By Pranisha Tamang
What even is instant? Instant noodles take five minutes. Instant soup? Fifteen. Instant dumplings thirty, if you’re lucky. So when they say instant death, do they mean five minutes? Ten? Or those last godforsaken five seconds the ones where your lungs claw not for breath, but for air, as if survival were something you could bargain for. But there’s nothing. No mercy. Just a sharp, dry panic that makes it feel like your insides are lined with sandpaper, every gasp grinding you down, grain by grain. They say at least it was painless, but what do they know of pain when the body is still fighting, when the heart is pounding like it’s begging the universe to hit pause, when the brain doesn’t go quiet, but lights up in terror. Tell me what is instant about the slow realization that this is the end? What is painless about the scream that never leaves your lips, the breath that never makes it home? No, death is never instant. It’s a slow, cruel poetry crammed into seconds a crescendo of fear, a silent gasp for more time from a body that already knows it’s too late.