Three Days

Three Days

I. The First Day

You will not be alone when you die. One by one, we have arrived here in Bangalore from different cities: Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh. Your daughter—my mother—is with you. So is her husband, my father. Your grandson—my brother—is present, too, and both of your brothers, along with their wives. And I—the eldest of your two grandchildren, your first and only granddaughter, the one most beloved to you—I will be with you as you draw your last, as you were with me when I drew my first. It is June 6. You have been asleep for twelve days.

There are others. The son of family friends in Boston is here, visiting from his current home in Mumbai. So is your neighbor, Gowda, from across the street, who would stop by your house every day to ensure there was food in the fridge and that you had someone to talk to. Your daughter and I have joked many times that you like him more than you like us. Cheerful and white-haired, Gowda would never scold you when you walked too quickly up and down the stairs or into the bathroom when the floor was wet. We are always telling you what you should not do.

Ravi and Devi, your daughter’s dearest friends, stay for an hour. So do their daughter, Vidya, and her husband, Sachin. They helped me bring you to the hospital the night you forgot who you were and who I was, the night I eventually found you unconscious, eyes half-open, seemingly dead.

The nurses wheel you in and turn off the machine that sustains your breath and withdraw as we pull close. Your daughter holds your face in her hands, strokes your arms. They are thinner than ever, defleshed in intensive care. In Tamil she urges you on your way while she holds you close.

Over these last two weeks, your grandson has seemed older than me, not two years younger. He has studied your labs, he has argued with your doctors at Ramaiah Memorial, he has fought for your merciful release. Seizures, coma, sepsis. You have always been quick to boast to friends and strangers that he is a doctor. In your final hours, he watches you breathe without rhythm, in tension with the harsh tempo of the machine observing your heart. It is your grandson who has carried your daughter to this moment, the choice to let you go free.

The eldest of your brothers—the former professor—stays for a time, sitting in his wheelchair and resting his hand on yours. It is swollen and puffy from intravenous feeding. He looks into your face, as if to memorize it and the visage of what will come next for him. Now and then he fractures his silence to ask your grandson questions. “What does this machine monitor? Why does she breathe like his?” Your grandson answers in detail. When wife wheels him out later, his bald head wilts on his neck. You will never see each other again.

I sit with you and press my face to yours, now twisted by a tube snaking into your nose, arched by a new hole in your windpipe to an unfamiliar plane. Your face is warm from your fever. Now and then a teardrop gathers and falls from your right eye. I wipe it away with a finger, then rub at the gummed remains of tears on your face. Your thin gray hair is not in its usual braid, but knotted into a bun on your head. Anger claps in me like thunder. Why has no one cleaned your face? Why have they pulled your hair so tightly from your scalp? Don’t they know it must hurt?

***

Last night, your daughter visited the Shirdi Sai temple a few streets beyond the Ganesh temple. Your grandson and I joined her. As we walked, we passed an open gate. Beyond it, women gathered on red and green plastic chairs murmuring to each other. To the left a figure lay on a raised pallet, blanketed with flowers. I have never seen a dead body, so I wanted to look—yet I didn’t. When I tilted my face to peer through the gate, I was too late to see the figure’s face.

The Shirdi Sai temple was new to me—were I to have visited, I would have gone with you. But it has been a long time since you walked distances this long and longer since I left our people's gods. Tonight it was nearly empty. We sat cross-legged in a cluster on the floor before the large stone figure on the raised platform at the back of main room. Your daughter and grandson prayed.

I closed my eyes too and thought of you, asleep in the hospital, far from us and the house your daughter built for you. In my mind I saw you: a child I have never seen. You walked away from us, returning to the farms of your girlhood in Tamil Nadu, your dark hair streaming in the fields.

That night your grandson and I curled our arms around your daughter as we lay in bed in the guest bedroom. She wept. “I should have moved here, I should have quit my job.” We tried to swim to her grief as we drowned in ours, and surfaced just before dawn. The sky was blue from the night. It flooded your room with a glow that washed over your glasses, the case for your teeth, the framed photograph of me and your daughter. They sat where you had left them the night I brought you to the hospital.

I stood at the doorway and imagined you that night, motionless on the bed. I rocked you, I begged you to wake up, as your legs moved fitfully, without any meaning. You later woke in the hospital, and by then you no longer knew me. You gazed at me sweetly and uttered a syllable, over and over and over again. I kissed you goodbye and told you I loved you, and I left for the airport in tears. It was twelve hours later, during my layover in London, that I learned of the seizures that followed, that you sank into a coma.

A week later, I returned from the U.S. You were in intensive care. At first I could not find you in the room and was certain you were not there. The body of the lone, elderly woman in the room was wrenched from its natural shape, arms splayed by her sides, her breathing broken and her skin darker than usual. Was it really you? Hot tears spilled from the blue mask on my face onto you. Had you known I was there, clutching you? Had you known your daughter was broken by two weeks of unanswerable questions? Over and over again I spoke to you. “I’m sorry, paati, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Do you want coffee?” Your daughter was in your kitchen, hunting for tasks. I took the hot steel cup she gave me to your garden, where hibiscus glowed by the dark leaves of the curry plant. She joined me. The sun was rising and the sky was orange. After a moment, she laughed. “Paati would never let us take leaves from this curry plant to cook with.”

“Why?” I asked, though I knew the answer. The surface of my coffee gleamed with a cataract of film.

“I don’t know,” your daughter said. “I planted jasmine for her once too.” She walked to where the plant once grew. “By the next trip she’d pulled it up.” That was you. You lived by rules we never understood.

We gazed up at the iron trellis that arched over the path to the door of your house. It was a recent addition to the house, a project of your daughter’s (of course) to protect you from the coconuts on the tree in your neighbor’s compound. The trellis swarmed with ivy and flowers that opened pale pink mouths sunward. “I can’t remember the name of this plant,” your daughter mused. “Aren’t the flowers beautiful?” She turned to go inside. “You should shower while the hot water is on.”

Before I followed, I pulled blooms and leaves from the plants around me. Inside, I crushed them between the pages of my diary.

***

It has been two hours. Your breathing is strong, jabbing the air with irregular puffs from your toothless mouth. I see a strand of gray hair clinging to the hospital band around your left wrist. Is it yours? Is it your daughter’s? Is it mine?

Your daughter interrupts my thoughts and directs me to go eat. I protest—what if something happens? “Lakshmi. It could take hours. Even days.” She is stern. Your grandson and I walk downstairs while your youngest brother and his wife take the elevator. She needs an expensive knee surgery. He has been putting it off. In the humid, crowded canteen, I blink to bring the menu into focus. Jetlag roars in my brain.

I order rasam and scoop it into my mouth, an eye on your grandson’s phone. I can’t eat. Why am I here? How have I left your side? I leave my food and kin and run up the stairs, two at a time, back to your room. Your daughter is holding your hands. I urge her to eat, knowing she will not eat enough after all of this is over. Slowly, reluctantly, she leaves with your son-in-law.

“Call me. Call me if anything happens.” The others return.

Something does happen: you vomit blood, a cascade of orange from your mouth. You are calm, nearly motionless, as if this is not happening. Your gown is stained. Nurses enter and check the machines. Your grandson picks up his phone, your daughter appears, breathless. The nurses want to clean you, so they draw curtains around the bed and ask us to step back.

While we sit to the side, there is conversation. “Should we call the priest?” your daughter asks your son-in-law. I peer around the curtain where you hiccup for breath. “It’s late. If she goes now, we’ll have to wait.”

“Yes,” he muses. “I think we need to tell him to come tomorrow.” He makes the phone call.

I am uneasy. Why are they saying this so near you? What if you can hear them? I peer once more between the curtains and wonder why the nurses are so slow. What if you die when we aren’t by your side? Then I realize—the nurses have slipped away. Then I realize you are more still than you have been.

I pull the curtains aside. “Is she gone? I think she’s gone.” The numbers on the machine fluctuate. You do not siphon the air for breath. Your grandson checks your pulse. I hold your hand and watch your face. Had we left you to die alone? Was this what you wanted?

Your daughter sits unmoving. She says your name. She says it again. She says it as a question. She says it as a statement.

The nurses return. Now your doctor is here. He records your time of death. Your grandson asks him to close your eyes, then he walks to the other side of the room to sit. He drops his face in his hands as tremors move across his shoulders. This is the first he has cried today. A nurse pushes a clipboard at his face. Your brother’s wife calls their daughter.

I sit on the bed with you and clutch you, touch your arms, kiss your cheeks, tell you I love you. When no one is looking, I pull the gray hair from your hospital band and into my bag. I touch you again, and realize you are cold. Already, I thought. Why does this surprise me? I cry and your daughter tells me to stop. “The soul can’t go if you keep it here.”

“Paati is in my earliest memories,” I choke. “She’s in my memories before you are.” Then I ask: “What will happen to her now?”

“Should we bring her home?” your daughter wonders. “I don’t want her to be alone in the mortuary.” An unnameable horror strikes me. I am afraid to sleep in your house with you there as you now are.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say. “It’s warm. You don’t want that.” She decides you will spend the night in the mortuary and return to us tomorrow, and I am full of relief. Two women walk in with white gauze and ask us to leave the room. I linger. As if you are a doll, the nurses move your limbs this way and that way, so that they lie uncomfortably askew. How dare they touch you this way? As if you cannot feel?

***

Your daughter has instructions for us once we return to your house: we must bathe and wear fresh clothes. Our encounter with death has polluted us. After we have cleansed our bodies and changed, we sit opposite each other on the red couches in your living room. I beside your daughter, your grandson by your son-in-law. Your youngest brother taps his long fingers on his knees as he always does. Ravi and Devi join us briefly.

The phone rings constantly. Over and over again I pick it up. “You’ll have to call back in a few days.” I struggle not to scream. How can they expect your daughter to speak?

The heat of the day surrenders to the evening. Gowda brings food to the house, since we are not to cook until you have been cremated. I begin to eat and then remember you are dead. I push away the food and sit in your room for a moment. It smells like you.

After dinner, your daughter and I walk to a shop near your house to buy you a sari for your cremation. As we sift through piles of silk, the shopgirl asks me, “Is it for you, ma’am?” We do not answer, and I select a green silk sari. Green is a color I have seen you wear often. It was the color of the sari on the floor the night I found you lost and undressed in your kitchen, before your seizures, before your coma. As the girl in the store slides the garment into a bag, your daughter gives her a wad of rupees. Quietly, she says, “This is the last thing I’ll ever buy for my mother.”

I cry as we walk onto the dark street. The headlights of cars hurtle toward us, cows groan and lumber with us. We walk by the tailor’s storefront and your daughter leans for a moment on the counter, facing a thousand bolts of cotton cloth. Saffron, pink, blue. The tailor approaches and smiles. He expects the bag in my hand to contain pyjama to trim down to size, or perhaps folds of fabric for a new blouse.

“My mother died,” your daughter says. His face shifts into surprise.

“When?”

“This afternoon.” These are the facts of the day. As we walk up the street to your house, a light summer rain falls.


II. The Second Day

Your grandson, your son-in-law, and Gowda depart early in the morning to bring you home. They return with you in an ambulance and, with a bamboo stretcher, carry you indoors. But for your face, you are wrapped entirely in white. There are cotton balls in your nostrils.

“Wait,” your daughter commands, and spreads a sari on the floor of your living room. They place you upon it. The skin on your face is no longer taut, the folds of brown loose and natural. You seem to exist in the pause between breaths. You seem healthy. Then your daughter declares, “I don’t like seeing her like this.” She drapes you with your new green sari. I begin to worry. What will the priest say when he arrives?

