The light has gone out of our lives

Baba has left. My brain agrees it is probably for his good, he is relieved of all the pain and suffering and that he was ready to go and lead a beautiful content life but my heart refuses to acknowledge. I cannot believe this is permanent. Is this what every book, every scholar, every clichéd drama, dialogue, every person on earth talked about? How does one deal with death? This pain is like the cumulative pain of every loss I’ve ever known. The moment he was gone, stretches unbroken. I’m advised to deal with this like an adult and take care of my younger sister who isn’t doing very well herself. I can’t face her, I can’t. I just can’t. It’ll take me a while to get back to life. To stay afloat. I cannot be the elder sister just yet. There’s nothing I can say that can make her feel better or undo the loss. She took care of Baba selflessly, taking care of his every need, just being there for him when he felt lonely, sensing his tone when he couldn’t talk with an incredible patience and tolerance and she’s all of 20 years old! She’d cancel catching up with friends just to take care of baba. Apart from all the love, she has my highest respect and has taught me the greatest life lessons. I bow to her for doing whatever she did, there are no words. I’m forever indebted to her and incredibly proud of the person she’s become. On the opposite spectrum, I failed. I don’t remember the last time I talked to him, I don’t remember being there for him when he needed the most. And now he’s gone, his stories are gone. I hope he forgives me. I hope I can forgive myself. His absence will be the biggest void in our lives which can never be filled. Is this what life is all about? One calamity upon the next? Let me grieve my loss, I don’t need to be consoled. There’s nothing that prepares one for loss, nothing at all, you have to face the dragon head on. You have to drown, you have to fall. I hope we remember his stories anew every day. I hope we gather the strength to pick ourselves again and live a happy and fulfilled life just the way he wanted. I hope we have the wisdom and humility to realize whatever we are, whoever we have become, is all because of him, because he chose to make it happen. I hope we never let him die in our memories. For me, the next biggest task is to crawl out of this mammoth abyss and move on as they say. Zip up, pull up the sock and carry on. And finally, maybe I can sleep.

Rest in Peace, Baba.

What do you want?

Do you ever ask that to yourself? On that note, I'm back. Back to Delhi. You can't even call me a musafir seeking something or trying to reach somewhere or cherishing the journey. No. I'm running away to nowhere. As much as I love him, I couldn't deal with the identity crises anymore, couldn't look at the person that I'd become. I was a no one. I wanted out. I ran off to home only to realize it didn't feel like home anymore. Where does one go when one does not want to go anywhere or stay? No place feels like home anymore. I'm left with a handful people who're home to me. And he is not with me. I'm home away from home. What do I want? How does one weigh things? prioritize? what is more important? what is lesser? I'm running away from all the noise and madness of the world only to get jolted by silence. Isn't there a balance? Can't I love him and be myself at the same time? me, my fucked up, messed up self, but me nonetheless. I donno if that's a lot to ask for. These lines by Kahlil Gibran touch me at all the right places, strike all the right chords.

      Let the winds of the heavens dance between you. 
      Love one another but make not a bond of love: 
      Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. 
      Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. 
      Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. 
      Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, 
      Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. 
      Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. 
      For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. 
      And stand together, yet not too near together: 
      For the pillars of the temple stand apart, 
      And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow. 

Baba is sick, sans an illness

Baba is sick without an illness. It's called old age. It is shattering to fathom what he must be going through. His brain, over 9 decades old has stopped making sense of things, living— non-living. His memory is wiped out, he’s started hallucinating, he chats with imaginary people, is it because we weren’t there to talk to him? It breaks me. When we tell people, he’s suffering, he’s sick, almost everybody says, yeah must be old-age, very indifferently as if it's okay to suffer if you’re old and weak and fragile. It hurts me, but I know it's not their fault. When I was growing up, he had hundreds of stories to tell us, one can imagine he was born in 1922, he’s seen everything,  he lived in the era that we studied in history! We would sit around him and he’d tell us his college stories, of India’s struggle for freedom, of uniting one India post Independence, of his office days under the British empire, of how he raised his five sons, sans any money but loads of values, one could see his eyes glitter when he used to talk about the bygone era. But now, he remembers nothing.  He doesn’t remember my name. He doesn’t remember what year is it, he doesn’t remember anything that he’s experienced in the past 95 years, they say, it's the old age. Indeed, it is, but imagine the suffering. He was living with memories all his life and what does he have now? Is it okay to suffer if you’re old? I feel helpless, like never before. It sucks. Why not me? Why him? Why can’t I change places? What do I do to make him happy? He has swollen foot but doctors say, they cannot treat it, because it's apparently natural, its old age. It's something to do with the kidneys, they say. Why can’t we help him? The other day, a very independent 95-year-old man shat his pants, and cried of embarrassment, what do we say to comfort him? How? It breaks me in the most unimaginable way. It’s like saying a thousand goodbyes together. Yes, human body is fragile, world is unfair, shit happens, but this is soul crushing. May we have the strength and wisdom to make him feel loved and special while we can. He is a major part of who we all are. He is the root to the tree touching skies, he has nourished us, all his life selflessly, he is the reason we all exist, of who we are and what we’ve all become. May we gather the strength and patience to hold him and not let him fall because old or not, nobody deserves this. 

