A Family Quarrel Over Dying: Ratnakar Tripathy

Image of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (1510)

I

t was an early supper a few weeks before my father passed away. It wasn’t a grand family huddle by any means since father had just come back from the hospital after a long stay and mother and I were trying hard to get him to eat just a bit more. Father was slow with his intake and barely interested although gentle nudges from both of us made him smile radiantly as if our coaxing gave him greater joy than the food in front of him. Refusing to be spoon-fed, he raised his morsels with great disinterest like someone picking rubble from the floor. Being fussed over like a reluctant baby ready to spit up, he feigned annoyance even as the pleasure from all the fawning showed clearly in his eyes.

‘Such a wonderful parwal [a popular vegetable of Bihar and Bengal] and you had to make a watery curry. Why didn’t you fry them in thin slices’, he asked mother feigning great interest in the food.

‘Because I am not supposed to. The doctors said you must have very little oil if any. And anyway, this is easier for you to chew. Eating seems to have become hard work for you,’ was my mother’s stern response.

‘This pap barely needs chewing. Who was the British doctor who said you must chew your food no less than thirty-two times? That’s hard work for you’, father said grumpily but loudly enough for Ma to hear.

‘So, all the while you eat, I should sit and keep a count of your chomping,’ Ma reacted sharply.

My father gave me a frail but contented smile and said ‘why not? Your mother does everything for me, anyway. She always did. I even depended on her to bring me water when I got too engrossed in my work to remember.’

He was not exaggerating. I had seen any number of quarrels between the two when my mother forgot to fetch his punctual glass of water and got blamed for leaving him thirsty. Once an hour in a large brass tumbler was the iron rule! Once I heard him nag my mother over the thickness of chapatis – it seems she made them plumper than usual and with his routine of three chapatis for a meal, my father ended up overeating, or so he imagined. He was accusing her of causing him a nagging constipation.

‘I have been contemplating in the toilet instead of sticking to my desk but nothing comes of it,’ he whined in frustration. In fact, he brought all his health problems to Ma in the form of accusations against something or the other she forgot to do or overdid. The one thing I could not stand about my father, his elder brother as well as my grandfather was their habit of opening their mealtime conversations with updates on their private gastral matters. These conversations began on a note of deep and almost numinous insights and excitement over the grungy details of bodily processes they regularly reported to each other by way of family loyalty. They spoke of their alimentary issues as if their digestive tracts were alien and independent beings that dwelled within their bodies but had their own ways and rules of behaviour. The small intestine in particular was seen as a rogue requiring constant monitoring and taming. Their evacuatory anxieties bordered on a cosmic angst the threesome shared with great regularity. Such talk could ruin your appetite but seemed to add spice to theirs. Thankfully, they mostly passed on to other affairs just as I began to feel nauseous, and let me eat in peace. But it also remains to be said that unlike many other men, father never complained about food while eating. The unwritten rule in the household was you generally praised the food you relish and if you did not like it, you brought it up quietly with the women after the meal. His crabby remark on parwal gravy therefore seemed a bit out of character.

Father had been a stingy smiler most of his life and tonight it was strange to see him beaming and chuckling like an infant indulged, and basking under simple affection. In between he would stop and look at us waiting for a signal or perhaps an applause as the food went into his mouth. His medical issues, the doctors had warned us, were largely metabolic and even a slight lack of dietary care would send his body biochemistry into a downward curve. He had been in and out of the hospital a few times in the past few months and did not want a repeat as he hated being carried down the staircase, being packed into an ambulance and rushed across in utter helplessness and panic. The moment he came to in the hospital room his constant refrain was ‘when am I going home’? Every doctor and attendant including the ward boys and the sweepers who visited the room were faced with the same question in his tired and feeble voice which grew stronger and insistent by the day as he recovered after endless intubations. I think the harried doctors released him for the vexation he caused them rather than any definite sign of recovery. With too many calls to the doctors from his former students in high positions in the government and the professions, they couldn’t be rude or curt with him and were happy to let the cranky old man go. As if a release from the hospital by itself gave him a stamp of normalcy and fitness, he left the hospital with the smug expression of someone officially certified as fully mended and restored to normalcy! But it was just a lie that we couldn’t begrudge him! After a number of stints in the hospital, I suspect he seemed a bit disappointed with his medical calamities for not being terminal enough. This was the quiet mindreading that I kept to myself as I watched him smile indulgently and resignedly at us and the medical staff for our efforts at his recovery. Almost as if he appreciated all the sweat and good intentions but was certain that nothing much could come of it! Refusing to fight death with vigour and more afraid of disability than death, another stint in the hospital was the one thing he wished to avoid. Like many other aged folks, he dreamt of a cozy death that would come directly as a warm embrace of deep slumber without the inevitable illness that must preamble a demise. Father became comfortable with the eventuality of death way back as a youth but was terrified of illness and withdrew resignedly into an inert cocoon that was every so often ripped apart by the paramedics and medical gear that came home with the hooting ambulances.