Gowda reenters the house with jasmine and rose maalai piled his arms. The garlands are nearly as tall as you, fat and heavy with fragrant blooms. He and your daughter lay them on you. Then your daughter picks at the jasmine and roses. “These flowers aren’t fresh. Aren’t there fresher garlands?”

“These are the maalai from yesterday. Today’s won’t arrive until the afternoon.” I struggle to grasp their conversation. Gowda tries to fit his Kannada to our Tamil, so I can never fully follow it.

Your daughter yields and turns back to you, pressing her check to yours. “She’s so cold,” she whispers. I touch your face, too. Your skin does not feel like skin. It has the quality of putty. And yet—it seems as if you might wake up at any moment.

Outside a log of pungent wood burns black before the gate. The smoke colors the air before your house and announces to your neighbors: there has been a death in the family. A crowd swells inside. Puttamma, who has cleaned your house for years and tolerated your scoldings. She wears a faded purple sari and a face that streams with tears. Yasoda, whose daughter lives in the apartment attached to your house. She would take the bus from her village to visit her daughter and spend hours talking to you, cooking for you when you were tired. Chandra, the sister of your son-in-law, in a white and blue sari and large, oversize glasses. Her husband Shekhar, portly and small-eyed. Ravi and Devi. Manju, Ravi’s driver. Our relatives from Chennai.

The priest arrives. He is shirtless and bearded, a white cotton veshti pulled around his waist. White ash covers his forehead and his hair sits in a bun. He directs your daughter to pour water over her head and to loosen her hair from its braid. She emerges from a bathroom in the house, her sari soaked, her gray-black hair clumping into wet strings. She looks at me and does not see me.

While your daughter and her husband sit outside below the trellis and join the intonations of the priest, the women gather inside to wash your body. How are we to do this? Which sari should we use? How are we to move your limbs and change you when are stiff from rigor mortis and the mortuary? We Brahmin women are uncertain, but Yasoda and Puttamma know. They hold a cloth around us, enclosing us with you and protecting your modesty. They decide your undergarments will remain and that we wash what skin we see.

We unwind the bandages and remove the sari you are wearing to reveal the blouse and petticoat beneath, white to signify your widowhood. From the priest we learn we cannot use the green sari since it has already touched you. Your daughter enters with one from her wardrobe, a coffee colored length of silk. I sprinkle water on your face and wipe it dry. Wails fill your living room. They are mine, I realize. The older women listen. They have done this many times before. I raise your head to wind a fold of silk around you and slowly, slowly, let it rest back on the floor. I do not want to hurt you. Your head is like a stone.

We learn from the priest the women may join the men at the crematorium. Someone in the room voices my thoughts. “India is changing.” At first your daughter decides to remain at home. She cannot bear to see your body burn. But as our chants rose in thunderous circles and the men hoist you in the air, blanketed with flowers, she cries out to Ravi. “Ravi, don’t,” she begs. “Please, please don’t take her!” He looks her for a moment and turns before his face crumples. Your daughter decides to go.

The crematorium is dark and tall-ceilinged. By the time I enter, the men have placed you on the floor of a small room to the right. Now I remain in the back, far away from you. Chandra holds my arms, her husband Shekhar nearby. I do not know where your daughter is.

The priest asks your son-in-law to walk around you with a terracotta jug of water on his shoulder. Each time he passes the priest, the priest raps the vessel. Three times this happens, three streams of water pour out. The priest tells him to drop the jug and when he does it sprays the floor with water as it shatters. So, too, we hope, does your karma. May you never be reborn.

At this moment, Shekhar turns to me. “I heard you were when she went to the hospital?” I nodded, trying to look beyond his shoulder. “But you still went back to the U.S. that night?”

“I did. But I came back a few days later.”

“Why? You could have just stayed for a few more days.”

I grip Chandra’s arm as I meet his eyes. “You think I don’t feel bad about that?” I hiss. The priest’s intonations thrum throughout the room. “How can you say this to me? Right now? Right here?”

“I was just—I was just—” He looks at me, stunned. Never has a young woman spoken to him with such disrespect.

