The performing animal left the circus on June 25, 2009 but  we continue to anoint his remains, repair the broken halo and embroider a velvet shroud to celebrate him. He, who in his lifetime was first built and then taken apart in a bloody arena for all the world to see. What is it with fame? What is it with us that at some point we start believing that we are bigger than those we worship? That they owe us something more than their work? That it is somehow alright to destroy the very things we have loved?

I remember watching the 1984 Grammy Awards at my aunt’s Cantonment bungalow in Kanpur. I did not know who Michael Jackson was but then there he was. The moment he rose to grab the opening moments of Beat It, I felt something that I have felt everytime I have connected with a new hero in my Pantheon.  That it was meant to be. I had felt something like that when I heard the first strains of Kal Chaudavi ki Raat Thi by Jagjit Singh. When as a child, I claimed all of RD Burman’s hits as mine and never let go. Or when I heard my father reciting Faiz and Sahir for the first time and fell in love with Urdu poetry.

Still it is hard to describe what it was like to see an MJ video for the very first time in your teens. What you connected with was beyond the charismatic boy-man you saw gliding across the floor. Beyond his showmanship, his clothes, the childlike innocence that could in an instant become dangerously sensual like his voice. It was like stepping in a magnetic field that took hold of you and your heartbeat for a few minutes. It was like being branded and being told, “Thou shalt always love Michael.” And so I did. I collected small booklets about him that came with Sun, a  short lived pop music tabloid. I collected his music that came in T-Series cassettes imprinted incongruously with numerous chants of Jai Mata Di.

After his death, I revisited on YouTube, that charmed Grammy evening when a shy, centered, soft-spoken boy got up time and again to collect trophy after trophy, curiously detached from the hysteria that erupted every time he opened his mouth to speak. He was so together or was he? I remember reading in Sun how erratic his behaviour was getting and how sometimes he would screen even friends like Lionel Ritchie before letting them in his ranch. The darkness was gathering, in his videos, his music, his life.

I actually wrote a two page letter to MJ in the dead of the night, trying to comfort him and to make him believe in something that was disintegrating around him. How this beautiful, sunny boy who had access to everything in the world ended up as deformed joke is hard to tell. What is clear that he was always expected to perform for a hungry audience that was either mindlessly hysterical or cruelly derisive. From the time he was five to the day he was carried out in a casket from his home in a ceremonious procession. 

And he left with a flourish like a true performer. While watching This Is It and the recorded footage of the last few days of his life, weren’t we surprised? That the one up there, in the spotlight for the last time was not a manifestation of a bizarre Paparazzi dream? That his nose did not fall off? That he could still dance and sing, oh yes, he could? That he was, in the ultimate analysis, beyond our perception of him, good, bad or ugly?

Watching Michael Jackson’s last bravura turn in This is It was like moving away from all the noise, cacophony and cat calls that followed him in his last years and from everything that diminished him. It was like being in the presence of what is ultimately the purest and the most inviolable thing in the world. A man’s ability to create something in the likeness of what is best in him.  And we saw what it is like to be in the presence of pure genius and a brotherhood of guitar chords, impossible dance moves, passion for perfection and love for a music that cannot be tainted no matter what anyone can say or do against the man who created it.

And the man himself?

You strained your ears to catch his gentle words as he spoke to an unknown girl playing the guitar like the ghost of Eddie Van Halen,“Strike your highest note here. This is your moment to shine. And we will be right there with you.”

You watched his audience of young, awestruck dancers who cheered him from the stands as they watched his every move and consumed everything he did with his voice and his body. At the end of a high octave note, you heard him say ruefully, “God bless you. I love you but you should not be making me do this. I need to conserve my voice (for the show).”

You saw clearly that he was not the one singing a song, he was the song. When he danced, you could hear the song inside his body. Every chord, every beat, every thrum. His musicians would agree because one of them said that it was impossible to fool him because he knew all his songs, all his chords, all his notations. So he went, “There is no extra bar here.” And you heard him say to another musician, “Don’t hurry this. Don’t go from here to there so fast. Keep it simple. Bathe in the moonlight. Let it simmer.”

And the bonding MJ shared with everyone. Once peeved by wrong decibels, he says without raising his voice, “I know you mean well but I can’t hear anything. Its  like someone’s fist is shoved down my ear. But I mean this in love. L.O.V.E. ”

Or when he jams Billie Jean till everyone in the house is on their feet, cheering and Kenny Ortega walks onto the stage to say, “This is a church. The church of Rock n Roll.”

Or when the team holds hands to remember and share why they are doing this show and MJ says, “This is an adventure. There is nothing to be afraid of. We must take the audience to places they have never been. And we must remember that we are doing this for love. Love for our audience and the earth. We must fix what is wrong with our planet before it is too late.”

And this movie was not meant for public consumption so this was no PR exercise. In retrospect, we can understand why he did not understand the media’s obsession with his shifting cheek bones when Amazonian forests, the size of a football field are being destroyed every minute and four years down the line, we won’t have anything left to fight for.

Yes, he was accountable to himself but who is accountable for what happened to him?  Like Lisa Marie Presley said last year to Oprah Winfrey, “I had to leave when the doctors and the vampires moved in.”  He also told her years before his death that he would die like her father. Helplessly dependent on drugs and alone if not physically, then in his head.

We gave Michael Jackson everything except the right to his own sense of self. It was all decided for him. He was the child prodigy at first. Then the breakout black superstar. Then the King of Pop. Then a villain. Then a joker. Then a victim. And finally a tragic hero. As of it matters to him now. The dead don’t care how much we care for them in retrospect.

Weeks after his death, my son who mocks my “antique music collection” and finds anything even with a whiff of overwrought emotion “cheesy, ”  tried to moonwalk and said, “He was so innocent. What happened to him? Did he sell his soul or something?”

I don’t think, MJ sold his soul. He just cut it in little pieces and made songs out of them. So as my son said, “RIP MJ. Sleep well now.” Yes, sleep well Michael Joseph Jackson because the worst is over.  

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )