A Matter of Weeks

Jun 7, 20215 min read

Updated: Jun 25, 2021

Last week, my father had what I can best describe as an anxiety attack. I was on my way to the kitchen to fetch a water bottle when I saw him sitting at the dining table, one finger inside an oximeter. His pulse count was gradually ascending - 100, 120, 140, 150. I placed my hand on his chest; I could feel his heart on my palm. In a voice that seemed part broken, part concealing his tears, he muttered, “Bahut ghabrahat ho rahi hai.”

My mother emerged from their room. She and I exchanged looks of surprise and worry. We had hardly seen him in such a state, at least in my living memory - openly admitting to a vulnerability to both of us.

“Babba, thodi der bahar chalo. Khuli hawa mein deep breathe karke shayad behtar lage,” I said in my best assuring voice.

As I unlocked the door and he stepped outside, I heard him say, “Please mere saath bahar chalo, akele mujhe....”. This was the second strike at my perhaps mistaken imagination of his stoic figure.

In the darkness of the midnight sky, my father, mother and I tried assigning various reasons to this sudden trigger. My father sat there quietly, quieter than he usually is, not able to fully comprehend what had happened to him.

Before us

Three weeks ago, my grandmother added herself to the growing number of fatalities of the pandemic. My parents and I had fallen prey to the infection too. Two days after my grandmother was admitted to the hospital and put on a never ending supply of oxygen, I had, fortunately, recovered. My parents, however, continued to isolate themselves in separate rooms. I would leave food outside their respective doors and check on them via video call if they needed anything else. This was coupled with intermittent updates from the hospital and doctors as to my grandmother’s condition. The calls would span from breakfast to dinner and sometimes midnight and beyond. For a few days before the last update call from the hospital, my grandmother’s condition had given us the illusion of hope. But that’s what it was. An illusion.

On the morning of the last call I had just sat down at the dining table, to a rather yellow looking fried egg when I heard my phone ringing loudly in the empty living room, its ringtone echoing through the hall. The hospital number flashed on my phone screen.

“Aap Kanta Joshi ji ke yahan se bol rahe hain?”, the hospital control room operator asked.

“Haanji”, I said.

“Ji...aaj subah unki death ho gayi. Kuch ek hi ghante pehle. Aap jab unki body lene yahan aayenge, to unki aur apni aadhaar ki copy lete aayiega.”

Death. Body. Aadhar. I could not string or make sense of these words. My heart was in my mouth and I asked the control room operator to confirm my grandmother’s name. There were no doubts. Death left none.

With trembling hands, I called my parents. This breakfast-time call was usually to either apprise them of any update from the hospital or to decide the food menu for the day. My mother was in the washroom and my father was lying down, chest and belly stuck to the ground, filling his lungs with air.

“Mujhe abhi abhi hospital se call aaya”, I began. They, innocent of what awaited them, listened rather matter-of-factly.

“Dadi ki death ho gayi”, I blurted out and covered my face with trembling, sweaty fingers. My mother’s eyes widened and she placed one hand on her mouth in disbelief. My father’s screen seemed to have blurred and he screamed, “Ija!” and let out a howling fit of tears. I rushed to the window of my father’s room and stretched out my hand as if to caress him. My mother stood on the other end, crying in unison with him.

“Mujhe laga tha wo vapis aa jaayegi...”, he said in a broken voice. The three of us stood, separated by a window and an infection grieving at our isolated spots trying to console ourselves and each other.

A pahadi couple

After finishing all the paperwork at the hospital and waiting for an extra hour for an ambulance to take my grandmother’s body to the cremation ground, I saw two hospital attendants carrying a lifeless lump wrapped in sheets of protective material down a makeshift elevator. The ambulance had finally arrived and soon her body did too. A yellow and red sticker was stuck across the body’s outer cover stating her name. Kanta Joshi. When she was fully inside the ambulance, the two attendants unzipped the cover from the top, asking me to confirm the identity of the deceased. Her shrivelled, lifeless face lay there, her lips pursed and her forehead contracted. There were no signs of it having been a peaceful passing. Her face was so unlike her - one that hardly wore a look of worry in the most stressful of situations is now etched in my memory as a pile of wrinkles and contractions, begging for air.

On my way to the cremation ground, following the ambulance carrying her, I could only recall the last time I was following my grandmother seated in an ambulance. The last time, she had gone crying, complaining of back pain, asking where she was being taken. Never to be seen again. The image of my father also entered my mind, possibly lamenting how he could not see or bid goodbye to his mother for the last time, my mother by his side trying her best to console him. Both unaware and ignorant of the way their mother and mother-in-law appeared in her last moment, to be bid farewell by a few strangers now piling wood on her lifeless body.

Last evening, my mother and I emptied my grandmother’s wardrobe. Years of accumulated dirt, dusty bottles of hair oil, countless bhajan-pustika, combs with missing teeth, sarees with their price tags still stuck and a few yellowed photographs emerged. We threw the combs, placed the sarees in another drawer and I pocketed the yellow, dog-eared photographs (the ones you see scattered throughout this post). Then there were the diaries, possibly given by my father to her every year. 2001, 2005, 2011, 2013. With nothing written in them, except outdated phone numbers. I spotted mine and my sister’s handwriting next to the crooked numbers penned down by our grandmother, as if with trembling hands. We had moved cities and my sister countries. But they were there, fixed in time and the fading pages of the diary. I wondered if she tried calling us on these numbers, possibly answered by irritated strangers, confused at the ramblings of an eighty year old woman.

While we were busy re-arranging her wardrobe, my father entered the room, glanced around, picked a few things, put them down and made his way out. I saw him from the corner of my eye, seating himself at the dining table pushing his finger into the oximeter. Barefoot, I went upto the table and stood beside him. I placed my hand on his chest. His heart was beating fine.