quarter

Twelve weeks. Next Thursday it will be one quarter of a year.

Death is like a crazy inversion of birth: a mockery of it. I talk about weeks the way I did after my son was born, recording every new sensation at small intervals; everything seems more important. I am more acutely sensitive in the early days and more inured to newness and sensation as the months go by.There's also the feeling that this acuteness of observation must be held on to because it won't happen again like this. Later will be too late.

*

The care that people need soon after birth and as they approach death is the same: the body needs other hands, is not yet or no longer self-sufficient. The more attention you lavish on these bodies, the more you feel loved and the more love you are capable of feeling. The difference is that while such love matures and grows immense as a child grows, the moment a person dies, there is nowhere to put the love you have cultivated through the last days. Sorrow must be love’s sad face.

Just as the navel is a mark of what is lost, death must leave its own scars but on whom and where?

(Grave. Graven. Engraved. Gravestone.)

The Sleeve of Care

"You'll find yourself sleeping a lot," a friend said a few weeks ago. "You should just sleep and not feel guilty about it."

My problem was quite the reverse; I couldn't sleep at all and I refused to take sleeping tablets (not that anyone was prescribing them to me officially). So I forgot about what she'd said.

More recently, all I want to do is sleep. I sleep large chunks of the afternoon away and when I miss calls and have to return them, I sheepishly say, "My battery ran out", or "I left my phone in my bag and I couldn't hear it." Last night a friend called at 9.30pm. Not late. But I had already been asleep for an hour an a half, helped along by no electricity at home and a lulling breeze outside.

I look forward to weekends, when I don't have to wake up at 5am, with the eagerness of someone waiting for an advance copy of her book. Traditionally Mondays are supposed to be the worst; for me, it's Wednesday and Thursday (for other reasons as well) because that's when 'returning were as tedious as going o'er'. Then I remember that only one way is always open and that the next minute hour day week and then I can't bear to think any further.

One baby step at a time.

What if I slept it all away and the steps have been taken and I don't have the burden of remembering? That's called sleepwalking. That's what I would like to do, what I am doing but because I know it's what I'm doing as I'm doing it, it's no help at all. It's like the kind of sleep when I know I'm dreaming and I wake up exhausted with the effort of it. In fact, the worst part of falling asleep is the waking up when the Things To Do list act as my alarm clock at odd hours of the night (and in my case, day). When this happens, I jump out of bed because I'm falling behind with the things that need to be done, bump into several things and panic.

Did you ever dream of a day when you could sleep from whenever to whenever, without having to do a single thing you didn't want to? I do. All the time.

Another Word You Know

Like a word that you didn't know, but once you do it follows you everywhere, this one stalks me.

Reginald Shepherd. David Foster Wallace. The 22 (and perhaps more) in Delhi. The poet's daughter who jumped from the eighth floor. I see it everywhere, even - like the man in the ad - when it is only one half of another word: knell, throes, mega, little, sudden.

(no subject)

There so much I shouldn't say. There's so much I want to say.

*

Things, for instance. Back when I was married and the house revealed shrines in unexpected places - whole cupboards with a dead man's clothes, suitcases filled with negatives and yellowing scripts (we're talking in plurals here; I'm aware of it), gas and electricity bills that still came in the name of someone who was no longer there - I wondered what this was about. Rain came and they said, "that's Bapu." They were not talking about M.K.Gandhi.

It has taken me a dozen years to come to the understanding of that time. If they discarded every object associated with a beloved one, where are the aids to memory?

Already I remember so little. If I throw away tear up fill up forms in triplicate to request mutations, will I have only a few photographs left to look at? How can I take responsibility for that second erasure?

driving tips

I am the champion of driving while crying. I know. I've been doing it for years and I haven't had an accident yet. Which is not to say it won't happen, but there's a skill to it and I have it all figured out.

First, keep tissues handy. If no tissues are to hand, be prepared to use your sleeve or anything else that's available. If you wear specs, try not to blink. You're likely to transfer the tears from your lashes to the glass and you won't be able to see. Practice driving with your specs off. You might not see very much, but then you won't see much through tears anyway. At traffic lights, feel free to shed more copious tears than while moving. Merely as a matter of observation, notice how those around you respond. Beggars will move away, cyclists and motorcyclists will avoid squeezing in through the narrow gap between your car and the next one. Nobody will honk. You are allowed to take your time when you least want more of it.

