The Bogey Men

The One in the Photograph

That you could use up
someone's life
by sucking it out
through the lens.

they may live forever
on your film,
which might be just as well

because soon you'll need
something to remember them by.


The One on the Page

Who absorbs with the ink
every characteristic of your loved one
until a point when both
are equally corporeal.

This is where you should stop
recording a life
if you want it to continue.


The One Who Walks Always Beside You

You can do nothing about.

The breath of life

Between 19th May 2008 and 3rd June 2008.

There was an oxygen cylinder. I am almost certain there was. I remember because on S's birthday on the 2nd, Appa said he felt better after an hour of oxygen.

But these last few days, I haven't been sure because, if he was already on oxygen in late-May/early-June, why did the doctor not discharge him the second time until we had the oxygen sorted out at home? I've looked through medical records but I can't find the receipts from the oxygen supplier. I realise that while I've made and kept copies of discharge summaries and prescriptions, I haven't kept copies of any receipts. The first time I realised I ought to have was after I sent off the insurance claims and saw someone else at the xerox shop making assiduous copies of every bill and scribble.

I can't know for certain but I know for sure - to borrow Paromita's phrase - that there was oxygen. There was also, and about this I am certain, the antibiotic respules he had to take. Two years ago Dr. S had said that was the last resort. If I knew last year, as he prescribed it, that we had arrived at the last resort before the final long-haul of the desert, I had pushed the knowledge back behind hope.

Appa's cupboard tells me what he did those last two weeks but not how much time it took to do it:

An hour of oxygen in the morning and an hour in the evening and as required.
Two puffs of two inhalers twice a day (one of these three times a day).
Nebuliser twice a day. Each nebulisation for 15 minutes
followed by the antibiotic through the nebuliser for half and hour each time twice a day.

For the last time in those weeks, Appa went upstairs. He cleared out his cupboard, rearranged his papers (tore bitter letters and kept one photograph of his parents) and came down for the last time. Did he look a farewell out the window by his side of the bed? At the photographs, the terrace, my room and the view outside it that they wanted me to have when they built the house? Did he, in fact, know it was the last time?

Frankly, I don't think he cared. Not about these things.

The photograph on S's birthday has us sitting on the front door steps, Appa on the right of frame, Amma on the right and S and I in the middle. Appa has deep circles under his eyes. There are two white spots pinching at the side his nose as if he wore wireframed spectacles in the heat (but he didn't; this must have been something else). His smile is the kind some people have ready for photographs that other people take: a tentative stretch of the lips unmatched by the wathfulness of the eyes. As has become usual, one shoulder is higher than the other. This is the last photograph.

I am not and never was a diagnostician. But now, even I can see things that were there.

A Year Ago: Part I

Using Google, i find that the 17th of May 2008 was a Saturday. Is that possible? I suppose it is, because only the second Saturday of the month is a government holiday. I need to know this to remember last year because I was speaking to several govt. officials this day last year.

Last year, the mango tree in our garden had an unusually large number of fruits. The photos are up on my blog; people had groaned at the temptation they were unable to act upon. Udit was there. The kid, Satyanarayana, Udit and I filled up two huge cane baskets - the kind in which mangoes are transported - and there were still more we hadn't plucked. I think we plucked 300 or more mangoes. This year, we had four to begin with and then one fell, half-eaten or rotten; I can't remember which. 'And then there were three', I say to myself, every time I go out the gate and glance at the tree.

There was also the smell of burning leaves. We had fought logn and hard, and constantly to get our neighbours to stop burning the leaves that dropped from the trees on the road or in their houses. Why wouldn't they use it for mulch? But the street sweepers that day had piled up the lot (we hadn't paid them their tea money) under an almost-dry tree and burnt the leaves. The smoke drifted into my room. From the next one, I heard Appa coughing. It might not have been because of the burning leaves, but it certainly aggravated his cough.

I called the Municipal Commissioner. He said to send him a mail. I was mailing govt. officials, making lunch and plucking mangoes. Amma was in Chennai.

Nearing lunch, Appa - who had spent the morning opening the water valve, watering the garden, making coffee and doing what amounted to endless paperwork - went for his bath. In minutes he came out saying he had passed black stools (a sign of internal bleeding).

