Gratitude

Things that make me feel that someone out there is looking out for me:

To be honest, these past 6 months have been probably the most impactful in my life- both positive and negative.

Again, in the spirit of moving on, let's not dwell on deaths, but I really have so much gratitude for the multiple other things that have happened:

a) My maternal family- without my uncles and aunts from my mom's side, I would have never been in a state of mind to think about my device, get a provisional patent for it, or apply for and win a grant for it. In the past 2-3 months, I've gotten into the habit of looking to them for advice. It feels awfully heart-warming to know that social support exists... especially because, in the decade I spent in the US, I used to feel quite lonely.

b) My paternal aunts- for looking out for me in multiple ways.

The male monal

c) For the glimpse of the musk deer and Monal pheasants in the Himalayas- both extremely rare, the former near extinct. The fact that we saw them is incredible...

Himalayan male musk deer

d) For the black sheep dog who helped me on the trek to the Himalayas- he came suddenly, and walked by me, lay down next to me as I panted and gasped for breath and went away once he saw I was fine again. Wasn't the dog that walked with the Pandavas on their trek on Swargarohini also a black dog? The one that was left with Yudhishthira when everyone else fell by the wayside?

e) For the twist of fate that led to us carrying the temple flag from Chopta village to Tungnath to give to the priests there so they could fly it over the temple... what an unexpected privilege!

f) For the opportunity to share our temple prasadam with some of the other pilgrims on the mountain.

g) For the immense world of opportunities that have opened up for me in terms of professional growth. I have been hesitant about figuring out how to use these opportunities. But writing this post has helped me realize how privileged I am. I really must not waste these chances, or other people's time.

h) For the man, the kids, and the extended family and friends.

Truly, I am blessed. They say "Sa vidya ya vimuktate" That is knowledge, which liberates.
Well, on this independence day, I think the time has come for me to get a bit more liberated in my mind and go forth without being bound by my preconceptions of what is and is not possible.

Moving on

Three and a half months... and five months.... and many unpublished blog posts on grief and many more hours staring at a white screen thinking I ought to write something but never knowing what. I think it's time to make an attempt to write about something other than grieving... which, I never realized till now, is truly extremely personal. The process is long and complicated and apparently, never stops, just changes in nature. It becomes a little embarrassing after a point of time to even admit that you are still grieving and therefore not in a mood to adhere to deadlines or communicate with your group or anything that people around you expect you to do.

RK's cousin came over a few weeks ago, after the death of her father in law, and said, my husband hasn't gone to work since his (extremely aged) father passed away. He sits there, reading old messages and seeing old pictures and crying and I am so fed up of it.
Yeah... that's the other thing about grieving- people expect you to pull up your pants and move on after a point of time.

And even worse, they expect you to be grateful for deaths that happened in a particular way. At least neither of your parents suffered,  they say, whereas my husband/father/mother/whoever really struggled so much.

Yes well... sorry? To be honest, I don't know that my parents didn't suffer. The non-suffering, quick part of their deaths is the narrative that I created, encouraged and disseminated. Deaths force you to choose narratives, which you then have to stick to because what the heck else are you going to do?

The hardest thing for me these days is a long-enduring feeling of being cheated from grieving for my father. What these past few months have taught me is that my grieving process apparently doesn't begin right after deaths, but that things hit me only after a few weeks. Now, what upsets me is that I can't think of Appa without thinking of mom. They are inseparable in death as they were not in life. I was perfectly happy communicating certain things to my mom which I definitely wouldn't have shared with my dad, but which would have reached him indirectly. Similarly, my dad and I had a code- certain things we wouldn't trouble my mom with.
Now, dammit, I can't separate out the two. It's like inviting your friend for a cozy chat and then realizing that she/he is going to bring a plus one.

Ok... this post was not supposed to be about deaths or grieving. Let me move on.

There are multiple things on the horizon that I wish I didn't have to think about: taxes, utility bills, juggling the child care issue with work issues, setting up a new lab at Rjrngr, life insurance policies (which is too close to death certificates, so let's quickly move on), and whatever. Who cares

Let me focus on taxes, because god, it's two weeks to the (extended) deadline and I am still unprepared. Just realized that the policies we took last year for the kids are under my name but RK is the one who will be filing his taxes, which means we can't claim those section 80 benefits. Gaaah! Why the hell didn't I realize this last year? Why didn't anybody tell me? Why can't there be joint tax filing??
Also, I have to file and pay my dad's taxes and I really really wish he were here to help me out on all this shit.

Ok...deep breath.

