Stuck in a limbo

After losing a dear one, life crumbles around you as grief hijacks every aspect of life. Routines disintegrate into sore memories. How, then, must one simply go on living?

I wake up every morning in a daze. Reluctantly. The desire to sneak back under the covers is so strong that I have to fight the urge to give in. I get off the bed aware of the weight on my chest but willfully ignorant - ‘How will I ever get anything done if I don't wake up?’ Even as some days begin as a chore, on others, I'm amazed by the sun shining into the bedroom. Yellow, golden, warm, bright and promising - it's alluring. If I didn't know any better, I'd have thought this was the end of the tunnel. But alas...

I walk around the house looking for my cat Mao who is, by now, already napping by the plants on the balcony. He's spent a good few hours since the break of dawn making a racetrack of the house. Let him get his sleep.

Water the plants.

Now I'm not going to pretend to know more than I do. I just have a few versatile plants housed in the balcony - a bougainvillaea, a money plant, a tulsi threatening to die for months now, succulents and a few greens I do not know the names of. All this vegetation is actually borrowed from the gardens of my mother and my ajji. For years I saw them water their plants and make leaves from leaves. It must have been this practice, I imagine, that had them sane, keeping them from the dramatics of the domestic - their own little sanctuary of peace. So when I moved out, I chose their most reliable favourites from the nursery and attempted to make my own sanctuary.

Good job so far. After the plants are fed and I've fretted sufficiently over them, I make chai and nest myself at a safe distance from Mao, my cat. Beware of encroaching on a cat's space - you get too close, they flee.

It is while having chai that I really think about routines.  

My mornings used to be a lot different from what they are today. For one, it wasn't in Bangalore's dreamy chill, it was in loud, out-and-about Bombay chaos. And my mother was still alive.

***

My mother was the first one to wake up with the alarm for water. In Mumbai's suburb Mira Road, water had always been a scarcity. Come morning, the watchman became rooster blowing a whistle and opening the 20-30 minute window for the day's quota. Once in a while, she'd reveal that she had been up for hours. On those days, she either had to go to the bank or she hadn't gotten any sleep.

Then it was straight to business - doing the dishes, cleaning around the kitchen and making chai. My mother would reserve the dishes for the running water in the mornings displaying such sleight of hand that the pile was over before the watchman made his second round to shut the water valve. Some mornings I made chai, which my mother vehemently disliked. "Muta sarkha chaha aahey ha [this tastes like piss]," she'd scrunch up her face but proceed to finish it. A few biscuits here and there, a stale chapati from last night to dip in the chai or fruits following her diabetes diagnosis and my mother's breakfast was done. And off she went to toil about her day.

Many years went by in the circuit of that routine. My mother, once tall, staunch, mighty and brimming with possibilities, began to shrink under the weight of her duties. One, two, seven, eleven, slowly, the years started showing on her face - hardships lacerating crevices on her body, markings of labour and resilience.

I must admit I make better chai now. Any and all friends and family tell me I make a mean cup. New in-laws appreciate with wide smiles, vigorously nodding their heads. The beverage gives my days structure and offers respite. Some days, however, it is the source of great discomfort. I am sitting in my home but I have a deep yearning to return home. I revisit so much of my past through these memories but it always leaves me feeling sore. Let's name this tragedy the mirage of memories. 'Life is not gone by', it tells you, 'it's right here. Only out of your reach'.

They don't tell you this when it happens. When you lose a loved one, they refuse to tell you, that you live your days in limbo: suspended somewhere in between the past and the present, never really here, often there. Grief doesn't cherry-pick the big days to leak into your big moments. It is right here, shadowing you, making the mundane the dreadful and the past wishful. The mind is constantly jumping ships - from today to yesterday to that afternoon in 2014 when you lounged in the familiar, scuttling to settle in the old routine that once directed life - and the heart pining for bygone bliss.