Just as I was starting to believe that I was the only one who thought about Saagar, wanted to talk about him and keep his memory alive, I was proven wrong. At the Memorial event organised by his friends at his university, I met some of his teachers and close friends. I could see the reflection of my grief in them. They are hurting like I am. He is very special to them just as he is to me. They miss him terribly like I do. They love him dearly, just like me. Listening to them share their memories of him was pure joy.

Being on his Campus and getting to know his friends made me feel like he was around. He really couldn’t have been too far away.

This is what one of his friends had to say:

“There’s a little Saagar sized hole
buried in the depth of my soul,
this man had a heart of gold
he was so confident, if speech bubbles were real his would be written in bold
it hurts to think of his specific brand of jokes which will now go untold
whenever i find a siiiiiick youtube link
i go to send it to him out of instinct
and i stop and think,
goosebumps break out on my skin
the weight of his absence pushes my eyebrows down into a somber frown
my vision is drowned out, melancholy abounds as tears shower down on the ground
and then i just stop.
wipe away the teardops
fight myself from miring my mind in hindsight and wipe my eyes
I try not to picture the night he died
i still check his facebook from time to time
just to picture him by my side
as a reminder of the violence of life’s rich tapestry,
it deeply saddens me,
i mean, now who’s going to wow me with their musicality?
who’s going to teach me the recent street vocabulary?
And we always used to go to parties
he even got me to do whole term of pole-dancing
the man was a legend
and even though i don’t believe in a heaven
he’s definitely heading directly to level seven.”