Like everybody else in the same weight and height category, I use my credit card for shopping online. But why do these wonderful establishments that sell books, lawn mowers, hats, music systems, mobile phones, airline tickets, and holidays always ask that one unanswerable question when you put your card online?
Card number is fine, I can handle that. No problem with my name either. And then comes that startling question: Expiry Date?
Except for those condemned to the gallows, no one can answer that question with any certainty. “Keep next Tuesday free. I am being hanged for the murder of my neighbour, and I would like you to be there,” has a touch of both pathos and certainty. But for the rest of us, such certainty is impossible.
I am relatively young, relatively healthy, sleep well, eat carefully, avoid fatty foods, don’t smoke or sniff, and am barely on talking terms with anything stronger that comes out of a bottle than lime juice. I have fairly decent genes probably likely to keep me ticking for a while, and yet that startling question. Why do strangers want to know? In any case, none of us can make allowances for being run over by a taxi.
My instinctive reaction, therefore, is to say honestly, “I don’t know”, but there isn’t enough room there. It’s all very business-like. You can fit in eight digits. This is not enough to squeeze in the philosophical discussion the question calls for. Perhaps the digits can be made to represent something else — a code for a treatise on death. For example, the tenth day of August 2005 or, as you would say online, 10082015 might suggest the tenth chapter of the eighth book from pages two to 15. But which book, written by whom? Shakespeare or Agatha Christie, the two highest-selling authors? Both deal in the subject in their different ways, and if you searched hard enough, you would find the appropriate quote or essay or warning.
Death keeps no calendar, and even if it did, and shared it with us, it is like a private telephone number. Why announce it in such a public way? The Earl of Chesterfield, for instance, is quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson as saying, “Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years; but we don’t choose to have it known.” That seems like common sense.
There is a simple solution to the problem. Syntax — the Greek for ‘arrangement’. Instead of asking the expiry question immediately after asking your name, why not ask it after the one about the card number? I always feel a bit queasy as I key in 02/17 into the slot. I feel it gives me insufficient time to complete all those things I set out to do: bring in world peace, write that masterpiece, win the Nobel Prize, travel to the moon.
Marquez said a person does not die when he should, but when he can. I’d love to know how he answered the ‘expiry’ question.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