 

---

Also Read: Reading Dalit Autobiographies as Cathartic Conversations with the Self

---

So, on the evening in question, he sat tame and timid and ate like a biddable child under close supervision. In the meantime, the big secret I had kept from my mother was eating into me. During father’s latest stint in the hospital, the senior doctor had told me rather bluntly that he is unlikely to last long and that these visits to the ICU will become recurrent in a vicious cycle. Peppered with recurrent mentions of sodium and potassium, this came in response to my query whether I could go back to work any time soon. With my mother’s deficient hearing, she could not mercifully catch what the expert mumbled to me in a grim half-whisper and took it to be routine advice before my father’s release. Ma saw all his symptoms as easily curable, once he ate well without fuss.

When father was done with his first chapati, Ma promptly placed another one on his plate without asking.

‘Some more of your favourite parwal too,’ she asked slyly.

‘How many should I have? You both are force-feeding me. I will probably end up with a bloated tummy,’ he made a sour face and tore at the outer skin of the puncturing chapati.

A bloated tummy had forever been his chief medical concern.  Although I rarely heard him belch or fart uncivilly, I do believe that above half the Indian populace across the continent will admit to grave digestive problems abbreviated as ‘gas’ issues. Every move he now made was deliberate as if the smallest of bodily actions involved conscious and grave decision making. Clearly, the coming weeks would see him become more and more dependent and helpless. His earlier dependence on Ma was altogether different. Habitually unmindful as he always remained, Ma had to keep track of his dietary instructions, water intake, his clothes and his unchanging routine that hardened over the years. In fact, she spent the whole day repeatedly checking on him and his sudden needs and urges, most of which she deciphered better than he did just by glancing at him through the door of his study. Despite her finnicky care, he would find some fault or the other and complain like a child. When for example he came down with a cold he would blame Ma for not handing over his sweater and muffler on his way out. Imagine the comic pathos of a man drenched in rain who rushes indoors complaining why his wife forgot to hand him an umbrella on his way out! I do not remember him shout at my mother even once in his life although I do remember Ma putting her foot down and yelling at him when he got too demanding or accusatory. A few times Ma had to fire him up when he stuck to his desk working on his latest book and refused to come to bed. He would grin sheepishly in admiration of his forceful wife and slink under the cover.

‘I am writing a book and that requires some sacrifice. It wouldn’t get written by itself’, he would grumble gently so Ma wouldn’t hear him.

Father also went through countless eating fads in his life when he would pick on a particular diet and follow it obsessively till he felt sickened and sated. The one I remember most vividly is when he gave up almonds and walnuts and took to consuming large crescents of sliced coconut. The advice came from a friend known for his penny-pinching and the idea it seems was to save some money and find his vitamins cheaply. Ma had to support all these quirks with full willingness and above all procure the items without questioning him. In the case of coconut fad, I remember Ma telling me how he suffered for weeks through severe constipation and cramps before he finally gave up. It took him all the humility he could muster to admit that it was a bad idea and despite her utterly amused relief, Ma had to keep a straight face. She was tired of hunting for fresh coconuts in this remote hill plateau where the supplies were sporadic and unreliable.
as we ate silently, I could hear their unspoken arguments swirling in the air over the dining table. They were not difficult to imagine after a whole lifetime when my siblings and I often had to block their voices out of our minds and find some other distractions. As I grew up, I became aware that none of their arguments were really serious or sincere and it was just a sport that kept them occupied for a good part of the day. On the other hand, the ever favourite ‘but…’ with a loud note of hesitant urgency being their favourite remark with each other, I also knew that they were rarely in full agreement over anything at all except mundane matters like a travel plan or a visit to a friendly neighbour in a small place that could get rather lonely. Their constant bickering could alarm an outsider but we children knew that this is how they showed affection and concern for each other as well as the children. Father often had to speak quite loudly for Ma to hear especially when she couldn’t lip read him. Often when we spoke to Ma, she seemed to intently follow every movement on the lips and got annoyed when we spoke rapidly. Ma’s hearing problems turned us into a noisy family and everyone got used to a higher pitch even while addressing each other. This often gave the simplest conversation among us the feel of a loud and irate argument over the most trifling of matters. Over time, thanks to our parents, we rarely spoke a line free of sarcasm and turned into masters of a wide gamut of figures of speech that had a way of spiraling a simple comment into elaborate webs of rhetoric. The interesting thing about sarcastic remarks is though they sound like conversation stoppers, they mostly end up provoking and lead to endless ripples and echoes of verbiage passing to and fro. I think our loud talk also wrongly made us seem rather boisterous and spontaneous. Despite the appearance of spontaneity, ours was not a family where children were hugged and stroked except when someone got hurt and was in pain. Ours was strictly a love of the intangible sort, radiating and beamed from a distance like a text of affection to be read largely between the lines. Not surprising that I could hug my mother, just her toes in fact, without giving her a start only as a corpse as she was slid into the crematorium furnace!