Actually the biggest thing on my head is this Africa thing. Which is all very good for career and all that, but I haven't taken the bull by the horns yet because I'm scared- who will take care of the kids, will they come with me to Nairobi, how will all this traveling affect them (or maybe it won't? Maybe they will grow up to be true global citizens comfortable in any part of the world?)? What will the school say? How will I manage the Bangalore, Chennai and Nairobi labs? How will I get them all through accreditation without fucking things up completely? And there's the BIG grant and the device and all the stuff needed for that- the design team, paying them, getting additional funding through for that, meeting the right people to get it done.

I need to break this down into bite-sized chunks otherwise I am going to get drowned in all the clutter.

Actually, I need to delegate... I've been sitting in my cocoon of trashy romance novels and lethargy for too long. I have to get a grip, make some decisions, and communicate with the right people and get my thoughts in order.

Tungnath

Tungnath feels like a dream now. The mountain feels like a gently sloping hill, the colorful horses, the green grass and the blue skies make it seem like it could be a little place in the Nilgiris, somewhere near Ooty, perhaps.

But when I strive to remember, although I don't feel the pain, I remember thinking that I might die, or vomit endlessly, or faint, or do all at the same time. The climb up the mountain, the anxiety, my wide eyes, gasping breath, my struggle not to fall back- they could have happened to someone else.

Yet, one incident I recall clearly. I was stumbling over some rocks; RK was ahead and waiting for me; the kids on their pony were almost impossibly farther ahead, the pink and orange of their sweaters making a nice contrast against the bright blue sky. For every step of mine, the rest appeared to take ten. There was no way to catch up.
And at that moment of hopelessness against a background of stubborn will to climb that mountain to keep the kids in sight, if not reach the temple, a thought popped in my head: This is what a pilgrimage is. This is what penance is.

During a pilgrimage, there is no logic. It is a struggle and in that struggle there is only one driving motivation. Maybe it is the idea of God, maybe it is as simple as trying to keep up. But whatever it might be, it is what makes you force one step ahead of another, even if your chest hurts and you are light headed and your stomach feels like it might turn inside out.

I became one with the millions of others who must have struggled on that same mountain trying to reach that same temple over thousands of years. Just as they must have collapsed on the grass and stared sightlessly at the sky, giving their bodies a break and to gather strength for the next patch of mountain, so I did. After a point of time, there was no further reason to keep climbing other than the fact that I was on the mountain and the only way was up.

Somewhere in the back of my mind was a persistent thought: maybe this struggle was a good way of apologizing to my parents, for all the wrongs, for all the times I didn't listen, for the small daily decisions of inconsiderateness, forgetfulness, callousness or willfulness.

Onwards we climbed. 2kms, 2.5kms, 3kms up. At the 3km stop, I hired a pony. I feared I would die or faint or something highly inconvenient otherwise. I would have hired the pony for the remainder of the distance, but there was some disagreement with the pony fellow and I hopped down after half a km. But the break was good and I felt comfortable being back on the ground.

I don't recall the rest of the climb. I must have climbed the remaining 1.5km and must have met up with the kids at some point of time. I only recall reaching the temple gates and removing my shoes.

The priests at Tungnath sing out their prayers, instead of reciting them. Three of them sing in harmony, in three different octaves. It is easy to close one's eyes and get absorbed in the music. The main alter is Shiva's, but it is like no Shiva linga I have ever seen. It looks a bit misshapen, a bit hump-like. Later I remembered the story of Tungnath. Shiva tried to escape the well-meaning apologies of the Pandavas after the great Kurukshetra war, turned himself into Nandi the bull and not willing to take any chances, borrowed himself under the earth. Only 5 spots of the bull are supposed to be visible. The hump of the bull is in Tungnath. The shoulders, the tail etc are elsewhere in the Himalayas. The temple was built by the Pandavas, almost 5000 years ago. It's a funny story- no doubt many of us would like to borrow under the earth while disguised as animals to escape people we have no desire to meet!

Maybe it was the exhaustion, or the air, or maybe it was just the place, but when the priests started singing the Shanti mantra (for peace) in that small, dark, ancient alter, my mind was filled with my parents and tears started rolling down my eyes. They followed it up right after with the Kshama mantra (forgiveness) and I was grateful and wonderstruck. Maybe it was a sign from God that the priests chose those exact mantras to chant?

Ultimately, it was a privilege. How many people get to see a temple built by the Pandavas?

One striking thing about this whole trip has been how my idea of our epics have changed... All my life, the Mahabharatha and Ramayana have been great stories. This trip made them so real- temples built by the Pandavas, their kingdoms (which are now suburbs of New Delhi), their battle grounds, the mountains Rama worshipped on and the peaks they stayed at... my view of India's great epics have always been extremely Western- I always felt these were wonderful fiction. Only now are my eyes slowly being to open to the fact that many of these stories might have actually happened, that the Pandavas actually did exist at one point of time. And if they did, then Krishna too would have. Which means that God suddenly no longer feels like some abstract concept. I too have walked the same mountains that all these people walked on. Suddenly, God feels a lot closer to my reality than ever before.