“Don’t speak to me,” I said. “Don’t speak to me ever again.”

Chandra draws me to her. “We’re all upset today,” she whispers. “You did everything you could.”

I am breathless. I am shaking. I am torn with guilt as the questions I have tried to crush for two weeks well up inside me. Why did I leave you? Why didn’t I spend the night in your room when I already knew you were ill? Would you be alive today?

My rage dries my tears and I follow as they carry you to the foyer. They chant and bring you up a flight of stairs to another room. The other women falter and trail behind the men, who have disappeared into the room. Should we go? Your daughter steps inside and immediately steps out. She looks at me—or is it through me?—“No, no, no, no,” she says, shaking her head. As I move toward the doorway she pulls hard at my hand. “No, Lakshmi,” she says. “No. I don’t want you to see that.”

I shake her off and enter the dark room. But no, it is not dark. Brilliant orange flames blanket you, a light and heat that I feel from where I stand frozen, three feet away. I can hardly see you through curtain of fire floating from your body. I turn and see your daughter on the other side of the threshold, alone and eyes wide open. I leave your side to rejoin hers, hold her to me, rest my chin on her head. Her hair is damp from the rites at your house.

When she finally moves away, I return to the room. You are gone, brought by a conveyor belt behind dark curtains. Only your grandson and Gowda remain. A low boom sounds. “Thalai,” says Gowda, in Tamil—“her head.” A low rumble runs through the room. “It’s done.”

***

In your house, hours later, your grandson remembers something: a recording of a conversation with you from his visit to your house in Chennai. We gather close as your voice speaks to us from his laptop. Our hearts reach back. In the recording, your grandson asks about your daughter’s wedding. What was it like? “Terrible,” you sigh. “The musicians played the same songs over and over again, dum dum dum,” you say, mimicking their drums.

Listening, we clap our hands with laughter, your daughter most of all. “We couldn’t afford good musicians,” she explains. “We couldn’t even pay the photographer to stay for the reception.” She stops laughing. “Look at us laughing, just hours after her cremation.” Your grandson begins to cry.

As the afternoon begins to cool, your daughter and I step into your bedroom. Light filters through the blue-flowered curtains and onto the framed photos of your parents on the wall facing your bed. The figures are serious, unsmiling. “I asked Ravi to hang them on the wall,” your daughter says. “I don’t think she wanted them there.” I ask why. “I think she missed them too much to see them.”

Your daughter unlocks your bureau and we peer inside. A few saris droop from hangers. Your white blouses and petticoats. Bottles of Pond’s Talc Powder. Rolls of paper towels and bottles denture cleaner from the U.S. It was always difficult to get the key to this bureau: this is where you store your cash. Your daughter and I would laugh at how you would sit on your bed and count it with the fervor you prayed with at the altar.

“There’s almost nothing in here,” your daughter marvels. “She’s been giving things away.” Silence unspools before us. “It’s as if she’d been preparing.” Guilt crept into me. What if you saw us here?

She pulls out a decaying album of black and white photos. A peacock poses on its woven fiber cover, damaged by invisible insects. “Where did she get this from? Did I put this together for her?” She opens it. We flip through photographs of your daughter as a child. Your brothers as lanky young men. Your mother, sweet-faced and serious. The son you never spoke of.

And then—there you are. I am stunned. “I thought she destroyed all her pictures of herself,” I say, leaning against your daughter.

“I did, too.”

You are a sharp-featured young woman, with firmly braided hair and a multitude of gold and diamonds in your earlobes and nose. In one photo, you sit with your twelve-year-old daughter, who looks at the camera anxiously. In the other, you hold up your infant son and gaze at him. The little boy is smiling. As you look at him, your face is impassive, a pearl of calmness and secrets. Over all these years and so many visits, you never once showed me this face.


