Grief is a stubborn animal

Ahana Chaudhuri’s story assesses the unpredictable nature of grief and the pretence that surrounds societal expectations of loss and sorrow.

The story was a finalist at Soup’s annual short story contest under the theme ‘Fake.’

Illustration by Ananya Broker Parekh for Soup

Grief is a stubborn animal. It doesn't appear timely, dutifully, hair tucked behind its ears, dressed in black.

Grief doesn't come when it is summoned. It didn't come when Tinni died. Tinni was my 28 year old sister. Though by the time cancer had gnawed its way through her flesh and bones, she was barely 28. Barely Tinni. Barely my sister. 

I wished her dead. Not because every last dreg of Ma's attention went to her. Not because we were all planets revolving around a dying sun. The house was consumed by the rhythm of her day. Brushing her teeth, bathing her shrinking body, cleaning her soiled clothes, feeding her curries, soups, monsoon river fish said to possess life giving magic. Food she had demanded on a whim and then refused to touch. 

I wished her dead when she wanted her finger nails painted red but couldn't lift her hand. When her cheeks sank into the skeletal hollow of her face making her look like a bedsheet ghost. The days and nights when she was in and out of hospitals, the crook of her arm growing blue, purple, maroon and then an iridescent palette of colours radiating out in circles like a needle pricked nebula. 

 Lying in her bed she made the house smell like death. Mists of Ylang Ylang, jasmine from the flower market still wet with morning dew, flamboyant Asiatic lilies, the greatest hits of Michael Jackson blasted at full volume through noise cancelling headphones - nothing could distract from the fact that death was at our door.

 When the phone rang at 2 PM that Tuesday afternoon, I was in History class. It was my cousin Juju. “Come home,” he said. “Why?”, I asked stubbornly. “I have Film Studies at 4. Can't bunk.”

“You need to come home right now,” he said quietly. “Didi is sick.”

My stomach growled. It lurched and churned, making it hard to concentrate.

“Okay,” I said and hung up.

 Out of my backpack, I pulled out a few slices of raw mango sprinkled with salt and lathered with red chilli powder. The newspaper it was wrapped in announced "India test launches a new missile." 

 I knew Tinni was dead. 'XYZ is sick, come home immediately', is my family's code for 'Someone we love just died. But you need to hold it together.'

Maybe they think that the hope of seeing them alive one last time will keep us sane enough to take the next flight, hop into a cab, walk the final steps that will lead us to an inevitable heartache. One that we are expecting and yet oddly enough never prepared for. 

As if to reassure us that the ones we love didn't leave without saying goodbye. Through all their pain and suffering they waited to see us one last time. 

 Around me the class was dispersing. There was the sound of shuffling feet, chairs being pushed and the class representative hollering some last minute instructions about photocopies of The Age of Ashoka. Something about a test on Friday. The information was falling on deaf ears. 

The test would be a surprise. More for Professor Mirza than for us. In our test papers, Samudragupta would woo Ashoka with his masterful command over the lute, and the two of them would write to Akbar, inviting him to go horse riding in the plains of Central Asia. Fact would lose its way in a maze of fiction and we would insist that is how history is written anyway, when we received our test papers will failing grades. 

 “Let's go to Chillerz”, my best friend Avni  was saying. 

“I want French Fries.”

We started walking towards the back gate.

 “Are you okay?” she nudged me. “You look a little.....off.”

“That's not even English,” I said. Biting into the sour mango, sucking the salt and red chilli off my fingertips. 

“What's up then, Groucho?”Avni didn't let go easily. 

I shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

The college gardens were in full bloom. Father Jeffrey's dachshund was rolling in the grass, scratching its own back.  Yellow amaltas petals lay scattered like carpets. Dragonflies hovered over blades of grass that had a threatening lushness. There were groups of young men at the prime of their lives challenging each other to a football duel - a contest of vitality like no other. Who was stronger, who was faster, who's muscles could endure the most, who's heart could pump without giving. Life was exploding around me. Full, bursting at its seams. 

I don't know why I couldn't tell my best friend that my sister had died. 

My phone buzzed again. It was a text from Juju. “Come to Nimtala. Don't come home.” Nimtala is a 200 year old cremation ground in Beadon Street. 

Evidently, my cousin couldn't keep up with the charade of keeping Tinni alive any longer. Things must have been collapsing around him too fast. This wasn't like the night the fires of Vesuvius engulfed Pompeii. We knew this day was coming. Juju had turned from bereaved brother to event planner in a matter of minutes. He had an air of rehearsed composure. 

“I have to go. I need to pick up some books from College Street,” I lied to Avni. 

In the cab, I checked myself out in the rear view mirror. My hair looked fine. My red t-shirt and blue jeans were not too shabby. Tinni was friends with some niche famous literary, ex college alley revolutionary, journalist, social activist types. A crowd that made headlines in obscure publications. I was secretly in awe of them though I'd never admit that. Pretentious is what I would call them in public. 

 There was Aatish with his 4-day old stubble and brown eyes. He rationed his words like food in a famine-hit district. And there was Tito with his 121 string instruments collected from the hill tribes over his trips to the North East. The smell of Gold Flake cigarettes and budget cologne was his atmosphere. There was Sufi who actually had a small town, middle class name that didn't quite fit his poetry. 

What if they noticed me? Would my eyeliner smudge if I cried? It wasn't smudge proof. Sweat made it run. I checked my nails with their chewed cuticles and chipped nail paint. My sister's nails had the same colour. What would they be without it? Blue? White? 