There were moments when I could not help but think of my parent’s long history together. Children of unhappy marriages perhaps often brood bitterly on how their parent’s tangled relationship damaged their souls in a lasting way. And perhaps too, keep coming back obsessively to the same hateful conclusions over their pasts! I had no reason to fret over my parent’s shared past since I knew them to have fought their several adversities together in the most determined way, argument, or no argument. Once after I attained full adulthood, Swaroop Mama, perhaps my father’s closest friend told me how Ma helped father overcome his long illness and depression. It seems that after father lost his first wife to an early cancer, he turned suicidal right till Swaroop uncle got him remarried to his younger sister. But that was just the beginning of their roller coaster adventures. Soon after marriage and in his late twenties, father went through a massive bout of pleurisy that nearly killed him. Admitted in a sanitarium packed with TB patients and their attendants, his young nineteen-year-old wife nursed him back to health almost single-handedly. Father’s was not a well to do family at all and at some point their little brood was so overweighed with the medical expenses, they considered giving up on him altogether to avoid destitution. Ma never did.  She told me some grim tales from the sanitarium years when the young and old men at the convalescent home, including the attendants harassed her. Young, pretty, barely literate, and helpless, she had to constantly fight the advances made by them all the time, during the day as well as the scary nights as she struggled to procure all the healthy food prescribed by the doctors with the little money she received from her numerous brothers. She waited till late evening for the green grocers to slash their prices to the lowest before leaving for the market and was often stalked by men attending their family members at the sanitarium who hid behind bushes and surprised her in the dark. She dared not mention any of this to father since some of these men feigned great concern for him and were friends with him. And funnily, as she mentioned with much laughter, too feebled by their TB to outrun my hale and youthful mother on the hilly trails!

Father’s pleurisy was wrongly diagnosed as tuberculosis and he was quarantined with TB patients along with his young wife, which made them highly vulnerable in the early 1950s when fresh air and wholesome diet were seen as the only cure for TB. Ma later told me that time and again father would get depressed and express a desire to not live any more. Frustration caused by prolonged illness, the draining of family money, not to mention the recent loss of his first wife compounded into a dismal plight and a 19-year-old wife carried the entire onus singlehandedly, constantly chasing away his demons. Imagine a 19-year-old wife having to scour for all the likely philosophical reasons why her husband must choose life and not death without sounding too self-seeking! I suppose those were the days when they both had their first arguments around the primal metaphysical theme of ‘to be or not to be’ in an unending series that would last a lifetime as they found time to wrestle over lesser matters and petty details of daily living. Even as he was being released from the sanatorium, the doctors could not agree on their diagnosis, although the X-rays showed a clear damage to his two lobes.

Soon after father passed away, I invented a cliched story to explain his death when asked to. With no specific diagnosis, I would startle people when I told them that he died of glaucoma. That his glaucoma took him away from all the reading and writing he spent a lifetime with. And that it even stopped him from taking his long walks after he fell flat on his face a few times and that in turn left his shriveled lungs underemployed, which led to an ever-diminishing metabolism. Used to clear cut medical diagnosis, people perhaps found the idea of natural death rather unnatural and my long-winded concatenation had them puzzled. Despite the apparent absurdity, I stuck to my sequence of events since I had seen them work exactly how I put it. I had seen him literally breathe his last through his increasingly sluggish lungs in slow motion till the body gave up altogether. Sort of going, going, gone with no fanfare or dramatic convulsions as he wheezed away into silence!

