For When the Bell Tolls
Some bells echo up to the field of life. Some ring beyond that horizon. All by the hands of Death.
I remember deaths.
Not many. A few.
Personal deaths. Or rather, deaths I have witnessed intimately.
Not the act of dying, but what comes after. Or doesn’t. I knew them as they were, and I saw them erased. I was privy to their bodies leaving a trail of ash enough to fill an urn large enough to stand on a mantle. Until the remains are washed away in the Ganga.
For a kid growing up, the very idea of not being felt wrong. How could perfectly reasonable people just wither away? Who would take them away?
But then she came knocking.
I do not remember my grandmother. That is to say, I do not remember her alive. I have seen her photographs tinged with the sepia of age, yellowed with remembrance on the edge, and thumbed with the smudges of dredge. The ritual to recall is an album tucked away in the corners of different homes. Of my grandfather, my uncles, and my father.
It is he, however, whom I do remember. A flash as instantaneous as the precursor to a photograph. I see him in a dhoti, chest bare but for a line of sacred thread. I find sadness on his face, sadness I do not understand. I hear people crying. I feel people bleating. I smell the air hanging heavy with death. She was there, but I could not see her.
How could I? I was but a bud aged three, clinging to my mother, a shelter from the cacophony of the heralds of the end and of moving on.
That was my first brush. An understanding that I did not understand at all. A ritual I did not want to be threaded with. The holiness of passing had been buried under the folds of grey matter, coffined to confines I didn’t want to unearth.
I grew up and turned away from death.
While my parents stole themselves away from their perfectly tight schedules to pay respects to the departed, I would curl up and lock myself away from the prying eyes of the living. It was a conscious web of struggle. I wanted to scrape the sand off the cold, hard earth and feel the friction turn my skin into minute shavings.
Just to avoid her.
But society does not give an easy release to a child. You are expected to follow in the footsteps of the elders. So when their shoes are parked outside the home of those who were, and the doorbell has been rung, your baby feet tread the imprints of oils from the living and into the antechamber of mourning.
And then they cry. And so we cry. No one is looking, it seems. No one is intervening to comfort the sobs of discomfort. No one helps to man the dams of tear ducts.
My head loses the will to stay up. But my body tenses up. Like a grazing deer made privy to the upwind scent of a predator. I lift my head. My doleful eyes scan the horizon. Nothing comes to pass. But then, just for a fleeting moment, between the pauses punctuated by sobs and earmarked by tears, I see her.
She is gentle. Sad. Tired. Yet unmoving. She scans to see her work done, to collect the tears in her own little urn; a glass vessel colder than the receptacles carved into Himalaya’s face.
She didn’t want to spook me, for I was never her quarry that day. But I knew that she knew that we’d cross paths once again in the Savannah grasslands.
What do they call it? The circle of life? She finds that amusingly pitiful.
She stands up. We stand up. Our patrons stand up. We bid farewell. Her lips carve a smile onto her absent face. Farewell had been bidden twelve days ago when she made the doorbell toll.
I curl up again, angry that my parents made me accompany them. It is a necessity, they say. It’s an act of solidarity, they remark. People work together. I cannot pull myself away from the fabric of life.
Which is why I try to do it a few more times.
I did not want to see her.
But she did.
So she rang more doorbells around us. Sometimes within the extended family. Some I could run away from. Others, I was shackled by familial bonds. I made sure, though, that I would not lift my head. A gazelle only wants to graze. Why should it worry about the herd when it has its mouth to feed?
The grasslands of life, however, are a commune on their own. If not today, then tomorrow, when you gulp the satisfaction from a waterhole, you will find yourself close to the one who brings your death.
Or a death that’s close to you.
There is a night in the deeper folds of my grainy consciousness. A night I often gloss over. Somehow, the events preceding that night live eternally well-lit in our collective consciousness.
It was that night, however, when the clocks had tucked the blanket of the night, that my mother’s phone rang. The first toll had been rung close to our family.
My Naani (maternal grandmother) was a hardworking woman. Short in stature and fragile to look at, as if she’d break at the softest of touch. But iron-willed to the very bones that jutted out of her skin.
I have many memories of her. With her. Without her. Memories I am fond of. Memories I hate. Memories I wish I wouldn’t have to revisit after a cold glass of water on a September morning.
And then there is this memory, a snapshot plucked from the album of my life, neatly labelled in a tidy scrawl, laminated for protection until my end, and tucked back within the flow of time.
How do you remember someone who isn’t alive to be the subject of said remembrance?
I saw my mother collapse after that phone call. Age had had the final word with my Naani. We left that very night, my father driving through the borders of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, my mother trying to keep herself steely-hard, and I unfocused and unsure of what to feel.
Dawn saw us to the doorstep of her home. There were others here. Others from the family and their families. My mother took my support. She couldn’t stand. I couldn’t run.
We did not need to ring the bell. The door was ajar. People encircled what remained of my Naani: a body shrivelled with hardships, age, and neglect. My mother couldn’t hold her emotions any longer. Down came the tears, the sobs, the cries of loss.
And there she was, with her many arms primed to collect the offerings of mourning in her frigid chalice.
We locked eyes. Death had missed me.
I found a place between my maternal relatives—aunts, cousins, women I never knew, men I knew but didn’t want to know anymore. There was a mechanical practice to my movements.
I had done this before, hadn’t I? The visiting, the mourning, the exchanges of recognition, respect, and reverence. I could not feel, but I could remember. Rigor mortis had set in. Muscles tensed with cold grace, neurons activated measured signals, and movements came with practiced fluidity. Even when I sat frozen with the shock of my Naani’s passing washing over me, I was animatedly unmoving. Alive and dead. Life next to Death.
She held her gaze questioningly at me. Where was I all this time? Did she not beckon with the knells of ambulances, wails of the living, and rings of the doorbells?
How could I even answer? I couldn’t even look at her. I was afraid that if I let my emotions unfurl, I’d only lash out at her.
The dead don’t divulge their secrets. Those around me bayed with the ferocity of a trapped and hurt animal. Questioned the threads of fate. Lied at the expense of societal agreement. The mourning had begun.
This time, I couldn’t cling to my mother. She had her own mother to cling to. One last time.
Hindu rituals of passing have their own cadence. There is a time to do things, and a place to do them. The body’s offering to the pyre, to be released back into the elements, is prefaced by practices and recitals that pierce the morning light. Loved ones and pretenders offer their final supplication to undo the mishappen. But Time wears Dali’s overflowing, limp robes. Outside, the world comes to a standstill.
The march begins. Lord Ram’s name is infused with the lively crawl of people, vehicles, and earthly rotations still tugging at the strings of fate. Until the crematorium comes into focus.
It was here that, and I distinctly remember this, I found myself alert once again. The pyre had raged its rage, released the immortal soul from its captivities of the mortal shell. My Naani was free.
I remained standing.
I felt alive.
I felt miserable.
A single tear heralded my sadness. As it made its way down the ash-laced cheek, I knew I’d never see my Naani ever again.
But death? She had passed. There was no one to collect my tears.
