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15

Prose

For Mana, With All My Love

Sara Vernekar

“She was very old,” everyone says. They give their condolences and you nod, nod, nod, till your head falls off. The truth is, she could have been two hundred years old and it wouldn't have made this easier. The truth is, you feel a little bit orphaned now, even though your parents are alive and grieving beside you.

There she is on the bed, looking for all the world as though she were asleep. As though, at any moment, she would open her milky brown eyes and fix them upon you. With concern, reproach, recognition, anything. They stay closed. Her short hair is clumpy and unwashed; there had been pressing matters to deal with in these past few days and haircare was not among them. You stroke her forehead – papery skin gone cold – and her poor, swollen hands. You ask your sister if we’re absolutely sure she’s dead, and she assures you through her tears: yes. Cotton has been placed in her nose and mouth, but you still watch her chest for movement with something akin to hope.

She would not want to be remembered like this. Her favourite colour was blue, she loved the taste of dill, and she revelled in her childhood days. She was stubborn and suspicious and difficult to like. She held on to betrayals more steadfastly than she did her friends, and this cost her dearly. When I was a child, she used to peel orange slices for me and console me every time I cried.

Mathematics was the only love that didn’t fail her and I was never any good at the subject, so we turned elsewhere for conversational ground. Hours were spent talking as the sky turned from orange to black, her on the rocking chair and me on the floor at her feet. The fading light of the evening would be recast by the lamp on our balcony and glint off her spectacles. More often than not, she’d be telling me about a memory she had already shared before, and my love, which was sometimes guilty of arriving late or skipping family events altogether, would be attentive during these evenings. I was there when she walked underneath a tree decades ago, delighted to look down and discover a carpet of her favourite flowers. The smell of dying flowers hung in the air and her words brought them back to life one last time.

The fact of death: it's not bad if you keep your mind an empty vessel. As long as you thinking of nothing at all, death is quite manageable. This is what I tell myself.

The four of us take her ashes to the sea and scatter them there. I’m expecting them to swirl around in the wind like they do in movies, but they fall straight down in grey blobs – the humidity of Bombay doesn’t allow for aesthetics. At last, my mother’s tears flow. She plays a song my grandmother once sang while sitting at a beach in Goa. At this beach, my mother drops the empty pot into the water and we watch the waves carry it away. I’m hoping it will float back in sight so I can ascribe some meaning to this all. Instead, the song comes to an end and everyday life trickles in through the phone. The pot does not return.

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