Way back in the sanatorium, during the two years of the illness my father and Ma were not supposed to cohabit, something my mother ensured with great restraint and determination. As father got better and a gust of hope blew into their lives, they broke the house rule which led to my birth soon after he made full recovery and got himself a well-paid job. The boon of a child soon after recovery seemed good news but they also worried if the newborn carried any TB in his bones. That alone gave me the status of the favourite, indeed fêted child on both sides of the family, a dual privilege though also a burden I carried as long as they lived. With the conduct and the temperament of the black sheep, I was constantly reminded of my astrologically ordained position in the clans on both sides. Ma’s father once put me in his lap at the age of six or seven and declared to a small family gathering that given the planetary alignments in my horoscope, I would one day become the president of India. It made me a butt of jokes throughout my school years when I proved a cipher in science subjects and math although my proficiency at languages made up somewhat for the ignominy. Later in life with an obsessive focus on my inner life rather than outwardly achievements, I was reminded by every passing aunt and uncle of my métier and my destiny. I particularly remember an aunt startling me with a remark in my mid-thirties when she blurted out ‘Time you proved your grandpa right, Ratnakar. It is getting awfully late.’

‘Late for what’ I asked in all innocence, when it suddenly dawned on me what she meant. I nearly blew my fuse till I saw the melancholy expression on her face.

Coming back to the present, it was a bit of a wonder to me how my father ever began his total dependence on my mother. Having spent his entire childhood and adolescence in a traditional Sanskrit pathashala, a Gurukul, where my grandfather was a headmaster, he and his elder brother had to manage their affairs since early childhood. Father told me that they woke up everyday at four in the morning and got to work in the dark, groping their way around till they lit up a woodfire in the earthen oven. They chanted their lessons under their breaths, filling up each other’s gaps in shlokas and mantras, including the brief grammatical one liner formulae from Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian from long ago. All their chores, cleaning the house and cooking their first meal were accompanied by a murmuring chant as the elder brother often corrected him. Their lessons began only after some repast and washing of vessels at a nearby well. In brief, there was not a thing my father couldn’t do by way of taking care of himself by the age of twelve. Having lost his mother as an infant of two, his father and elder brother did look out for him but they also didn’t want him to be overly dependent. Once when my mother had to leave home for a whole week to look after her ailing uncle, he surprised us children with the quality of his cooking. It was simple but a welcome relief from my mother’s elaborate and nuanced recipes. Once Ma came back, we praised father’s cooking, calling it ‘picnic food’ for its delicious plainness much to her annoyance and his amusement.

---

Also Read: Pandemic’s Void: Making Sense of What Happened

---

Long before father concerned himself with my early education, he was already busy teaching Ma to read and write fluently. I have a vague memory of my father teaching her to tell time from an alarm clock before he bought her a watch. When she made a mistake, she would receive what must have been not too gentle a pinch on her wrist as a punishment. She squealed and giggled just so briefly and got back to her lessons with greater resolve. By the time I began to read and write, she could write without making gross spelling errors, even though her handwriting remained a bit clumsy all her life with too many swirls and loops for the Hindi matras [vowels], her disorderly alphabets leaning right and left in no particular order, giving her free hand a weak look. She took to long spells of reading in her middle age when she was relatively free of household chores and growing children, although she never tried out high literature like some of her educated friends. I fear that the chief motivation behind my father’s pedagogical dedication was his own sense of shame. He didn’t like the idea of being married to an illiterate woman and soon managed to overcome the social handicap with the help of his eager pupil. Strangely, nearly all my mother’s close friends had been through higher education and one of them ended up doing a doctorate in the course of time. But Ma was no Pygmalion shaped by a spouse I believe, and she spent a whole lifetime reshaping my father in ways only their children could perceive over time. He certainly became more sanguine and tended to wallow in gloom less often as he grew older, taking to music and poetry with great zeal.