Escape from Bangalore 1- Travels to Delhi

Just the very act of getting away from Bangalore felt like someone had pressed a release valve in the pressure cooker of my brain.

Mundane acts of travel- packing up, waking the kids up at midnight to make in time to the airport for our 4am flight to Delhi, printing out boarding passes, going through security-  took on a sheer exuberance. We might have been the first people in the world to ever travel by air, such was the level of our excitement. 

I've never been to Delhi by flight before. The two other times in my life I've been that far up North (people like me, who feel most comfortable south of the Vindhyas and who always have to scrunch up their face to recall their primary school Hindi, always capitalize the N in North India. The geographical, linguistic and cultural differences seem so vast that North might just as well be a different country) were when I was a child- first when I was 10 or 11, and the second when I was 22 (one might think, well, not so much of a child, but for all practical purposes, in terms of total and blissful ignorance of anything of import, I was).

Outside Delhi airport are a couple of eating and tea drinking joints. Tea seems to be the favorite drink in the North... which makes me wonder why my mom, who if she could have double-capitalized the N in North would have done so while firmly proclaiming that she was fine in the South, thank you very much, was such an avid tea drinker and reluctant coffee drinker. When I was 10, my dad got transferred from Madras (which is about as South as one can get). Initially he was supposed to go to Delhi and my mom literally cried, "Oh my God, how can we possibly survive so far up North? The cold! The Mustard Oil!!" But in fact, he got transferred to Pune and my mom told me, "Oh good, it's only central India. It's quite close to Bombay and that's practically home" And that is how my parents and I became life-long addicts of poha, bakarwadi, aam burfi and zunka bhakri.

So anyway, we went to an eating joint called "Delhi Str-Eats" and guess what we saw? Idli and dosa!! So much for Delhi street eats!

We all recoiled. Give us authentic Delhi food, we cried. And so we ate parothas with big dollops of fresh butter, deep fried pooris with aloo and a gigantic oil-dripping bhatura with chole. 

My uncle had booked us a room at the IIT Delhi guest house, in the center of the campus surrounded by trees. We were greeted by a golden oriole pair, a few jungle babblers, a coppersmith barbet and a red vented bulbul as soon as we got off the cab. Very soon it became clear that while the natural beauty of the guest house was all very well, it was impossible to actually stand outside in that weather for any length of time to enjoy all this ornithological pleasantness. It was 42 degrees Celcius.... at 9 in the morning!

Our days in Delhi were spent hanging out with my uncle, aunt and cousin; visiting some friends and driving around Delhi. In my mind, Delhi was this horror city, covered in smoke and filled with rapists.Turns out, apart from the preponderance of Hindi, Delhi isn't so different from Bangalore.  Also turns out, my Hindi isn't so rusty after a few days of linguistic immersion. So, maybe I don't need to capitalize the N after all... it's just the north. It takes the same time to reach it as it does to reach Kolar by car. 

Blood

My aunt sprained her foot this evening. That left me to wipe the kitchen floor after dinner, the first time I've been alone in that kitchen since the night after my mother's death on that same floor.

If you look closely on the tile under the fixed cupboard, you can still see remnants of my mother's blood, the dried stains we were unable to reach to mop up. 

Today, while I was wiping the kitchen floor, I remembered my mother in law. She helped me clean my mother's blood after we returned from the hospital. She and I scraped the pulpy mess out, sprinkled water on the dried clots, mopped up the seeping blood and carefully poured out buckets and buckets of reddened water from the moppings into the toilet so that the bathrooms would not become stained with the discards.

No matter how much my mother in law and I might argue, I will never forget how she helped me that night, quietly, sincerely and compassionately. She wept for my mother as she cleaned and although my eyes remained dry, I took comfort in her tears. 

Many hours later, my cousin and I wiped the floor again with soap and water to remove the stickiness of the blood and the stench of it. She sprayed insect repellent by the foot of the cupboard to stop ants from eating the blood. 

Today, wiping down the floor again, I saw the stubborn stains of dried blood hiding under the immovable cupboard and I recalled my mother in law and my cousin. Somehow, I am not as worried about ants eating up mom's blood. Let them. May they gain some succor from it. 

As for my mom, she truly did give her tears, sweat and blood to that kitchen. 

Life and Death

We only ever hear of medical miracles- the time a child drowned for hours was somehow revived, the time a man had massive pulmonary embolisms that blocked off both sides of her lungs but yet survived and thrived, the time a man was revived despite his heart having stopped for a whole hour, all the "almost-died but didn't", the "lucky to be alive" stories that populate pretty much every form of modern communication known.