I don't know that I had a first thought followed by a second then a third. There were things to be done and I did them: did Appa have money? Had we taken the files? Insurance papers? I told Sayanarayana we had to leave. And the maid. I was thankful that Udit was there to be with the kid. How would I have taken a seven year old to the hospital?

I always drive recklessly in such an emergency. I think of the time saved, the bleeding stopped the life held.

Playing it back, I notice Appa had stopped pressing an imaginary clutch or brake. He didn't even clutch his hands. It was I mouthing prayers. We didn't speak.

The Emergency Room is called Casualty. I had already called Dr. DK. He said he'd be there and to let him know when we arrive.

Outside the Endoscopy room, I sign the release forms. Appa lies down, is able to talk, explain. Dr. DK, with the mask around his face, listens. I sit outside with the files, the water bottle and his footwear under my chair. I watch the monitor anxiously. If there's bleeding I can't see it but even after all this time, what do I know?

Dr. DK comes out. He says we have to admit Appa for observation; that though there was no obvious blleding from the oesophagus, if there were black stools, we need to find out where it came from. He says Appa will be taken back to Casualty until I complete admission formalities.

Ten minutes later, I notice a lot of nurses in the Endoscopy room. Appa seems reluctant or unable to get up. I worry. I find out he's been sedated because the doc thought he could do without the pain. But the nurse is shaking him awake, saying, 'Swamiji! Get up!"

I am furious. Now it seems to me it is the Head Nurse on the Fourth Floor with whom we will have so much trouble, but of course that is not possible. I have cut and pasted a different face on this nurse because of how she behaved.

Instead of having him get up, they wheel him out into Casualty. I get him admitted, asking for a single room but being told I should take what I can get (he gets a single room). We have to wait for him to come out of sedation, get an X-Ray before we go up. I wait. I call. In a few minutes when consciousness returns, Appa's speech is blurred. This makes me want to cry. He has never been less than fully conscious. I stroke his hand wishing Amma were here.

X-Ray done, we're in the room. Amma flew in from Chennai, went home for a few things and came to the hospital to stay for the night. Appa was there for three days. They never found out what caused th ebleeding but the did a CT Scan which told the doctors more than they told us that time.

Nobody else came. As we went back home with the discharge summary and a review in two weeks after tests, we assumed it was a false alarm like so many others in the last few years. I recalled that it was in alternate years that Appa landed in hospital; that he had escaped a hospitalisation in 2007 and so this was just a delayed, unspotted bleeder from the varices.

Nothing to worry, Appa said. We repeated this to family and ourselves. I didn't even begin writing out the insurance claim for a week. We had the kid's upcoming birthday to think about. I was thankful that Udit seemed like family enough that he could stay with us, hold the fort in emergencies. I even looked forward to him returning in early June. Appa said to him, you are the child's father. He needs you. Please come often. Did he cry that time or later?

We packed the mangoes in cartons in layers, with newspapers. Appa could not sit and get up like he used to be able to. I did it all and listened to him being annoyed when I was too tired to check every day and rearrange them so the ripening ones were on top. The downstairs room reeked of raw mangoes.

The Beginning of the End

Quicksand: this is what memory amounts to.

I thought the 14th of this month was the day the end began but I was wrong. I see now that it is the 17th.

How much do I really remember of what happened? How much does one re-form while piecing together? What falls between the unmending cracks?

I'm going to try and find out.

third quarter

it's a relief to find everyone has gone and i am talking to myself. perhaps this was how it should have been from the very first.

the year was drawn and has been quartered. we find ourselves entering the last one. there are too many rooms. we who are left could have one each could pass our days never seeing each other. we are already like that: hardly talking, each in our own time perilin and the many-coloured death, needing the other but surviving alone.

there are scabs in my memory. did my grandparents leave, never to return, after my wedding? why does my father's cupboard have a photo album of my grandparents at my taladeepavali? did they come back? was everything forgiven? who here is still lying? what is the objective measure of memory?

i have lost the will to pick at these wounds. i know i should because the illness has only retreated temporarily. i need to dig deeper search harder look inside but i am afraid i won't recognise it when i find it will move on and i will become incomplete.

Dream (2)

Early this morning. Just before waking, I dreamt of a stool propped up against a number of heavy, blue-gray fuse boxes. My father was opening each box and checking the fuses. I watched from below, anxious about how rickety the stool was, worried he would fall. He found one that he didn't put back immediately. "This is the one," he said and half-turned. I held on to the stool that swayed. Lights came on in all the fuse boxes that now somehow stood open, making a line of orange-yellow. And beyond - by which I mean to the right of- the one in his hand, all was dark.

