Chacha

I am lying in the bed where they came to visit him. The pate of my shoulder blades and swell of my bottom rest on the very impressions his body left in the wrinkled sheet. Death was in this house, this room and this very bed. The body was bathed in this room and the bier left that very door I see before me.

It is too impersonal to write a eulogy for someone who has lived under one’s own skin for a month and a half and yet if it were someone I loved dearly, emotion would have defied articulation altogether.  I did not love him but I was related to him not just by blood but by the human connection I shared with his predicament – that of a sick man, who was too afraid to be alone and suffocated when he was with people who wished to alleviate his fear. I write this because I feel it necessary to honour his life and his absence in some way.

Sundays were his days with us. They had to be meat days because he was coming for lunch. I always thought that Ammi’s insistence on meat was part of the rituals of serving a man in this culture. I understand now that it was borne out the cognizance of his adversity. Sometime around noon or latest by 1:15pm, the doorbell would ring and in he’d come bearing a bag full of chips and candy for Foofy. It was his way of acknowledging Ammi’s meat days, perhaps. Foofy and I seldom sat with him and usually inched to our room after lunch but Ammi and KK, sensitive and considerate women as they are, sat with him for a couple of hours and prodded him into conversations he’d saved up for the whole week.

These past two months we all tried mending our fences but he wanted so badly to not be with us. It was his turn to rub in our faces that he was closer to taya’s family than to ours and that he had hated our parents for too long to be able to appreciate their efforts for him. I don’t remember the early years of the marriage but I have always seen my parents extending themselves beyond their means for that family and always being disregarded or dragged into webs upon webs of politics.

Allah forgave him all that when He summoned him that Friday and eased his final moments so quickly. Allah was kind to him…that gives me hope that our follies will too be waived with the same magnanimity as products of an overwhelming time.

I do not pray for him anymore. I believe he rests in peace.