death in double c

by Mariam Hasan

death in double c

when i was young i was asked to draw my family; this was easy because my family was easy. we stepped into our parts and stayed there without consternation. ammi wore perfume, she wore motia on her wrists, she wore her hair up as she pressed her knuckles into the aata. abba went to the daftar in the mornings and i sat and sorted his ties by color. i polished his shoes until they were black like the samandar at midnight and i called him from the landline. when he answered, his voice was steady.

my family was easy until it wasn’t. years spilled into one another and life revealed itself for what it was: a process of continual loss. here i speak not for myself but for my loved ones. my gharwaley, who have lost more gharwaley than i can count. if i missed the way my grandmother’s words were laced with laad, what must ammi have been feeling? what was five years against thirty? nothing at all. nothing has ever been taken from me. i don’t know what that kind of loss feels like. what i know with certainty is this: it is outside the bounds of my imagination to understand how my parents resist giving in to bitterness, how they fight the heavy pulls of grief.

my family is not easy; we are difficult. we are heavy-handed and have no respect for privacy, even in the face of death. we repeat duas or read paras or cry or stand stoically, staring at the dry whiteness of the chador that lines the floor. we sit at the feet of our elders and bring them paani when they ask for it. death becomes an exercise in community. ammi’s lightness falls away. the rituals of maut are not new to her, and the grieving family forgets how young she is to know them so well. abba stands in doorways, quiet and serious. when he speaks, his words reveal no discomfort with the realities of life and of death.

my family is not easy because nothing is easy — not in the way children expect. abba hates sad films and abba holds great disdain for needless tears and abba cried today. i have seen him go where i can’t follow, i have seen him withdraw, i have seen him go silent. but abba cried today.

my family is like any other: we mourn the loss of our loved ones. and loss — death, this close, is a tripwire. we insist we understand mortality, but we are unnerved when it touches our own. loss, then, is not an absence, but a presence, asking to be felt. 

we do as it says. we feel the chill of what was once there. we sit and stare the empty space left by those we’ve lost. no amount of mourners in black are enough to fill it, but no one is trying to fill it. they are only trying to remember.