"This is the one that changed everything," he said.

The boxes were propped against the gate. Beyond that lay a pile of stones and rubble. He was no longer on the stool and we could no longer leave.

Only, of course, it wasn't all clear like that because I woke up.

Au Revoir

Sometimes I think the reason I don't post here any more is because I'm recovering. Sometimes I can't bear to examine anything. I'd rather just let things go, let one day do its work and get it over with.

Some days, like the last three weeks, I think I should see a shrink. Or acknowledge that I have never, not even during my divorce, been closer to a mental breakdown. No, perhaps that's not right: there was that one time six year ago when I woke up in the morning and started to cry and couldn't stop and a friend who found I wasn't taking any calls left work early to come and straighten me out.

So this is why I don't post here any more. At least, this is my reason today. Nothing I think makes any sense. Saying it aloud doesn't impose any sense. Things just go round and round in my head and it's a big enough effort to go through each day as if everything were normal.

I really just want to lie low and hope that nothing and no one will know I'm there and some day I can find I've got off the seesaw for good.

diwali

So this is what the first major festival without looks like.

No waking up at the crack of dawn, none of the usual frenzy before sunrise, no somnolent mid-mornings, no phone calls, no home-made sweets.

It should be - in an appalling way, it is - a relief. We have a ready-made excuse to not celebrate a very exhausting festival.

It is also useless to ask why it makes me feel so terrible when the day has gone exactly like I've wished a thousand times it would be. As if I didn't know why. Instead, I think of how my mother, every year, warned my father a month in advance that she would not be making stuff at home; how, two weeks before he would persuade her to at least make a payasam or therati paal ('for the kid. Paavam, he likes therati paal'). How it would start with that one concession and end with two namkeens, three sweets and a jar of leghiyam that would last a whole year.

It's not that we aren't celebrating stuff because we're not supposed to. We just don't want to. I can see this lack of enthusiasm extending well into the future - I've personally never been a big one for festivals. But my parents had always wanted to do things so that my son at least knew what it was all about. I used to think it was for him; that it would be my son's absence that would take away the enthusiasm. Now I'm wondering if it wasn't my father's craving for the festival specials that made my mother do everything with such dedication year after year; whether, with him gone, she could ever find it in her again to celebrate something like that.

Moth

In the early days, we kept a light on in the bedroom downstairs. It was a zero watt bulb we had originally put in for my grandfather when he used to visit because he needed it to see by when he went to the bathroom. We never took it out, though we never used it again until that time.

I have been first down in the morning for some time now, to make the coffee and school lunch. For as long as that zero watt light was on, my eye was drawn to that room first thing in the morning. That was when I would really wake up: with the shock of knowing that the light signified an absence the room didn't yet feel.

On one of those mornings I noticed a moth on the wall just below the light. It was a huge moth, with a large wingspan and touches of purple in the grey-brown. I went to get a broom in which to catch it and let it out.

The broom was a new one, soft and sizeable. I parted it in the middle and reached for the moth. Holding it close, I thought, 'that was easy!' Near the door, I turned to check that I had indeed caught the moth. I hadn't; it was on another wall, half-hidden by the still-drawn curtains. I shook the broom loose of I don't know what and went back. I drew back all the curtains.

If I gave the moth a light whack, it would fall down stunned and I could pick it up gently, I thought. I swiped; the moth fluttered away. I whacked at it; it flew higher. I climbed on the empty bed and hit the wall where the moth was...had been. Its flight grew more frantic and irregular: it smashed itself against the light, the window; it came at me, swerved away. It looked like a small bat in that half-light.

While it was somewhere in the air, I hit at it repeatedly, blindly, hitting myself in the forearm from time to time with the broom's handle. The moth disintegrated. Moth dust flew in the air and I breathed it in because I was breathing hard now and almost sobbing. I no longer wanted only to gather the moth and deliver it to the morning air. I wanted to destroy it.

The moth was nowhere. For something that large, that dark that visible against the walls, it had completely disappeared. I turned all the lights on in the bedroom, the dining room and the kitchen. Even in the bathroom. I looked behind every curtain, shook each one. I checked each wall carefully, section by section, as I would look for a pen in the clutter on my desk, certain it was there but I was just not seeing it. Finally, I started to pull chairs away from the wall to check behind them. I knelt to check under the bed.

