My Second Home in India
Death is one of life's great unknowns, and one of my greatest fears. Watching the people I love most cope with it have been some of the most difficult, yet enlightening moments of my life.
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I’m at the age where everyone is losing their grandparents. Though this is of course a large generalization, I am in the age bracket where many of my and my peers’ grandparents are now approaching—or even crossing—the age of 80. We worry about sicknesses or disabilities that may develop, trying to remain cheerful as we try not to focus on the inevitable. This looming, unknowable end—one that we aren’t sure when will occur—is too terrifying a reality for many of us to name out loud. So, we silently watch the ones we love approach the end of their lives, wishing it wasn’t happening, yet knowing that it has to come. But what if we were able to talk candidly and openly with our friends and family members when someone is dying? To ask the questions about death that we truly seek answers to, from the people that are closest to it? I wonder if this can somehow make the other side not appear so elusive.
This has been weighing more heavily on my mind recently, as I just returned from more than two weeks in India. As many of us feel when we travel to a country that holds the essence of our home, family, and values—leaving behind the excesses of consumerism and capitalism that now necessitate a life in America—oftentimes, it very much feels like a relief. I talk with close friends who spend time in their home countries of India, Egypt, and Pakistan, and describe the same emotions of feeling relaxed, cleansed, more wholesome, and even more pure when they are back home. I find that most of my reflective writing occurs in India, which I now visit about once a year. I do a lot of reading there. In general, I get more quietness and clarity in my thinking.
There was a time in my life when I would spend all summer, every summer in Punjab, India. For the three entire months of summer, every year, for nearly thirteen years, I lived under the care and supervision of my grandparents. I would switch back and forth between the two houses on my mom and dad’s side of the family: my Nanima (mom’s mom) and Nanaji’s (mom’s dad) house, where my mother and her sister grew up, and my Chachi (dad’s sister-in-law), Chachu (dad’s younger brother), and Dadima’s (dad’s mom) house. Largely, my India are these five people. They took the place of my parents for a quarter of the year during my childhood and were essentially formative in many of my earliest and adolescent memories. I talk openly and freely with them; we are close. I can tell them almost anything.
When I close my eyes and picture India and begin to smell, hear, and taste the familiar details that I remember about my country, the central setting is most often at one of my family’s houses. The black iron gate outside my Nanima and Nanaji’s house that keeps inside their old silver Suzuki four-seater and Toshiba scooters. My Nanima’s aloe vera plants that line the garden. My Dadima’s carefully kept and organized jewelry, that she stacks with her neatly folded hankies (what she calls handkerchiefs) in her colorful drawer. My Chachi and Chachu’s homemade churned butter that they serve me atop hot paranthas in the morning. They all remind me of home and being a child as vividly as eating chips and salsa on the beach in California.
After the passing of my Nanaji, and the older I get as I return to India each time, I can’t help but notice the things from my memories that are no longer present in this reality. My grandfather’s books are all still arranged the same, stacked in his old bedroom, but there’s no one left to read them to me as he used to, lying on the bed with his legs crossed as I listened intently.
My mom’s father, my Nanaji, passed away on January 4, 2018. My Dadaji, dad’s father, on January 1, 1984. My Nanaji developed Parkinson’s Disease after living an extremely healthy and mentally stimulating life. He had a PhD in mechanical engineering. So it was that more devastating when this disease slowly started to take away some of his cognitive abilities, turning him into someone unrecognizable to his family. One of the sharpest men we knew now needed assistance walking, talking, and eating. It’s fascinating how we can spend our lives building ourselves up to be a specific person, only for many of our identities to essentially be robbed in our final years of life.
We now keep my Nanaji alive in our stories, swapping jokes about his simple nature and sometimes severely serious manner. One day on this past trip to India, it was just my Nanima and I at home. She returns one day from the grocery store with Amul ice cream and achar (pickle) to eat with our lunch. We sit together at the dining table as we recount memorable anecdotes about the ones who can no longer sit at the table with us. Looking around at the four empty wooden chairs, I can’t help but picture how many iterations of table settings my Nanima has lived through in her house. First just her and my Nanaji, then them with my mom and Massi, then just her and my Nanaji again, and finally; just her. When my family gets a chance to visit, she gets a companion at the table. But she mostly dines alone.
I started remembering my Biji, which is what my family used to call my great-grandmother, my Nanima’s mom. Spunky, hilarious, confident, and full of life, she was beloved by her children, her family, and her community. My mom and her were very close, similar to the relationship I now have with my grandmother. My Nanima and I finished our lunch and moved on to dessert. We were laughing about a sarcastic comeback that Biji used to say to her husband.
“She could have been an actress,” I said to my Nanima in Hindi, eating the final spoon of creamy butterscotch ice cream—our favorite—that was in my crystal glass bowl. “She was so funny and full of life.”
“She totally could have,” my Nanima and nodded in agreement, her eyes starting to gaze up as if she was picturing a particular memory.
We looked at each other, smiling.
“Everybody’s gone,” she said, staring straight ahead, looking at particularly nothing. I could see her swallow her breath and her great, deep eyes fill with water. The silence seemed to reverberate loudly between us as a minute went by and she became lost in her gaze. I looked down at the table and closed my eyes, trying to get my lip to stop quivering. If I looked at her, I would burst into tears, which would make her feel even worse than she already was. I am very close to my Nanima. I have a deep sense of respect and love for her. Yet, her strength is sometimes completely unfathomable to me.
How does a person keep living when almost every person from their past is no longer here? It seems impossible. If the people we are most intimate with in our lives are our anchors in the world, how do we keep going on when all those anchors come loose, and are no longer there? When they simply become memories? Does it feel like a world she doesn’t know? How would I ever be able to live in a world with no one to share stories of my childhood and family with? When there is no one left in the world who knew me as a little girl? Is that feeling replaced with the love we have for our children? I do not know. I am too scared to ask her these questions.
