Snow in July
On absurdity and the illusion of next weekend
I saw him smiling at me through the photograph —those knowing eyes, as if he understood what I was up to and was quietly assessing it in his head. I assumed we would speak over the weekend. He would offer a comment or two on my writing. He would ask about Sahil.
Life felt cut off mid-sentence.
A few months earlier, my father-in-law had been vacationing in Bylakuppe, Mysore. My mother-in-law still speaks of that trip as if it were yesterday. Then came the heart attack. The surgery. The optimism. The recovery. And finally, pneumonia—almost a narrative footnote—ended the entire arc.
There is something disproportionate about that.
We are taught to walk through life poised, responsible, collected. We do our duties. We make plans. We recover from setbacks. We believe, perhaps unconsciously, that effort and meaning create a kind of cocoon around us.
And then astronomical collisions occur.
Snow in July.
It is not grief alone that unsettles me. It is absurdity.
The clash between the stories we expect and the way the body actually fails. The way a tangential illness can undo a heroic recovery. The way next weekend simply does not materialize.
Thirty-five years after reading him in graduate school, Albert Camus finally makes sense to me. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he writes about the absurd—the confrontation between our longing for coherence and the world’s indifference.
The absurd is not drama. It is the fracture between expectation and reality.
It is the boulder rolling down after you thought you had reached the summit.
In that instant, all the lessons of spirituality seemed to stand politely on the sidelines while I found myself on the other side of the road, blinking. I still believe life is imperfectly perfect. I do not feel less spiritual or less optimistic. But there was an electrified pause in being and believing—a brief dislocation between understanding impermanence and encountering it mid-conversation.
Perhaps writing is my way of making sense of that pause.
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It could be anyone.
Perhaps the absurd reveals not that life lacks meaning, but that meaning does not come with any guarantees. None whatsoever.
And yet, something else remains steady.
Beneath the rise and fall of events, there is a quiet awareness that is not undone by them.
My father-in-law met what came—travel, surgery, recovery—with optimism and composure. The ending may have been abrupt, but the way he lived and the life he shared with his family were not.
Perhaps the only revolt against absurdity is not control, but character—the way we meet what comes.
The boulder does not roll back because we are foolish. It rolls because gravity exists. It just is.
And yet, we rise, we love, we plan, we write.
Not because life is guaranteed.
But because it is ours while it is here—and because we are called to give it meaning while we can.
Meaningfully yours,
Anu Prabhala