There it was. At the very centre under the double bed, the moth lay, smaller than it had been. I lay on the cool floor, warm with exertion and watched it as it made a half-circle and lay still. Then I heard it.

I never knew until that moment that moths make sounds. It was a high squeak, but not like that of bandicoots heard in the dark; not like other night sounds. But it was a sound all the same and it came from under that bed.

I swiped under with the broom but it was just out of reach. I shifted the broom so I was holding only the very edge of it and tried again but only managed to push the moth further away from me. I got up and went to the other side. This time I swept it out. It lay on the floor, tattered but still recognisably a moth. Like the very first time, I parted the broom to scoop it up. The moth heaved itself off the floor and flew with heavy wings - isn't that strange? It had lost so much of its wing, but the flapping was slow and weary, as if the weight of wings was too much for it to bear.

It flew past. I was slow also, and I watched it go. I was ready to just let it be, just die in peace in some corner of the room. It wasn't going to chew the curtains through in its current state. What did I want to kill it for, anyway? Against the growing light outside the window, the room became a little smaller, the lights a little more unnecessary. I turned them off. Room by room, I turned off every light and came back to lie down on the bed. Standing at the foot of the bed, though, I saw, backlit by the window, small bits of moth-wing, still drifting down. I couldn't see it, but the bed must already have been layered with flakes that were no longer brown or purple or any colour at all. I felt the breath rattle in my throat. There were other things to do.

Later, we found the moth under the fridge, still alive. We took it out and left it on the steps. It still made half-hearted half-circles. I could not watch any more. Still later, in my room, I took out Primo Levi's Other People's Trades and read his essay on the butterfly.

What I feel today is still a burden of guilt. In my mind, the moth and the light we kept on to illuminate someone's death are inextricably linked. Why did we do it? Why did I do it?

all this long silence...

...only means that I am carefully avoiding picking at scabs.

Much too late for a ban

From today on, cigarette smoking is banned in public places. This includes roads, railways stations, airports, restaurants (that seat less than 30 guests) and pubs.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

My father worked for a cigarette company for 14 years. He moved to Hyderabad in 1970 to take up the job and he stepped across some line then. Suddenly, his life was something he could never have imagined; it must have a been a culture shock but he took it well. He started smoking because cigarettes were, naturally, freely available. When he returned home from work and I buried my head in his neck, it was the cigarette smell that signalled appa.

People like us - the families of those who worked in cigarette companies - were the last to know about the health risks. Perhaps we were just the last to heed it. It was only because my mother and I stood so often on that line that divided us from the rest of the family and wathced life from both sides that we didn't start smoking; so many women in our circle did.

So my father smoked a few then a pack and then two packs a day. There were always ashtrays. I broke one when I was little and its pair is a reminder of the other one. I think the one I broke was a peachy-pink. It was solid glass, oval but pinched in the middle for cigarettes to rest in.

It wasn't until the late '80s that we began to see changes in my father that were definitely linked to smoking. The cough, for one. Mornings would begin with that. During vacations, I would wake up with that hacking cough that came from deep inside, as if his insides were trying to turn themselves out. I would lie rigid in bed, waiting for the fit to pass. (These days, I lie in bed rigid and waiting for a cough that we will never again hear.)

Once, mymother wrote me a letter in college. She began by talking about regular things. I turned a page and she said, "Don't be alarmed but - " Whatever she said to me, it was clear she was not just alarmed, she was very worried. It appeared that my father had, a couple of time, had such bad coughing fits that he couldn't breathe and had fainted. I was frantic with worry. I called my father andhe reassured me, listen to me ranting and promised to quit.

It was a promise he was to make several times in the years that followed. It was from him that I learnt all the vain braggadacio of smokers: I can quit whenever I want. I am not really addicted; I smoke because I enjoy it. I'm smoking much less than I used to. I swear. I smoke only four or five cigarettes a day.

Then the sincere attempt, the withdrawal symptoms, that irritability, the lighters discarded, the ashtrays put away, and inevitably the slide back.

I can't remember when my father stopped smoking in the house. He took his lighter to the terrace/balcony and kept a lighter somewhere where we couldn't see it. It looked as if no one in the house smoked. On rainy days, though, he would stand at the window with his mouth at the grill and blow the smoke out. My mother would fume and fine some excuse to pick a fight with him about something else.

