Ghost Facebook profiles haunt long after a loved one dies

It happened before we could blink.

Last year, my beloved aunt was diagnosed with the most malignant form of brain tumour. Three months later, she was gone.

It’s hard to describe what Manisha Bhattacharya, a celebrated ceramic artist, meant to us. She was loving and she was fierce, the kind of firebrand who lived in the most generous way, never to be pushed around, but always to be relied on.

Her leaving us was not something that could be faced. At least not in the literal term. I expected her to casually walk into home again, her long earrings dangling. I expected her messages to pop up under my photographs, I expected her to be seated at the dining table. It was a strange sort of mishmash existence without her.

Some of us seemed to have instantly become small children again, with faces scrunched up in pain: why do people die? No, she can’t be dead! We were prepared to face every adult task: Excel sheets, bills, setting the table, calling people over, Skype calls, doing anything, busy like ants, purposely overbusy; just to avoid facing the finality of it all. It was, and still is, unfaceable.

And then, suddenly, a few weeks later, a Facebook notification bleeped red on my profile. "Manisha Bhattacharya wants you to like this page." It was the first thing I saw in the morning. My eyes were heavy with sleep, my mind befuddled. Time stood still. Oh, she wants me to like this, I told myself happily, with the sort of mutual indulgence I reserved for her.

And then, I remembered.

She was gone, utterly so. It was not her sending me that thought, it was just a dumb algorithm. I shot out of bed, seized by livid anger. How dare Facebook do this to me? How dare they play with feelings of people, of people who are barely recovering from losing those they have loved, how dare they do this for their pedestrian networking? How dare they? How dare they!

I was reminded instantly of my life insurance policy. I get premium notices for my policy, and these guys are supposed to care about me living. Their letters to me are marked with sir/ madam. It is rich irony that even life insurance schemes don’t have databases which know if I am male or female. It’s all one big churning machine and we are just side-stories in it, no matter how sensitive the issue.

I spent my entire day being upset. We use Facebook and social media as we want, but think little of how it tries to use us. How it tries to influence our thoughts, our actions, and ultimately, our behaviour. If I was to have a Rage Against the Machine moment, then this was it.

Weeks later, perhaps with the further need to "do" something, I wrote a post on my aunt’s Facebook wall. I said she was like an open drawer in my mind, spilling memories, mementos, bric-a-brac, and perfume. Many others also posted messages, hoping they would reach her, or maybe we were just trying to satisfy our urge to feel like she was listening.

"I thought of you today," said one friend. "I saw this picture and thought you would have liked it." "I heard this snatch of melody and it reminded me of you," said another. "I know you are with us," said many other posts. There were hundreds of us on her page, all second-guessing what she would have thought and said, and how she would laughed. Her page had transformed into a monument.

Months later, Facebook sent me yet another notification. "It is Manisha’s birthday today. Send her good thoughts."

Sadly, uselessly, I remembered my childhood. A bearded old man, sitting in my drawing room. "Tum jiyo hazaaron saal," (may you live a thousand years) he said to me, on my December birthday. "But I don’t want to be a thousand years", my pigtailed eight-year-old self said indignantly back to him. "Everyone I know, and Tommy (my dog) will be dead by then."

****

This year, another beloved person passed away, also to cancer. Rauf Ali, a celebrated, irreverent ecologist, one who joked about having survived malaria a record 37 times, passed this April, just a few days after being diagnosed with cancer. Fittingly perhaps, he went on April Fool’s Day.

Some of us actually thought it was an April Fool’s joke from the old bugger. Not knowing where to post our thoughts — should we write letters with no addresses? Should we write on a slate and then wipe it off? Should we write Word documents and save them in draft folders? Many of us wrote on his Facebook wall, and sent him emails.

Shortly after, someone decommissioned his Facebook page. Maybe I prefer it that way. I don’t know. The nature of social media has turned into one of excessive, almost manufactured sharing. Sharing can be caring, but the performative nature of "RIPs" and "We Love Yous" sometimes takes away the essence of nuance and personal meaning. Sometimes, we can find nothing to say at all but the outpouring of communal emotion on social media forces reluctant words out of us.

Rauf, or Raufie as I called him, was a force of nature. He lived on his own terms, and lived king size. He scoffed at social media, though he used it. He was very much a one-on-one sort of person. And we spoke very often.

This morning, I was on Skype, after a long gap. While scrolling down my contact lists, I saw there were two messages from Rauf, and the last one I had missed, having a sort of scorn for Skype myself. The Skype profile had missed being decommissioned. The first message was on Diwali last year.

"Get yourself a driver. Don't drive on pavements. Else, get yourself lawyers who represent blackbuck poachers" was his sage advice to me, asking me to not drive after drinking, and making a Salman Khan joke.

The second message leaves me speechless. After many failed, cross-city attempts to meet — both of us had crazy schedules — he had written on New Year's Eve: "Bye....off to get drunk! Hope I see you in the coming year!"

The year has passed and Raufie is gone. How strange that all that remain are words on ghost profiles.