Bodies...

"What is essential is invisible to the eye..." Shekhar liked to quote from The Little Prince. Why I would suddenly recall that on the way to hospital, behind the ambulance that carried Shekhar, I don't really know. It was sometime during that ride that I felt a warm flutter against my face as I sat between our sons in the back seat of our neighbour's car. I intuitively knew that the worst had happened. When we reached the Accident & Emergency Department, a nurse directed us to a waiting room as the doctors tried to resuscitate Shekhar...I involuntarily rocked myself and tried to think. It was impossible. I felt like I was outside myself, observing me, the surroundings and everybody else. Although deep inside I knew...there was a certain peace in waiting, hoping, praying...a lucid break from reality. When the death was called and they allowed us to see Shekhar, the boys and I were unbelieving until we saw him for ourselves...in a moment of clarity, I realized that what made that body Shekhar just wasn't there any more.

Later as the boys and I sat on our bed, dazed and uncomprehending, I looked around the room. Panic rose slowly as it hit me, we lived in a home provided by the organization Shekhar worked for, drove a car that was leased by the organization Shekhar worked for, the boys' education was funded by the organization Shekhar worked for, we were in a foreign country on dependent visas guaranteed by the organization Shekhar worked for...the entire illusion of my life as I knew it was on lease from the organization Shekhar worked for...and now our future depended on the largesse of the organization Shekhar worked for...

Dry eyed and numb, hugging Shekhar's empty jacket, I wandered around the house looking for what we could really say we owned and they were just things. Things that occupy space...in our case, an alien rented space...things we thought were 'essential' to our lives.

When the coroner called to confirm the cause of death and say that a post mortem was not going to be necessary, I only registered the fact that at least Shekhar's body would not be disrespected any more. It was a bizarre moment when I saw him again. This time he lay cold, swollen and alone on a gurney in the Chapel of Rest, dressed in absurd purple robes...the body was Shekhar's but it didn't look like him, it didn't smell like him, it didn't feel like him...I was mourning a stranger. Yet, as his coffin was consigned to the flames, all I wanted to do was save the tangible body through which I knew and loved Shekhar.

I have now understood that life is all about our bodies. They need a home, they need clothes and things, they need to be fed, protected and looked after...just bodies. In essence, we live for our bodies rather than through them. As I look back at the moment of clarity at the time of Shekhar's passing, I realize that the only thing I truly, physically own is this body. It is where I live, it is how I am made visible...but it is just a body. A body that provides the fragile and transient logistics for living a fragile and transient life in a fragile and transient world...while leaving the essential invisible to the eye...

***

God gave me sunshine

Then showed me my lifeline

I was told it was all mine...

Bodies on my family

Bodies in the way of me

Bodies in the cemetery

And that's the way it's gonna be...

From "Bodies" by Robbie Williams, Brandon Christy and Craig Russo

Strength, grace and wisdom

A woman brought her dead child to the Buddha and asked him to bring him back to life. The Buddha sent her to a village nearby, telling her to bring back a few mustard seeds from any home that had not had a death. If she did so, he would do as she asked. The woman went with hope but came back empty handed and enlightened. There was no such house in the village...

Like this woman I have spent the past twenty-one months knocking on illusory doors but although I have a quick grasp for intellectual concepts and rational thought, I am a slow learner of life lessons. Some lessons have been intuitive whispers, others gentle nudges but I have only listened to the ones that whacked me upside my head. I can understand God's frustration with me...

Someone once called me Nu Qian Ren, which in Mandarin literally means a strong female person. It gave me pause. The dissonance between my internal perception of myself and the external impression people formed of me was disturbing. How could they not see the doubt and uncertainty or the struggle and fear? I have heard the same words several times and in many different forms since Shekhar died. The dissonance is stronger and even more disturbing. Little did people understand that I felt like a boat that had lost its moorings, floating rudderless on the rapids of a life I did not recognize...an orbit-less planet in a universe where the star had died.

In the immediate aftermath of Shekhar's death, I would tell anybody who would listen that I had lost my husband. The words would fall out of my mouth unbidden and inappropriate... as a sort of apology or explanation for what I could not control, to make real the unacceptable truth of his sudden and inexplicable passing away but most of all to externalize and make visible my internal pain and confusion. The pain was so intense that I could not look beyond myself. Everything only made sense in relation to what was happening to me - I could not empathize, everything became distorted, at once magnified or made trivial by the strange prism of grief - I was both human and automaton. Slowly and painfully, perspective is returning...the other side has come into view despite the death grip of memory.

The truth is that this is my life and these are the circumstances, I am living it...strength has little to do with it. It is more about resilience...how much can you survive without breaking or falling apart? We all do the best we can, with what we know and understand and can bear...

A year is a wonderful metaphor for life. It begins with possibilities and resolutions, encounters the self somewhere in the middle when revisions and recalibration become acceptable and ends in regret and a still full in-basket...as one year dies a natural death, the new year promises rebirth and the cycle repeats itself.

Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystic, said, "Many demolitions are actually renovations." As I begin another year living in the rubble of my previous life and identity, I am renovating using strength, grace and wisdom - strength to meet the many challenges ahead of me, wisdom to embrace the new year and as Sarah Ban Breathnach says, grace to be grateful not only for what I have but also what I have escaped...but most importantly of all, I am rebuilding in congruence - where the inside is the outside and vice versa.

***

Memory is how we hold on to the past... Regret, hostility, anxiety, insecurity all depend upon trying to relive the past and change it. Therefore, memory blocks the flow of life in the present...The past is dead. There is no life there, even when you dwell upon a happy past.

Deepak Chopra

First day, first show...

Shekhar was a first day, first show man, especially when it came to Amitabh Bachan movies. I preferred to wait for the first reviews to come in, for shorter queues, better seats and legally bought tickets rather than the over priced ones sold in black by touts. It was just one of those many small differences that made us balance each other.

Yet there were other times when we both preferred to wait. Like the time when I got my results for my M Sc degree. I had threatened that I would paint the town red, get drunk, be merry and stay out until the wee hours of the morning. Shekhar and the boys were all gung ho despite their inner disbelief that I could or would ever do something like that. The day came and it was pouring cats and dogs. Shekhar and I dressed up to the nines, then armed with umbrellas, the boys' blessings and a rugged determination to have fun, we hit the bars in Lan Kwai Fong at 9 p.m. Starting with a pitcherful of margheritas, we went on to have vodka shots wearing fur coats in a room made of ice and then sloshed our way to watch people dance on a bar counter in Wanchai. I remember the moment when we looked at each other in a dark, noisy bar not quite drunk, not quite having the fun we had envisaged, in wet clothes...it was a silent consensus. We hailed a cab to take us home. "You had fun?" he asked as we got into the taxi. I had to think a little before I replied. "Not quite...I would rather be home with the boys." "Me too," he had said. We laughed the rest of the way.

"What's wrong with you people?" the boys had looked at us in disapproval as we walked in through the door. "Do you know what time it is?" We looked at our watches and were ashamed. 10.30 p.m... there was no redemption for people like us. As we changed into our pyjamas, threw a movie into the DVD player and watched together as a family...all was well with our world. We had decided to wait for a time when the call of home would not be as strong, fun was for later. When the bonus came, when the boys had plans of their own, when the bills were paid, when things settled down, when the weather was better, when the future was here...

A couple of hours before he died, Shekhar had said, "Tomorrow, I don't care if it's raining or not, we are going to Greenwich. I want to stand on the prime meridian..." As usual we had waited, only this time it was to no purpose. His tomorrow never came.

Now standing at the threshold of a new year, I look back and realize that we were both waiting for now to have fun...this was the time, this was the nebulous future we were holding our breaths for...but my first day, first show man had bought tickets to a different movie.

As acceptance slowly creeps in, I have decided not to wait anymore...neither for time, circumstance nor people. It has been a painful realization that whether I wait or not, time will pass, days will end, new years will begin...I still haven't thought of the how, but it is a new year and a time for resolution - of a past that cannot be carried into the future and to promise to create a future that does not involve regret...now.

Press play...

***

...that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way...It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

From Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

God's fingerprints

I never thought of myself as the earth mother type. But the day the paediatrician handed our first born into my arms and said, "Don't be afraid of what you have to do to look after this baby. Motherhood is like water, it'll find its own level," I was transformed. Every wish, desire, aspiration and ambition I had for myself became secondary. Then our second son was born. Once again, I held a little helpless baby in my arms and wondered at the magic of motherhood. Any doubts I had about whether I had enough love to stretch to two disappeared; as not only did it stretch, it grew exponentially...

Five months before Shekhar died, I discovered a lump in my breast. It came on suddenly and grew quickly until it was visible to the naked eye. Since it was accompanied by weight loss, thoughts of malignancy were never far from my mind.

For over two months till when I could get it tested under the NHS, Shekhar and I panicked, worried and thought of the worst. Then the earth mother kicked in and I did what I do best, I made a list of scenarios. "If this happens, then..." We never told the children till the day I had to go to hospital. It was all according to the plan. If all was okay there was nothing to worry about, if it wasn't then they would have to deal with it. I had a plan for that too. I came home after the extraction and waited...it was benign, the body's detritus. I had prepared for a protracted battle but was sent home from the enlistment centre.

Three months later, looking at Shekhar's still warm body in the hospital, my first thought was - it should have been me. I was prepared, ready. The wrong parent had been taken and God's fingerprints were everywhere...

Since then I have struggled to get out of bed each morning, wanting to hide from life and its vicissitudes. I have pushed against the resistance for one reason and one reason alone - the two beautiful gifts Shekhar left behind. One parent may have gone, why put them through the torture of losing both?

The other day, our youngest expressed the crackling wit of his father. Then he looked at me and said in jest, "It's your fault, you gave birth birth to me." It was a timely reminder of the privilege with which I have been blessed. The bitterness of being abandoned at the post of parenthood faded. It made me realize, I may be the wrong parent...but at least I am still here. God's fingerprints were here too.