Even after his major illness was diagnosed, he continued to smoke. It wasn't until he was rushed to hospital with internal bleeding caused by excessive coughing a couple of years ago that my father finally stopped smoking. This time it was really permanent. He never smoked another cigarette again. Ironically, it was only after this that his lungs began to get worse and then collapsed.

A few days ago, my mother said she dreamt of appa for the first time since he died. She dreamt he was in hospital, irritable the way he was when he really was there. And he was smoking. Lying in bed in his pink hospital robes, with his thin shoulders on the pillow and his arms attached to tubes and the oxygen tube in his nostrils, he was smoking.

I feel capable of great violence when I think of it.

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.

Status: Widow

This is what happens:

__ You look at all your silk saris, those gorgeous weaves and colours that you picked out so carefully, and wonder if you'll ever go to a wedding again.

__ It's Varalakshmi Puja, and kolu is only a matter of weeks away. There has been, so far, one invitation from a lady who believes she is radical for having issued it. The others have one year in which to redeem themselves.

__ You never liked that colour that is like watered down kaavi or perhaps chandanam with a touch of kaavi. Now you see it everywhere.

__ The girl's basket has a high spiral of jasmine. You automatically take out ten ruppes as you come out of the vegetable shop and then you stand, looking stricken. When you come back to the car, I ask what happened. "It's become more expensive. I'm not buying malli at that price," you say. I don't look at you in the rearview mirror.

__ At night the bed feels too heavy on one side. No wonder you don't sleep well.

__ Your grandson says:

I Nani is a widow.

Yes.

D Pati is a widow.

Yes.

Periya Nani is a widow?

Yes.

Dadi also.

Yes.

And now you're a widow.

(beat) Yes.

Grief Is A Long Distance Runner

At the crematorium.

My son says, why can’t he be buried? Why do we have to burn his body? I will never ever see him again. If we bury him, we can look at him when we want to. He thinks dead bodies are preserved by the earth and we can take them out once in a while to remind ourselves of what they looked like.

My grandmother says before we leave, when they put the body in, say agni swaha, pavan swaha. I think, she said the body.

They lift the rails. The gates open. I don’t say anything but I am shaken by such violent emotion that I can understand how people throw themselves on the pyre. Not to die with the dead, but to pull them out, say, ‘nobody can stand so much heat’. Outside, I watch the smoke from the crematorium chimney. That’s my father rising up in the air.

To my son I explain that the body is like a flower whose loss we don’t mourn. That it is in the nature of bodies to perish. My explanation feels both right and extremely wrong. We have no unfinished business with flowers.

When he is alive we stay silent or uncommunicative; we fight because we believe there will be a tomorrow in which to erase unpleasant memories. Right now, though, he is alive and I am angry and I show it.

Tomorrow comes and in place of the person there’s a legacy of guilt. He knew I didn’t mean it, we say, with the same kind of certainty with which we say, ‘he would have wanted me to go on that holiday’. How conveniently well we know the minds of the dead had they been alive.

[incomplete entry]

8

8

If someone had said you passed away
this evening at 8, when my watch was still
an hour behind, on a few minutes to seven,
I'd be around for rituals with your loved ones.
We'd sip the last of your lemon tea, taking
turns to embrace you with private words.
Some would simply freeze you
with that wholly unsayable look of love.

In the quickening, we'd fold away your clothes,
close the curtains over the awful pouring
light, but couldn't do a thing for the beep
& brake of cars, the low hum of a fast
travelling bus as we'd help you to the awkward
angle of your bed, how you'd be found,
then we'd hold back for the aweful way you'd rise
to the almighty challenge of your punctual

heart-stop.

Making our journeys home

we were back in time
strangely prepared
when someone said
you passed away
this evening at 8.

Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming To Dover! Tranquebar Press. 2008*.

*

It's been seven weeks. 49 days. I can see myself getting used to marking the weeks but not tearing myself up over their arrival and departure. I can see myself looking into the room, at the bed and not feel a lurch of the heart.

Heart-stop. It happens. Get over it.

*Daljit Nagra's book was published by Faber and Faber in 2007 in England. This Edition is for sale in India only. The word 'aweful' in the poem is sic.