III. The Third Day

We rise early the next day. Today we drive to Srirangapatnam, three hours west of Bangalore, where the Kaveri River meets itself at a sacred confluence. We take two cars. Your daughter, your brother’s wife, and I sit in one. Your brother, your son-in-law, your grandson, and Gowda in the other. They leave before us to visit the crematorium. We will meet later at a temple on the outskirts of Bangalore before processing to Srirangapatnam.

It is hot today, the roads are thick with yellow dust. By the side a man stands with a cart pilled with fruit the color of eggplant. The fruit is circular and hard. “What are they?” I ask, as we await the others. She gives the Tamil name for the fruit. It is a word I do not know and one she cannot translate into English.

She steps out of the car to speak to the man. “How much?” She asks in Kannada, but he responds in Tamil. She smiles. “You’re Tamil?” It isn’t really a question, but a statement of approval. “Why are you in Karnataka? Give me a few of those fruit.”

“I sell the most here,” he says, and pries open the fruit. Inside sit white, translucent blobs that burst with strange sweetness. I am unsure of their texture but eat a few to please your daughter. “Give some to Manju,” she instructs, and gestures at Ravi’s driver, who doesn’t want them either. But your daughter has decided we need to eat, and today we will not argue. The others arrive in their car. I know you are with them.

As we near Srirangapatnam, lush fields slip by. We are near Mysore, home to the palaces of Tipu Sultan and the oil paintings of Ravi Varma. Two decades ago, your daughter and son-in-law brought me and your grandson there on a day trip from your house. You remained at home, too tired for the journey.

The Kaveri is full of swimmers who scream and splash. We remove our sandals and slowly walk down the slick concrete steps of the ghat that slopes down to the water. The river bears floating bits of plastic and other refuse. Further out it is blue and clear, and in the distance it meets a cloud-clotted sky. Your daughter insists that your brother and his wife stay at the top of the steps. “We don’t need more than one death this year,” I joke. She laughs. We fall silent.

A young priest—a teenager, really—at the foot of the ghat agrees to guide us through your rites. Your son-in-law sits cross-legged on the bottommost step, your daughter stands behind him. She puts a hand on his shoulder and the priest sits opposite him. Your grandson and I face the trio and the water, which lurches inches away. Between them is a small terracotta urn, the fruit of the crematorium. Someone removes the plate covering its mouth.

There you are, a heap of black powder, mingled with chunks of pallid bone. You, my grandmother, the first love of my life.

It is too hot to cry.

The priest requests the names of your father, your mother, your father’s father, your father’s mother, your mother’s father, your mother’s mother. We move on and on into the depths of your ancestry, uncovering the names of those you must join. Into the urn your son-in-law pours clear coconut water, then water mixed with blood red kumkum. You have no son who can see to your final rites, so it must be your son-in-law. Your daughter, a woman, is forbidden. At last we are done, and he wades into the river, the urn balanced on his shoulder. Your daughter and your grandson and I watch from the bank, shielding our eyes in the sun. “He’s going to fall,” your daughter says. “I just know he’s going to fall.” The murky water reaches his waist and soaks his veshti. He lets go of the urn.

Though we are distant, I see in my mind what happens next. The urn will fill with water and the ash will mingle with it. Your bones will sink to the bottom of the river. Over time you will journey from Karnataka through your homeland, Tamil Nadu. You will reach the Indian Ocean and your soul will join the souls of the universe.

Your son-in-law dunks his head under the water and your grandson and Gowda joins him. Together, we all climb up the ghat to slip our shoes back onto our feet. A hundred feet away I see a cart piled with coconuts, bright green in the afternoon heat. Your grandson joins me as I walk toward it, and we pay six rupees for two. Drinking the nectar inside, I squint at the river before us. You are gone.

___

Upcoming:
7.7 - lecture: "Diversities of Mobility in the Roman Empire," FIEC/CA Annual Conference, London, UK
7.14 - performance: "MALA/MAALAI" (with Cathy Hsiao), DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL
7.28 - performance: Edgar Miller Legacy, Chicago, IL
8.9 - performance: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

LakshmiR.com
lykanthea.com
twitter.com/lykanthea
instagram.com/lykanthea