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by Manmeet Kaur
It has become easier to talk about death. Badi Mummy was working through the details today. She has never become too aware of Gurgaon. In her mind, home continues to be people, places shifting only as far as the background of the walls is concerned. Home is not a place; the neighbourhood is not a familiar collection of houses. I am not sure how much of the house she sees anymore. The walks she takes in the house are limited — navigating the little corridor between her room and the kitchen, her room and the bathroom, her room and Babaji’s room. I don’t think she has seen my room in days. We live in a three-bedroom house, all on the same floor.
She has been struggling with sleep for some days now. Old age, she says. But she never stops stressing about it. Old age is not a passive fact, it’s a condition she negotiates everyday. She seems torn between her desire at complete austerity complying with the colour of her hair, and her desire to be able to move in the house as before. Not beyond, just within. But with a little more ease, and some sleep at the end of the day.
I have been having trouble sleeping for a few months now. I try to blame it on my age but at 24, I am not sure which bracket I fit anymore. Badi mumma says it is my bad habits. Sleep early, get up early, wear longer pants. You shouldn’t be sleepless at your age! I try to articulate the effort it takes to stay awake through the day and asleep through the night. I stay quiet through the effort. Yesterday, she mentioned she couldn’t sleep, planning through the process. It has become easier to talk about death.
She was shivering on the dining table last evening, just before tea. The fan was off, the monsoon had touched and left the room. She was shivering, and a fever had made it to her forehead. In COVID times, that was enough. She spent the day in her room, watching the new mythological show on DD. She ate there. By morning, the fever hadn’t returned, and we were free to freeze the fear for now. But she hadn’t slept the night, trying to figure out the logistics. She was unsure of where we will get the stuff needed for death rituals. She hadn’t been out shopping for many years even when we were in Delhi, but she had known. The memory of where ‘essentials’ could be bought had sustained. She has never become too familiar with Gurgaon. We have lived here for five years.
As COVID updates from news channels, old neighbours and oldest relatives flowed through the house, I was asked not to go to her room too often, and keep some distance. It wasn’t difficult, but it did tell me how I hadn’t been to her room in days. I hadn’t seen her bathroom in months. I had bathed there when my shower broke almost a year ago. I had slept with her night after night once she came back from her longish trip to the hospital just before my sister’s wedding. I hadn’t slept in her bed all this time, and now I couldn’t. Isolation was a necessity, but it had long become a way of being.
I walked through the house today, a three-bedroom in Gurgaon, all on the same floor. I touched corners, and felt for switches I had had nothing to do with for many days. I relished the touch of walls not yet out of bounds. I traversed through my isolation to really look at the rooms I had marvelled at five years ago, when we moved in. I looked long and hard at the veranda, stared at the bay window, disbelieving we had it, all on the same floor. A veranda, like the ones I used to memorise from the interior-design magazines to draw for art class. A bay window just like the one I fixed in my head to dream of a house I wanted. A house I now had.
It has been five years of being in this house, five months of the lockdown. The forced period of isolation is a mere ornament: I had retreated into myself long ago. We all had, I think — in our three-bedroom house for four people, picking fragments of drawing-room conversations and restaurant allusions for our own one bedroom, mincing words in our heads, turning them around, lazying through the effort of articulation. The grief of difficult dialogues, and the reference to death stayed inside the room. With mild fevers ebbing and flowing through the dining table, it became easier to talk about death.
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Manmeet Kaur is an English literature graduate from LSR, with a Masters degree in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies, UK. She writes short stories and personal narratives driven by real or imagined women. She is based out of Gurgaon.
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