While moving, make good use of your nails to remind yourself that what you are doing is not a good idea. You would avoid it if you could, so show that you're doing what you can.

Learn your way around. Lose your way. It doesn't matter. Drive in the slow lane. Stop. Notice how it doesn't help, because just as the tears stop when you do, so do they start again when the car does. Distract yourself for a while with the connection between tear ducts and ignitions. Smile. Watch pedestrians give you curious glances. Look at yourself in the mirror.

Angle the side view mirror so you can see yourself. Remind yourself of how difficult it is to really laugh while looking at your reflection and hope the tactic works in this situation. When it does, allow yourself some self-pity for how changeable you are, how easily distracted.

Cry. Drive. Repeat.

Letters to other people

"Was he creative?" my friend asks, looking at the photographs on the wall. There's something strange at work here that I find interesting only now. I 'took' those five photographs of my father that are on the wall. Four of them from fourteen years ago; the last one, where he's holding my son and laughing, head thrown back, seven and a half years ago. All are black and white and though nobody else has noticed, I know that two of them have been flipped. It's easy to tell with the ones where my parents are on the swing: they have their positions reversed.

It's interesting because the printer seems to have looked at the ancient negative from the other side and not even I realised until much later. Looking at those five photographs gives me a strange sense of unease; as if I have deliberately falsified this man in it, said something about him that was true and yet not right. There's been a sleight of hand here.

"Was your father creative?"

I answer by saying other things about him. None of them are offshoots of the word 'creative.'

With a slight sense of panic I realise that there's very little to go on. Very few photographs; none that I can bear to look at from the last three years. And letters to other people.

I left home to go to boarding school when I was 12. That means the father I knew was the one who wrote me letters. When I was 10 and going through a premature adolescence, I locked myself in my room and he slipped letters to me under the door. I don't know what they said, but they must have charmed me out of my sulks.

'Charmed' is the wrong word. My father was more solid than that.

In school, when others got one letter every ten days or so, I got two letters a week. One from my mother and one from my father. I was the object of everyone's envy. Then there were all those other years when I studied in different cities, got married and never returned home except for holidays. All those years of letters and nothing to show for it.

Because I don't keep any letters. I tear them up, sometimes after a few years, but I tear them all up. No exceptions. Especially not letters that came regular as clockwork, spoke of routine things at home with the customary questions. I don't remember if I even answered as frequently as I used to.

When I returned, those letters stopped. Instead, I took on secretarial duties. He would write the letters out longhand and I would type and print them out. "One plus one" he'd say. "Two plus one".

"Why can't you just say you want three copies? What is this 'two plus one'?"

To, The Commissioner, GHMC. Sub:

To, _______, The HMWSSB. Sub:

To, _______, Sub:

Sometime in May, sitting around the table after lunch, one conversation set my father off on some tangent that led him to the airing of some long-nourished grievances. Having worked himself up into a frenzy, he claimed he could show us proof: letters he had hoarded that would demonstrate someone's perfidy. These stories were decades old. My mother and I looked at each other in dismay.

A few days later, my father, unable to do the climb of one flight of stairs, decided to shift his things downstairs. I found him sitting on the floor, tearing up what looked like letters, but came out of a file. He would take one out, read it briefly, tear it up into tiny bits and throw them in a plastic bag.

"These are those letters. I decided not keep them anymore."

One and a half months later, he was gone. There are no diaries, no journals, no private letters. Not even an anniversary or a birthday card. Not even the letter I wrote to him on his 69th birthday, a long one that turned out to be other than the carefully composed manuscript I had been working on because we had had a fight the night before. He read that one early in the morning and cried. As he had the year before, when he read the poem I had written for him, by hand, on a scroll-length piece of paper.

I feel envious. He left nothing except those official letters and numerous small pieces of paper with practical notes pinned on to files.

"Was he creative, your father?"

He wrote like an angel, I should have said. That would be a typical piece of misdirection, like those photographs that are reversed on the wall.

In Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, the dead sister's book is received with high praise. She wrote like an angel, people said. But she didn't write any of it; the narrator did. The dead sister kept a diary with brief, cryptic notes, numbers, practical things. Like angels who keep ledgers, marking off who goes where and who deserves what. She wrote like an angel.

He wrote like an angel.