Why wasn't my heart breaking? I'd never see her again. The cabbie turned up the volume of the song that squeezed its way out through the radio static. Kishore Kumar's voice filled up the gaps between the everyday orchestra of street sounds. The sky was a mocking shade of blue. The sun was dancing on tree tops. 

It was a good thing no cabbie needed directions to Nimtala.

The ghat was 5 minutes away. Tinni's trip ends here. This is the place that turned Tagore into ashes. For 200 years, the ghosts of a lost Bengal have walked its grounds. On the nights of Kali Puja, the Aghoris visit and feed on the remains of those who have been cremated. Nimtala is up there with Hastings House as a hot bed for paranormal activity. 

This would have tickled and terrified Tinni in equal measure. Her appetite for horror was borderline funny. She would draw the curtains and make the TV room as dark as possible while the sun was still out. Then she would subject me to a horror movie marathon. Later in the night, when she had to go to the bathroom, she'd wake me up and ask me to tag along. I wouldn't have been of much help in the unlikely event of a ghostly apparition. But I'd wait for her on the other side of the bathroom door like a loyal dog. 

Why wasn't my heart breaking? My lips felt chapped. I just wanted a cold orange stick. There was heat rising from somewhere inside my body like a bubbling furnace. I couldn't let it out. I couldn't douse it. I couldn't ask for water. 

The cab came to a halt near the gate. It was here. But I felt like I was in a place outside time and space. 

“Titli hugs like an orangutan. With her arms and her legs”- a 10 year old Tinni was giggling inside my head. 

 “Don't touch Snowy. He's cold,” Tinni was pushing my hand away as I tried to run my fingers through our pet dog Snowy's fur one last time before he was laid to rest under our mango tree. 

Why was my heart not breaking? Why was a lump not choking my throat? Where was the boulder that was supposed to sit heavy on my chest, making it hard to breathe?

 There were people pooling inside. Standing in circles. Muffled sobs punctuated a stifling calm. There were too many people. Not all of them had come to see my sister off to wherever she was going. She was in queue - number 24. Even death kept you waiting like a popcorn stall at a movie theatre. Maybe when the wise ones figure out the murky morals of euthanasia, they can also figure out a way for suffering bodies to spontaneously combust. Wouldn't that be a more dignified way to go? 

The smell of incense and flowers mingled with sweat and decay. It was making me sick. It was making me angry. 

"Idiot, stupid, rascal...I'll tell Ma you bit me." Tinni was screaming, locking my neck in a twist. The milk glass was falling. Ma would dispense swift and equal justice. A slap across each face. Our common shame would make us friends again. 

"You read my diary....you little B. I read yours too. I can't believe you let him lift your skirt.", Tinni was sniggering. The flash light piercing through the dark of the blanket, making her face look like the moon. 

It was summer vacation. We were sitting on the branches of the guava tree in our grandmother's house in Ranchi. “I'm reading Mills and Boon", Tinni was saying in a conspiratorial whisper. "But I have covered it with brown paper, stuck one of your sparkly labels and written your name on it,” she was sticking her tongue out at me. Tinni the monster. 

We were racing after Baba in Shantiniketan's Khoai. The wheels of our cycles skirting the red earth, setting loose gravel flying. Later on we would park in the shade of a forest called Sonajhuri. A word that means droplets of gold. Like the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the Sonajhuri trees. Like the yellow leaves falling from its branches in winter scattering like gold dust on the forest floor, caressing our toes. Our picnic lunch would come out of its basket and disappear on the count of 10. We used to be hungry like wolves. 

Why was my heart not breaking? 

Ma was standing in a corner with her back towards the living world. Denial could only carry her so far. Now she was on her own. They say parents don't have favourites. Bullshit. That must have been concocted by some sort of PR manager for parents. 

 Tinni and I were pooling our pocket money and planning to set up a candy store so that we could be financially independent. So that we wouldn't be doomed to watch The Ten Commandments with our parents in a movie theatre that didn't allow food inside. We could buy tickets to movies with fifteen songs. Where we could cry when Aamir Khan died on screen without Ma rolling her eyes and muttering under her breath we couldn't possibly be her daughters. 

There was Tinni lying on an old straw mat on the terrace on a November afternoon. We were staring at the sky. It was making our eyes water. “If you could eat the clouds, what flavor would you like?”, she was asking, running her long fingers through my hair, making me feel sleepy. 

When our next door neighbour Putul didi got married, she didn't cry when she left her parent's home to go live with her husband in a city she didn't know. People talked about her for days. About how strange and stone hearted she was. What would they say about me? 

I took out the paper wrapped mango slivers, swiped the chilli powder off the surface. Slowly, gathering every pigment of red. Then I touched my eyes. They burned like a house on fire. 

Did I look the part? Was my red t-shirt too bright for a funeral? Monima, my aunt, she looked the part. In her cat eye sunglasses and white chiffon saree, like a celebrity no one knew. Tito with his disheveled hair and sleepless eyes lost in dark pools, looked the part. Did he love her? Did she know? Did they ever kiss? Tania looked hysterical. It was taking four people to hold her down. Sobs were wracking her body with seismic force. She was Tinni's best friend. Baba was kneeling near Tinni's feet. His eyes were shut, his shoulders weren't drooping. There was little to suggest how this loss would erode him to less than the sum of his parts.

Tears of salt and chilli were filling my eyes to the brim. Spilling out like a shower of fake diamonds willed into existence with laboratory equipment so sophisticated even a seasoned merchant's eyes can't tell fake from real.

As teardrops streamed down my face, I looked.......I hoped I looked pretty. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Aatish walking up to me. 

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 Ahana Chaudhuri is a sloth bear from Calcutta masquerading as an advertising busybody in Bombay.