Sandeep Sharma finished his PhD/D Phil in Semiotics in 2012 at Himachal Pradesh University, India. His thesis was on non-verbal aspects in the novels of R K Narayan, language of Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction in particular. Currently He’s Asst Prof of English at Government College, Diggal (HP), India. He is Associate Editor of the journals In Translation (Université Badji Moktar de Annaba) and Traduction et Langues,University of Oran 2. He received Award of Academic Excellence (2022), along with Noam Chomsky, by the Arab Translators’ Association for his research works. His academic page as of now has been viewed by 266,709 people across the globe.   His profile remains at the top 1% of the total searched pages on the net. He has made available most of his works at:  https://hp-in.academia.edu/SsandeepSharma

                   On my Death: I will be Programmed again

“You’ve to be as quick as Usainreadingbolt.
Go through all philosophies of Death 
The Bardo, The Garuda Purana and all—-
From the East to the West
The North to the South 
Before you vanish, vanish at around 60”
Prophesied my ‘Masters’
Astrologers from the Himalayas  
'Master’ not in the sense 
My students use it to mean—-  
‘Fucking Flabbergaster’—-
(neither in good nor in bad sense)  


This is August, the thirtieth
My Last Day———
All the books I didn’t read
And the prophecies
Refereed to in line 8, in line 9 of the time gone above
The psychiatric interpretations 
The self, the death chemical
The Gulik, the  Markesh in my astral chart
All are dancing elegantly on 
Some unidentified self destructive island of the brain

I shared with them 
“In hallucinations 
I can see a puppy and a goat
playing and gliding 
Bouncing above the vitrified tiles
Merging and emerging into rust” 
  
Actually what I said wasn’t a true lie!
In reality all I could see was
Two jumbled sentences written in air
One in Gurmukhi 
Another in English
From within the cracks of these two languages 
Radiating a weightless light  
I saw them responding—- 
In courageous, logical, unemotional speech acts
In Daughter’s Tongue (Hindavi)
—-to my Aristotelian Tragedy  
Which we only acquire
with education and 
seeing words which Socrates saw 
in his mind
before these came to his mind
and his undertakers 
“It’s your time. It’s over.”’
I giggled,”What if it’s not?

They called Simla Coffin Services
and booked 
The  best bargained 
Red-Shroud-and-Dry-Wood for the evening 
On which my corpse would be sewn
burnt with what I’m eating now—-
‘The Present-Continuous-Spinach-and-Cheese Burger’
And the semi-shit I will have to be able to manufacture  	
in my large intestine

What a jerk!—-
Finally in the evening 
with setting of the Sun
I breathed my last
—-My head lolled down on my collar bone
 
Flash! Before I could identify my flesh from the  soul
Light from the dark particles 
I saw skunks, pigs, dogs, ants, hens, goats, cows, bosses, colleagues, friends, haters, likers, trollers, followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, my WhatsApp chats, husbands, children, parents, the Himalayan Masters and Gods ( bearing black, brown, blue, yellow, white and spectrum of some indescribable colours)
from the previous and upcoming births
peeping at my body
like a rectangle 
which looked like a silent circle 
which looked like an introvert rhombus 
of 10 Billon currency notes
in Missionary Position, one above the other 
which looked like the people of the same gender sans gender
which looked like incoherent shouts 
“Hurry up, you’ll be programmed again!”