My heart in my pocket

There were so many times when I had started to write this and then hesitated, unable to complete it, unable to move forward and post it. The time did not seem right or I failed to find the right words. Mostly, I had not sorted my feelings out, yet. Funerals, I had only heard, were mostly sobering affairs. Then my husband’s grandparents died and right from the moment the phone call came to the time when they were taken away to be cremated, every moment passes through my mind in slow agonizing detail, repeating itself in endless loops each time I let my mind wander.

Thata and Paati were what they were called by everyone and they had been married for 64 years. The path to my marriage was not exactly smooth like an ice skating rink. There had been opposition, lots of shouting and many tears and it took the better part of two and a half years for the wedding to happen. For one of those years, I was in the city of the boy’s home. Good etiquette or maybe some confusing feelings in all parties concerned ensured that I went over regularly to be introduced as the boy’s friend to whoever happened to be visiting too. That was when I first met Thata and Paati. She was almost eighty and read books with the curiosity of a child and he was well past eighty and spoke the language of where I come from with the delight of someone who last spoke it some fifty years ago.

When I did get married and first went to my husband’s home as the daughter-in-law, paati was there to welcome me, with warmth in her face and a smile on her lips. There was the finality of acceptance in the smile. Two days later, she was rushed to the ICU, almost comatose and hopefully with the will still left in her to fight for her life.  She did come home that time.  Some shades paler than her former self and yet, with a book in her hands. A month went by and one day, when we were getting ready to watch India play against South Africa, the call came that she had passed away. The world stopped for a fraction and five hours later, we were there to see her one last time.

She lie in the middle of the floor in accordance to the funeral rites of her faith. She was covered in a shroud. Since she had died a married woman, she was bathed, dressed in the traditional madisaar like for a festival and taken away to be cremated. The rituals dictated that we should pour water and rice into her mouth. There is no dignity in death. Whatever is done, is done to comfort the living.

Within my heart, I did not want to do any of it, did not want to remember her lifeless on the floor. I waited and waited for her to wake up. She was taken away to be cremated and then I knew that she was not coming back. The floors were swept and washed, everything was put away and lunch was served. I suspected then that all the hard work after a funeral like feeding elaborate meals to all the guests were tactics thought up by ancestors who were probably wiser than us to turn the mind away from the grief. Slowly the tears stopped and silently the laughter returned.

Until the day after the funeral, I never did work up the courage to talk to thata. My own grandfather had died when my mother was twenty one and so grandfathers for me were a mystery to be tucked away in some tiny corner of the brain. Gradually, I did work up the courage and strength to try making some talk with thata. The old man who was almost deaf, kept hearing the word paati in everything I said and was soon reminiscing about their days together as a newly married couple, bringing little children into a alien world where everybody around them were from a different  religion and vegetarian food was hard to come by. Not only were the warmly embraced by the community but they lived there for fifteen long years, speaking the local languages and acquiring a taste for the sharp and spicy food, though still they stuck to their faith and remained staunchly vegetarian.

Thata would tell everyone who came to visit him those few days that paati had lived a full life and though they had been married for sixty four years, he was glad she went away only after she had seen it all. As it turned out, he had been lying. On the twelfth day, he did not wake up from his sleep and then the world really stopped. Once again, we flew down to see him and yet, I kept waiting for him to wake up, knowing this time that he would not.

True I did not know thata and paati for long or very well. I was a stranger to the grief of their children and grand children. I heard from one and many about all the wonderful things they could do and all those that they did. Yet, seeing them lying there, looking nothing like themselves, I wanted to go and hide, my grief mine own, a tightness in my chest, desperately clinging to my memories of them laughing, complaining, talking, breathing. Tears were there everywhere around me but mine were locked away, still not believing what I was seeing and when they did come, I tried to hide them, trying to understand them. I learnt then that the grief of the living is often more difficult to bear than the grief for the dead.

Every time I think of the funerals, my thoughts flit to my own grandmother, a frail lady of eighty who insists on living by herself and my heart flutters to think that one day, she would be gone too. I cannot think I shall have the strength then to laugh ever again. But laughter does return and slowly, we bury memories of the death and cling to memories of the dead. When thata and paati died, I wanted to take my heart and pin it into my pocket and mourn for them within the confines of my small corner of existence, afraid to share it with anybody for the fear that they would not understand why I was mourning for somebody who I just knew but when somebody dies, you are not allowed to do that. I finally decided to write this today, just before I finally do pin my heart and allow time to heal me because I decided I wanted to remember. So that when I do not have the strength to laugh again, I can come back here and remember that I will heal and the laughter shall come back again.

 

 

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