sender’s feelings, but I am not sure of what it did to my friend. He was silent. A few days after the death, maybe because he did not know how to exit from or delete the group, or maybe with deliberation, I saw that he was removing all members of the group, one by one. I know till he removed me. I hope he has removed everyone.