There is a particular cruelty in the way the world insists on continuing. Even before my youngest aunt’s bier was out of the house, tea arrangements were being made for everyone. People would need tea after the cremation. My brother was driving me, my mother and her septuagenarian brother, the widower who was totally unprepared to cremate his much younger wife, to the middle-of-the-city crematorium. All of us complained about the potholes on the road. And I thought: This is the part they leave out. The tea and the potholes.
Grief, as it is sold to us in elegies, in the long third acts of prestige dramas, in the memoirs that win prizes and generate profiles, is a grand and annihilating weather. It’s like a storm. It descends. It levels. It sometimes makes the bereaved luminous with suffering. Those left behind are rendered interesting in their ruin. We are given widows who wander. We are given fathers who drink themselves into a useful metaphor. What we are not given, with any real frequency, is the dusting. The bathrooms are always wet because there are too many people in the house now. The specific horror of realising, four days after the cremation, that you are out of biscuits to accompany the tea. People will come braving the potholes. They’ll need tea.
Bereavement, it turns out, is largely an administrative experience.
{{/usCountry}}Bereavement, it turns out, is largely an administrative experience.
{{/usCountry}}The dead leave paperwork. They leave new sets of clothes at the tailor’s. There is medical equipment lying in the bedroom; it needs to be returned before the next month’s rent is accrued. There are bank accounts and lockers to be handled. Mobile phone connection that will be kept by my cousins only for emotional reasons. The death certificate will have to be procured. Yes, everything is digital, but the website will keep crashing. The bereaved inherit not just absence but logistics. Grief has a to-do list.
And the body, that stubborn biological fact, keeps making its embarrassing demands. We are hungry at the wrong times. We sleep too much or not at all, and in the not-at-all hours we find ourselves watching videos of dogs being reunited with soldiers, not because we are sentimental but because our brain has simply vacated the premises and left the television on. My cousins eat food bought from a nearby dhaba, the only place that makes home-style food, and worry about the leftovers. The self, in mourning, becomes a neglected house-plant. Still technically alive. Not doing great.
Some friends and relatives, meaning well, bring food. This is ancient, this impulse, and genuinely kind, and yet there is a comedy to it that the ancients perhaps did not anticipate. Sometimes the food is delicious in its simplicity, and sometimes it’s inedible. Sometimes it’s more than enough to feed the neighbourhood, and sometimes it’s too little, but everyone remembers to comment on its quantity regardless. Nothing goes unnoticed.
Admin work has to be done more aggressively than before. People need to be invited for the thirteenth-day rituals. They need to be fed. The venue needs to be fixed, menu needs to be finalised. Everything has to match the deceased’s standard of living. Or death.
There is a theory, not comforting but a useful one. The very banality of bereavement is its mercy. That the medical equipment rental shop will send its person to collect everything anytime. The world is not cruel but simply indifferent, and indifference, after a certain point, becomes a kind of scaffolding. Biscuits run out, and you unlock your phone to place an order on an e-commerce site. It screams of offers and promotions. Cousins like me drop by at that very moment. You greet them and forget to order. You remember after an hour and feel guilty. While choosing the biscuits and other things, you feel the full weight of the fact that ordinary life is still on offer, still available for purchase, and that this is both terrible and sustaining. But the feast needs to be organised, too.
The feast is not a climax. This is not the part where language rises to meet the feeling and carries it somewhere meaningful, like they have been telling us about the soul. This is just another day. People like me turn up after work and eat the delicious spread. My cousins ask if everything is okay. All of us keep remembering my aunt, her zest for life, the countless childhood memories. She is gone. And everyone else is still here.
The tea is served, along with the biscuits, later in the evening once everyone is back home after the feast. People are now joking, sitting on her bed. The most banal and astonishing thing of all.
Nishtha Gautam is an author and academician. The views expressed are personal