This was also the period of Hindi cinema [1950s-60s] when sad and mournful protagonists were seen as more weighty and serious characters, whereas a happy temperament stood for frivolity and dimness of the head and the heart. Such sentiments were rooted deeply in popular ethos and found an exaggerated expression in the melodrama of cinema, where rhetoric of pathos found its fullest expression, while happiness was perceived as a passing sentiment, a transient bubble undeserving of elaborate rhetoric.  Almost as if when you are sad, there is so much to say, whereas when you are happy, you just carry on quietly chewing the joyous cud! The corollary being that being happy could also make you feel rather useless and hollow, whereas anguish however self-induced or affected gave you the ballast of dignity and poise. If the dinner from that night seems grim in hindsight, matching the most tragic of scenes from the Hindi movies, it was largely due to the quiet undertones rather than the intense showdown that soon followed. Unlike the longwinded rhetoric of filmy tragedies with unending dialogues, the dinner seemed to go in a broody slow motion with a lot of sighs and heavy breathing. Even as I held out a piece of potato to his lips, father winced with distaste, staring at it in alarm as if it would bite him.

‘A last one, father and I will stop,’ I assured him as he extended his face towards my fingers. Ma seemed amused at this strange act of alimentary courtship between a son and a father who for the good part of their lives were better accustomed to loud and stubborn arguments. As for me, I had no idea I was capable of such tenderness towards father with whom I had a perpetually refuting and rebutting rather than a nourishing or conciliatory relation. He gave me a slanting look as he accepted the potato and leaned back satisfied that the ordeal was over. After all, he had the gratification of reducing his main adversary in the family to a surrendering supplicant, making a humble offering of curried potato! But Ma had other plans. She slid half a glass of thinned curd in front of him, startling him all over again. Father gave her a mournful look and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. They stared at each other without saying a word, with Ma looking at him imploringly and father wondering if he should give in.

One would expect that given my father’s state and his diminishing appetite, my hunger pangs would be the last thing on my mind. But the sight of my favourite parwal the best of which is rarely available outside Bihar had all along been unbearable and my appetite kicked up suddenly and unstoppably. Unable to hold back, I sidled to the kitchen to serve myself an obscenely large plate, also hoping absurdly that some of my ravenous hunger would pass on to father. I tried to add some extra relish to the simple meal by frying some papad and even whipped up some impromptu raita, placed a fat blob of amla and coriander chutney, an old favourite of my father’s that no longer seemed to draw him to food. In fact, I rummaged through the fridge and found some shriveled and stale but unspoiled Gulab jamuns, all of which I arrayed in a large plate and carried it to the dining table. All this took me a while in the kitchen and I hoped Ma would persuade father to wipe up his plate in the meantime before being served some more. But no, as I placed my plate across father’s, I found him stroking the chintz tablecloth in dreamy raptness and a livid Ma staring him down, her eyes burning in anger. Father was absently stirring up his buttermilk with a spoon while Ma sat with her elbows rested on the dining table, her eyes brimming up as she looked at me with a mix of rage and despondency.

‘What happened? No progress here?’ I asked cheerily and pulled myself a chair. As I sat down, I realized something was dreadfully wrong.

‘What?’ I looked at them both as I sat down. My father gave me a brief, daring look and turned his hostile gaze to the glass of buttermilk.

After some hesitation, Ma blurted out ‘He is saying, he wants to die. He wishes to die before I do.’ She was crying in despair.

After a painful pause, my father stirred up and looked ruefully at Ma. ‘Yes, I did. Who is to take care of me when she is not there,’ father muttered with agonized stitches on his forehead. ‘What’s wrong if I say so?’

‘And has it occurred to you who’s to take care of me when you are not there? I know, for you it’s just a contest of who’s first and you wish to go before I do. That’s all, with no thought of leaving a widow behind you’. Ma was emphatic and let him have it without remorse.

Nodding her head with taunting anger, she barely said this and broke down uncontrollably. Tears came easily to Ma when she was angry and she rarely wept out of sadness. When really infuriated, she would stop talking and cry heartily before she spoke again. Father and I sat dumbstruck glued to our chairs with both of us occasionally glancing at her sideways. After a while as Ma seemed to calm down, she got up in her chair abruptly and began shouting pitilessly at the pale figure.

‘He knows I always dreamt of dying a sadhwa [ an aged woman who dies while her husband is living, unlike a widow]. It’s what every woman wants as the last thing in her life. Haven’t you heard all the din and loud music that accompanies the sadhwa woman on her way to the crematorium? They revere the sadhwa and celebrate her good fortune. But the selfish man, so selfish, he grudges me the one last moment of fulfilment.’ Ma was still teary but quite articulate and went on in this vein.

At once I lost my appetite and withdrew from my plate, my mouth gone completely dry. I could feel a sudden swirl of red-hot anger swell up from within.