Shaadi ka laddu

Not much has changed post marriage, only everything .One year, 3 months and 11 days into marriage I now know what the fuss was all about. All the jokes, all the shaadi ka ladoo metaphors, all the hype, I don’t shy away from concluding, at the risk of concluding too soon, that marriage sucks. It makes one bat shit crazy. Its hell lotta work and no, I was not and am not a fan. There! I blurt it out. Its outta my system. I love him, I love him but marriage sucks. I might sound like Mark Antony but I really mean it. I’ve read and thought about the box metaphor where it is proposed that, marriage is a box wherein you mustn’t look forward to take away things but put in it together to help your marriage grow and sustain and bla bla. The more I think about it, the more it drives me to insanity. But ab pachtai hot kya jab chidiya chug gayi khet? Which is why I’ve decided to not cry over things and begin to accept shit as it is, served cold, salty or bland—Eat it!

I’ve quit my job back in Bangalore and relocated to his hometown—I was told I’m crazy for doing this and that this will turn to be a nightmare etcetera but some things are neither right or wrong and you must do it for your soul, I don’t regret my decision one bit but this is the most difficult phase of my life, hands down, his hometown,  the steel city of Orissa, encircled by rivers and pretty hills. I wake up every day to the chirping of birds and a sight of a gulmohar tree blossoming red flowers. But not everything is pretty, for the uninitiated, I do not know the language, Odiya, which is a blessing in disguise of sorts. On the first day, I was asked to wear a saree with silver toe-rings, anklet, red bangles, mahroon sindoor and a ghunghat, I suddenly felt like my teen self, the girl who cried when she was first hit by the monstrous menstrual cycle, mostly out of embarrassment and not being able to comprehend what the fuck was going on. This time, I felt a similar discomfort, a feeling of disconnecting from my own self. It was like putting on a garb and woosh, in a split second I was someone I didn’t know. “Its just the clothes, don’t make it a bid deal” I told myself repeatedly after weeping in his arms for hours. Of course, he had no clue why it was such a big deal for me. Apart from hating the hideous clothes, which wasn’t that big a deal, honestly, being told what to do and wear was what hit me the most. I’ve always hated being told what to do, wear, eat, not proud of it, but that’s how I’m wired. That’s how I function, I know no other way. I am was convinced that in this quagmire of subservience, I’ll lose myself in the most dramatic way ever. I wake up depressed most of the days, having the hardest time just to survive one more day. When I manage to survive a day, its like crawling up a pitch dark hole, only to lay flat on the surface staring at the clear blue skies, thanking the lord that you didn’t die. I hope I make it till the end. 

What a fighter she was!

“You look so pretty after marriage!”, she said holding my hand with a gleam in her eyes. I managed a smile, fighting myself to hold back the tears. “How are you badimummy?” I asked, I knew how she was. Fighting to live everyday, with the strength I’ve only read in legends. What else heroes are made of? And here I was feeling so weak and vulnerable, I wanted to cry my heart out, only I couldn’t. I’ve never felt so naked about my emotions ever.  There were so many thoughts slapping my head that I was almost going insane. How could life be so unfair? How can she smile with so much pain? How.Why. Of course, there are and will be no answers to such questions. She was still holding my hand, moaning with incredible pain, that one can only imagine. “How is S? He’s a really nice guy”, she smiled, I couldn’t hold a conversation and hated myself for acting so childish. Act Normal, Nikita. Hold back the tears, she doesn’t wanna see them! I would remind myself, frustrated. Often, I’d excuse myself with a fake phone call. It was so much harder than I thought, that maddening thick silence engulfing us all. Outside in the waiting room, I wept profusely, people saw, they turned back and saw but I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t care. I couldn’t masquerade strength, I could see myself all over the place, crying like a baby, even in front of my lil sister when I should’ve been there for her. I couldn’t, I was breaking in the most ugly way one can imagine. Some patients were in the corridors, walking, some were in the well lit waiting room and seeing somebody weep like that was probably the last thing a cancer patient wants to see, I failed.Miserably. I went back to her room, we were all trying desperately to strike a normal conversation, cracking silly jokes, pretending to laugh, “Shivi you remember that hindi language essay that you wrote in class 2?”, bhaiya asked Shivi. “It was genius”. She smiled and in a fit uttered, “bhaiya stop it, it wasn’t that bad”. Everybody laughed. Badimummy laughed too, it was a pretty sight. “You guys must be hungry, order food, P”, she asked her son and soon the rice and the noodles arrived. We couldn’t eat, how could we? She hadn’t eaten in 30 days. “You’re not eating, please take some more” she told mom. Amidst so much pain, she could think about all this, I could not believe. How can someone be like that? I was unlearning everything I’ve known about life in these 25 years. You need to shred every strand of your existence to understand death and how much nothing else matters. How everything falls flat in the face of death. I hadn’t seen death from so close and she was living it with so much positivity and courage. We all know death is an inevitable end, but I wasn’t prepared for it. Who is? That day I learnt how much it means to give and to smile and what strength does for us.  When we were leaving, she said, “I’ll soon come to Delhi” but sadly, she never will.  We lost her a week after I relocated to Orissa. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep for days thinking I hate this place  and this is what quitting job is doing to me. I couldn’t write. Until today when I wrote this. I’ll never forget what she taught me in her silence. May her soul rest in peace and inspire us all till the end of our days.