Though she probably has the answers, I’m not emotionally prepared to hear them. It’s one of the few things I can’t talk about without completely breaking down. As a writer, there is almost no topic that I don’t feel comfortable breaching. I give words to my ideas to make sense of them, and to pointedly identify what I’m feeling. Yet, I want the uncertainty of death to remain uncertain to me. Right now, I am too fearful to try to give it a name and make it a reality for myself. Writing for me is a way of understanding, and when I write something it starts to live in me. I am not ready to live with the reality of death. Not yet.
In the Hindu religion, it is customary and traditional to cremate the body immediately after death, so that their soul can be set free. There is no waiting for a proper funeral. My mom could not be present for her own father’s in India. She flew from San Francisco as soon as she could, but it was already too late. My Nanaji passed away in the morning—he was cremated by the afternoon.
Although I sometimes see cremation as extremely abrupt, and at times, even cold, I do find something beautiful in that ideology: that a person’s inherent soul is given so much value, that we can’t stand to wait even a day to keep it in a body that has passed away. At least, that’s the way I understand it. As soon as the body is gone, the soul belongs to the universe: free to be a part of the wind, a part of the trees, until it is ready to assume its next form; whether that’s another person, an animal, or even a plant. In that sense, we can take solace in the fact that their essence is still among us.
There is a separate ceremony held after the cremation in the Hindu custom, where additional family, friends, and colleagues of the deceased can pay their respects and give speeches. Everyone dresses in white. Afterward, catered, simple Indian food is served at the family’s house. By simple, many Hindu cultures mean food free of meat, onion, and garlic. Chawal (rice), rotis, moong daal, dahi (yogurt), rajma. My mother attended that ceremony with her younger sister, my Massi, and my Nanima. She gave a speech about her father. My beautiful, bubbly, vivacious and loving mom truly became a different version of herself for a few years that followed. She was deeply sad. Now, she is back to herself again, but it rattled to me to see a person I love so much suffer and grieve the loss of a parent.
Since I am an American, where some have different customs for the dead and not a devout Hindu—so perhaps the concept of the soul is not as tangible for me—I always felt a slight sense of comfort in a burial. It feels like a piece of the person we love is still here. There is an attachment we have to a person’s body; the way their face is structured, how their hair looks, the color of their lips. I’ve always felt like burying the body meant a piece of their physical form is still here in the ground we can concretely walk on, touch, and feel—and thus, not completely gone. We take consolation in choosing what their casket will look like, as if we are picking a comfortable bed to tuck them into; as if we can control how peacefully they rest.
You can go and visit a tombstone, where that person lies just underneath. There’s a physical closeness, maybe a sense of belonging when we think of how close our heart is to theirs, even if only one is beating. I can put some flowers down, decorating the outside of their resting place. I can make it look beautiful, even. I believe we take repose in the idea that if their flesh is still here on Earth, then at least that commonality is tethering us to them. We can ration that we have a body like they have a body, with feet that can still touch the ground, instead of the elusive idea of their soul floating about. I suppose Hindus would disagree with me.
Many of the prolific writers I admire say that death is nothing to fear. Similar to change, it’s one of the only guarantees of life. It’s another stage that we have to accept. How can we possibly fear something that we absolutely know is coming? I suppose because we don’t know exactly when it’s coming. Without trying to sound too dismal, in our lives, we’re all walking along a path, with the door to death waiting on the other side. I wonder if that makes me immature, sophomoric in my view of life. Forced by circumstance—or a natural product of getting older—some people feel comfortable with the idea of death, at ease with it. These people seem inconceivable to me as if they’ve reached a greater plane of understanding on life that I haven’t touched yet.
My father is one of those people. He lost his own dad, my Dadaji when he wasn’t even 17. What makes it seem even more devastating is that it happened completely unexpectedly. My Dadaji was a writer and professor of Hindi, whose friends and inner circle were writing the books that my father and his classmates were assigned to read in school. He, like my father, was an intellectual. An even-tempered man with a warm heart, he took excellent care of himself and his family. He never drank and he never smoked. Yet, on a completely normal day, my Dadaji went to the hospital with a stomach ache.
My dad went to the hospital with his mom, my Dadima, and his brother, my Chachu. News came that they had discovered gallbladder stones, a completely curable condition. Perhaps because of the period they were living in, and the limited medical technology in India, this was considered life-threatening. The next day, a call came to my Dadima, that he had passed away. Just like that. He was no longer here. The man who gave my dad his love for books, literature, and philosophy—which I like to think has also been passed on to me—just completely vanished from his existence. I will never be able to know him. Neither of my grandfathers will ever get to read my writing.
Perhaps if I was older, or had experienced more loss at an earlier age, the other side of the door wouldn’t look so terrifying to me. There are so many people in my life who have had to put their fear of the door away and are forced to walk through it. They have dealt with losing siblings, lovers, mothers and fathers, friends, and grandparents.
They can see what’s on the other side. I don’t know I won’t know until I experience it for myself. Not unless, but until. Because unless I go first, it is a guarantee that I will have to keep facing death’s door. It doesn’t matter if I’m scared, or if I’m ready. It will come. One of my great hopes for myself is that I can make peace with it. That it doesn’t seem like a great, dark, looming unknown, but instead, just a different and necessary transition. That I can gather the courage to ask my Dadima and Nanima these questions before they’re gone. What scares me the most in life is the possibility that I never will.
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Oh my! I read and re-read the article and each time it brought a tear to my eyes. A powerful and personal way to write about death.