I was away at the funerary rituals of my aunt last week and behaved very badly. With a brave face and steel in my mind, I stood close to where the sacrificial fire would be lit, all set to watch something I had not been able to look at when my own mother died in December last year. And I was past that immediacy of trauma, I told myself, and waited for the bricks to be arranged, the sticks to be laid, the dried cowdung cakes to be set just so, the chanting to begin. Then I fled, into the garden, clinging to my own composure by talking to a friend at work, two-plus hours drive away from where we were.
Later, when I was asked to play a miniscule role as a daughter of the family, I did, stone faced and rigid, staunchly holding on to whatever vestige of poise I had left of the vast store my mother had trained me to keep within myself. My father, as bereaved, if not more so, stood by me – as I did by him – the whole while, holding me as I finally cracked and wept against his shoulder out there among the shrubbery. It was a time we should not have had to relive…but we did, for my uncle’s sake, for the family, for us, in some strange way.
Death is not something you ever ‘get over’. The trauma of it all lingers, from the shock of that enormous loss, the pain of all the memories, the guilt of the overwhelming imbalance of the ‘not done’ as against the ‘done’. The scenes that you live through from the moment the person you lose has left you – or is on the way to doing so - until the time you come home again and bathe after everyone who has come to condole has gone get locked into a little box in the recesses of your mind and peep out at you just when you think you can look at them again without flinching. And, though the sharpness of the pain goes away, at least a little, it settles into a deep, incurable ache that you can never find a painkiller for.
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