Death is supposed to be determined by the lack of a pulse, but somehow that didn't stop these people from not dying.

When are you supposed to stop trying to for a medical miracle and when are you supposed to keep trying? And how do you know the outcome will always be the positive one that they show you on TV? What if you do all this work, revive a once-dead person only to have a damaged person on your hands?

I wonder if I gave up too soon on my parents.

Logically, I think I took the right steps: assume we had succeeded in reviving my father.... then what? He still had the cancer, the inability to breathe by himself, the mouth ulcers that made it difficult for him to swallow and so on. Or if we had revived my mother and then she ended up like a vegetable, bedridden for life, dependent on someone else for every single action. Neither of them would have wanted that, I think.

Yet, the part of me that weaves fantasies wonders if I should have fought harder for a medical miracle.

If mom had lived

A freak accident, a fall, and a bloody death.
 I looked at her body in the ICU, words forming accusingly in my head, fighting to keep from uttering them out aloud, "What the hell mom? What the fuck were you thinking to do?"
 And i imagined my mom's words, the cadence of it, the bewilderment and shock in her voice as she might have spoken had she been able to speak.
"I thought I would quickly just do that one thing, Varsha. I never expected...I never thought that's what would happen. The last thing I ever wanted was Ani to find me like that, that poor poor child"

That godawful blood. That stench of dried metallic fluid and gunk.

My mother was with me and she wasn't with me yesterday. She kept popping into my head to tell me things, that she hasn't meant to die, only to clean up the kitchen a bit, that she didn't want any of the fuss, she called me to cover her legs after they cleaned up her bloody clothes but hadn't thought to preserve that bit of modesty. She rested in the ICU only to wake up in my head again as we went to the police station to complete the medico legal formalities, regretting the trouble her decision to climb that ladder had caused. "I'm so sorry ma" said her voice. "Who would have thought I could do this or that it would come to this?" She bemoaned the delay in getting her body out of the hospital "Yeddukki, yenna ippidieyelan paduthura?"

The post mortem. My understanding of how she might have died improves. Her voice quiets as many many pieces of information are given: supra something something fissure, midline shift, massive cerebral hemorrhage on the right side, multiple fractures on the left side.

"So, you are saying that somehow she fell off the ladder, and landed on her left side, her right side of the brain started hemorrhaging and she lost blood and she died?" I ask the forensic doctor.
"The impact was massive", says the doctor gently. Massive, massive, says my head and her voice.

I latch on to something tightly. So she may have become unconscious? She may not have even known? RK clasps my hand to him and says, yes. She was unconscious when Ani found her a few seconds after she fell. Her body probably would have shut down immediately. 

I feel a sigh going through me. I sit with her wrapped, plastic packed body in the ambulance. I make no move to touch her. I recall the feel of her soft familiar flesh and I recoil from imagining how hard it might be by now. She looks different, sort of like a nun or some saint with her head tightly wrapped. She looks molded, like a doll. When my father died, he was dressed in clothes that he liked, in a khadi kurta and loose pants. My mother got plastic and ropes. "Ayyo Varsha", says her voice, and I imagine her keeping a palm on her forehead and shaking her head at me. "What does it matter now?"

We come back home, they lift her body into an icebox and I can no longer touch her, even if I want to. Right by the icebox on a table is my father's photograph. I stare at his face wondering if there is some secret that he knows. Could my father perhaps be there with my mother? Perhaps they were right now arguing about it. My father might be saying, I thought you wanted to join me and my mother might say, yes, but not so fast and not so violently! 
Or maybe my father would say, why in the world did you come so fast? Surely you knew the kids need you. And my mother would say, yes. I know. I don't know why I came so fast either.
Or even worse... To my ever lasting shame, my father might say, I saw Varsha didn't turn up with you for my 45th day ceremony. Clearly she wasn't taking proper care of you. I didnt think you should hang around there moping about me anymore.

My eyes are sore, my head burns behind them. I have a choice- I can either continue to sit and stare ahead, and eventually collapse into sobs, tears and a migraine or I can push some food into me, get some rest and stay in control. I eat. My mother is no longer taking directly to me, but in echoes, from a not so distant past when she and I both decided to eat after my father's body was brought home from the hospital so that we could stay alert to do what had to be done.
I nap.

When I wake up, my mother's voice is silent. There is a finality in that icebox. I join my aunts in keeping the vigil through the night. Somehow I feel lighter at heart. Light enough that I'm able to greet all those who come, able to narrate her death story and talk and laugh loudly with my cousins both during the vigil and later after the cremation

Somehow it doesn't feel wrong. And right now, when my head is thick, all I can do is go by my feelings.