My heart cries. Hari “Master” C M, died on Sunday, October 18. He was 38. We met in 2014 at Hillhacks, then worked at HasGeek together in 2017-2018. He completed a Masters degree in Public Policy in August. And now he is gone from the planet.
Hari was an unexpected anchor in my life. Right now, in the shock and grief, I feel like a tent peg has come loose and the corner of my fly sheet is flapping in a Himalayan wind. I don’t know what Hari thought about the afterlife, but I am certain our souls will meet again in other incarnations. That is small comfort at the moment.
I am crushed that I won’t have the chance to make new memories with him. We often talked about him visiting Japan, joking that some day he would just turn up at our door unannounced, but he never managed to get here. I haven’t been to India since February 2019; it’s been seven years since Hari and I breathed the same air.
We kept up online. Our introspective conversations about life direction and self-knowledge were intermixed with levity and beauty. Our last interaction was in late August, my Instagram comment on one of his photos and his reply, “Fishermen are colourful people and so are their boats.”
Hari was one of a kind. He wore a mysterious smile and a relaxed attitude that was calm in the face of every drama. He was quiet but when he spoke, it was always cogent. He sometimes reminded me of my father in that way. I trusted him completely even though to many people he probably seemed pretty sketchy.
Losing technology was his trademark: his laptop took trips without him; his phone was constantly in peril. I can’t tell you the number of times I got a text from a new number, telling me he’d lost another phone. A running joke.
Hari was utterly brilliant at getting things done. He was at most two degrees of separation away from some useful person. Despite all obstacles, he was always able to implement plans. Hari received the assignment and then disappeared, occasionally with sightings of him doing something seemingly unrelated, until the 11th hour he arrived back in a flurry of autos and text messages and the task was done on time. He lost a few jobs because he was focussed on GSD instead of telling people what was going on. Communication wasn’t his style.
He was quiet and he was kind. He loved snacks. Sometimes he and Anish would slip out of the HasGeek office in the afternoon to get some street food and I would join them. So many cups of chai. Once he shared around a bag of spicy potato sticks made fresh at a place near his apartment. They were delicious. He remembered I liked them and brought me more a few days later. Looking back, I think he might have been behind the biscuits at Hillhacks, too.
He somehow always knew when I was hungry. One evening after work, we were hanging out in the HasGeek kitchen during a busy period when I was stressed and barely eating when he suddenly decided to try to make dosa. We did it together and though we may have been the least skillful dosa makers in all of Bangalore, the results were satisfying and nourishing.
Hari wasn’t afraid of much. Tod remembered that at one Hillhacks, very late in the evening, Hari saw a forest fire on the horizon. “Hey, I lost my lighter. Let’s go get a light at the fire over there” and off he went with friends in tow to check out the flames.
Hari was a wanderer in every way and he had an eye for hidden beauty. His social media is filled with photos of mountain vistas, campsites, friends, and everyday life in villages all around India. He ventured from his home in Kerala to the peaks of Kashmir. And now he’s farther beyond.
All hail the goer.