‘But you don’t understand and neither does your son. Yes, I am selfish, I agree. But what’s wrong if I wish to go first. Look at me both of you, why do you go on shoving food in this hole? You are just as selfish too’, he indicated his mouth and opened it, his lips quivering uncharacteristically with emotion. That was the last straw on my back.

‘Are you both in your senses? I came all the way to make sure father recovers fully. Little did I know that there is a contest going on at home. Who will die first seems to be your chief concern. Ma wants her loud music and you are in great hurry. You are both disgusting, doing this to me. Fighting over death in front of your child!’ Close to cracking up, I got up abruptly, and left the table in a huff unable to hold back my angry tears.

‘Let me know when you settle your quarrels,’ I shouted and stomped upstairs to the wide-open terrace.

Pacing up and down on an ill lit terrace, I faced a tornado of emotions. I knew that behind my parent’s union lay a story of two enormously gaping insecurities – if father lost his mother at the age of two, he had a father who never remarried for the sake of his children and turned almost overnight into a part mother and part father, as well as a resolute celibate for the rest of his life. But Ma who lost her mother at three faced neglect right from the outset and spent her entire childhood and adolescence taking care of a series of step brothers and sisters, most of whom remained attached to Ma right through their lives. As the eldest sister, she consequently managed to largely overcome the step-hood in a roundabout way, claiming her place within the step arena as the eldest sister. Such compensatory affinity would of course never match the love of relationships built from scratch with her husband and her children with the quiet desperation of a lone survivor. Although she assured me time and again that her step mother, our granny was never unkind to her, it was obvious that she was never for a moment the centre of attention in a large family with a bourgeoning brood of all ages that got larger every other year right till her marriage. Her marriage to my father was her own domain of security and strength and she guarded it with all her elemental energy and ferocity. My father’s passions were somewhat fickle perhaps since he occasionally remembered his first wife and even dedicated a collection of poems to her, much to the chagrin of my mother. But Ma held on to her anchor with a single-mindedness that only orphaned and abandoned children wanting a life of their own will know.

Being so unlike each other, I found it fascinating to watch them both with some detachment at an age when I was long married and with a teenage child. I found it discomfiting to compare my own marriage with theirs as mine seemed to be made of fragile jelly of daily vicissitudes whereas theirs seemed firmly tempered time and time again over the past sixty years. But these were embarrassments I hid well from my parents, refusing to let them peek into my intimate life, leaving them to gauge my private morass from a great distance. Thankfully, they never asked me a direct question on my marriage although I always felt the frisson of my mother’s prying eyes once I turned my back and looked away from her. She knew that if she asked a straightforward question, I will not lie and didn’t wish to risk the lasting pain it would cause us both. But the magical thing about the unsaid is you can push aside the realities without denying them head on. I was always grateful to Ma for this act of mercy and felt safe opening up about anything else she wished to discuss, as did she in revealing some of the seriously dirty linen from her own growing up years among her vast brood. Long before she passed away, I knew nearly all the family secrets from her father’s clan, some of them quite hilarious, but many that seemed impossible to forget or digest and disturbing to the utmost degree. Tales of madness, violence, incest, sacrilege came inseparably with stories of utter innocence and playful mischief that must have filled up the days and nights in her childhood. She didn’t reveal much at a go and let her tales come to me in trickles to save on the shock and the outrage.
 

Tired of pacing on the terrace, I decided to come down wondering if my parents were still stuck over their ludicrous impasse, wondering if I should have left them to lock their horns at all! I found Ma sitting alone and there was not a sound to be heard except my father’s gentle snore from his neighbouring room. Ma looked up and slid me my half empty plate, uncovering it and shooing away the flies.

We sat in awkward silence and ate till she looked straight at me and said ‘let him go if that’s what he wants.’

After a pause she smiled sadly. ‘What does all the funeral music and dance mean to me anyway?’

I was taken aback at this prompt admission of defeat.

‘After all, I am too deaf to hear anything when they take me on my last journey.’ She let out a deep sigh and went back to her chapati.

***

Note: this narrative is part of a forthcoming volume ‘But that’s Another Story

Ways Of Faith, Love, and innocence’ by the author

******

 
Ratnakar Tripathy is a Visiting Faculty at Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna. His interest areas include popular/regional cultures and languages, migration, cinema, caste, digital economies, and philosophy of the sciences. He has a number of academic publications in these areas. His last research project focused on the digital music cultures in Himachal Pradesh [2016-18] at the IIAS, Shimla. He is currently planning a similar work on Jharkhand. 

Ratnakar Tripathy in The Beacon