***

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.

From Phaedra by Sophocles

Not waving, but drowning

Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross theorized that grief is a continuum starting with denial, moving through anger and depression to finally, acceptance. But as anyone who has experienced it first hand will tell you, grief is a Sisyphean struggle. One swings between the stages, starting one day with anger ending with denial or another with acceptance funneling into depression...human nature trumps any effort to sequence or categorize it.

I have been watching the television programmes marking the first anniversary of the carnage in Mumbai on 26/11/2008. The media is speaking to ordinary people, survivors and those who have lost someone close. There is a commonality I have observed...one year on, there is a significant difference between those who have experienced a personal loss and those who have survived or have been mere observers of the Golgotha that was 26/11. There is a wet deadness in the eyes of those who are grieving. No Duchenne smiles, no tolerance for frivolous banter, an emotional distance...

Having met several people who have experienced similar losses in the past year, I have seen the same deadness in their eyes. They use the same words, in the same flat tone. "I look at people laughing and enjoying themselves and I wonder how they do it. I could do it before but I don't remember how. Wonder if I'll ever feel the same or anything, any more..." I feel the numbness they speak of. It is like my soul has disconnected from my physical body. I have become a functioning, living, breathing, eating third party observer...an emotional zombie...

The night Shekhar died, something broke in me. I don't know how to fix it. I have been told that over time the pointedness of the pain will wear off, acceptance will come to stay and resilience will out. But I know that even though the wound may heal, the scar will remain. The damage has been done...time will tell if it is reversible, if at all. In the interim, that person I see swimming in the sea of grief is me and...I am not waving, I am drowning...

***

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning.

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning...

From Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith

A little sob in the spine

I started this blog with an audience of only one in mind, as therapy, an expression of what I could not articulate when I spoke. Why then such a public platform? Why not just stick to the journals I wrote ever since I can remember?

My life has been documented in the banal inanities of everyday living, the small crises that buffet the day...on paper with a fountain pen, in numbered copybooks of all shapes and sizes, marking years, journeys, destinations in Bowdlerized words...who knows who might read them and know the tortured soul I truly am?

I remember Shekhar wanting to read what I wrote. "I'm sure you're writing about me..." he would say. "Everything is not about you," I would reply. He would hover and find reasons to peek over my shoulder as I wrote. Soon after he died, the journals became about him. Every page was a letter to him, a litany of what one would be afraid to say to a person who was still alive. In death there is no privacy, everything is accessible...there is no place to hide, no secrets to keep, no approval to seek, no permission to grant...Communication between the dead and the living is the most honest it can be...but it is not enough. Your words float into the ether. There are no echoes...no responses...no consequences...

Hence the blog - to make oneself visible...to reach out and know that someone, somewhere might be touched, might know your pain, might understand...in a world that is bolting past your stillness, it is a cry to be validated, acknowledged as still living.

Vladimir Nabokov the author of Lolita said, "I don't write to touch hearts. I don't even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is the little sob in the spine of the artist-reader." I find myself agreeing with him, the only difference being - I write because there is a little sob in my spine...it appeared 18 months ago. Shekhar put it there...

***

As soon as one writes one miraculously ignores the current circumstances of one's life, yet our happiness or misery leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination is more dominant. When miserable, the power of memory takes over.

Natalia Ginzburg

Mortmain...

Like most people in love I too had professed that I could not live without the object of my affection. Now he's gone and I am still here. I am surviving, existing without him...life makes liars of us all.

It is eighteen months...everyone says how quickly the time has passed but I know how difficult it has been to get through each moment stretched in grief, in absence, in pain...time is elastic.

In the first few months after Shekhar's death, all I could think of was - what if I die too? That question carried me through the immediate collapse of life as I knew it...I lived with a deadline. I got through each day walking the tightrope between 'if' and 'if only' with an almost manic hold on the only reality I knew and understood. Everything needed to be sorted, organized, consolidated...for the children. Time was an external construct, a limited context. There were no goals, only priorities.

Then at some point around the sixth month, the question turned on its head. What if I live? For a year? For ten? For longer than I had him in my life? The emptiness yawned and consumed both past and present. I decided to live one day at a time but living one day at a time in the shadow of death means living without anticipation, without goals, without meaning, without purpose...without a future.

So since the night I held death in my arms, I have learnt not that life is precious but that when the time comes there is nothing you can do to fight death's cold embrace. Words bounce, tears dry, touch withers...mortmain - the dead hand - grips life. Its hold is so tight that time slows and becomes a fallacy, perspective foreshortens, thought distorts - life and death connect in a visible arc.

Mortality is our mien. We live to die but it is only when death becomes personal do we try to find meaning in life. Till then, death is just a statistic...and numbers don't die.

***

A death-blow is a life-blow to some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died, but when

They died, vitality begun.

XLVI, from Part Four: Time and Eternity by Emily Dickinson