Death Day

By Anita Kainthla

In a matter of half a breath my grandmother has become the corpse lying on her queenbed that I’m sitting on.There’s an unfinished plate of dal and rice on the bedside table. The leftovers of taste from the afternoon meal stir in my mouth at the sight of the plate. An ant family has begun carting away what food it can with a diligence resembling fury. A few from the ant family have perished in a pool of dal the size of a rain drop. Its death day.

My unwitting gaze trails through the room- the bulky, almost extinct tin trunk covered with an old blue shawl as though trying to hide something, a straight- backed and folding kind of wooden chair- severe, hard, cold, a window seat, (with a potential to turn into a prettily cushioned, curtained and coveted sitting spot but instead there always sits on it a mish mash of religious texts and trivia, papers and diaries- my grandfather’s, spectacles, knitting needles, an earthen pot with drinking water, framed photographs of my dead parents, brother and grandfather, like gods garlanded with marigolds and smeared with sandalwood and vermilion paste), a Godrej steel almirah with a mirror running down the whole length of one door reflecting the bed, the dead body and a portion of my leg and foot like a painting, my feet dangling over a coarse jute duree with a fading pattern of some folksy art.

At the end of their sortie, the eyes rest on the feet and gain sudden consciousness.

They rise big and nervous and fall on the body. Only one word arises as thought dead/death.

The dead body with the gnarled arthritic hands of my grandmother, fingers curled and palm upwards, lie helplessly on the sides of the body, looking like crabs; I remember these hands hard and knotty on my face, the twisted angles of their fingers getting caught in my hair, insistent on oiling and combing it. I wonder if dying had in anyway altered the taste of their touch. I don’t know. I was too numbed to touch the dead fingers and feel anything.

But I do know death. I have always known it as a word. It’s an old woman’s word. The word that was the theme of my grandmother’s stories. The stories of her life. Her life, the realm of which since the last eight months had been reduced to her queen bed. A bed that came as part of her dowry that came sixty years ago with her marriage to my grandfather. A plain looking bed of rich walnut wood that she said her father had got specially made for her wedding, for which she was much teased and envied by her two sisters. Her two sisters, both of whom were dead like the rest of her family.

Her stories were like the Songlines of the Australian aboriginals, of which Bruce

Chatwin has written in ‘Dreamtime’:

“I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song (of which we may, now and then, catch an echo); and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African Savannah, where the First Man, opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World

Song, ‘I AM’!’”

The way the Songlines of the aboriginals were the songs that re-created the geography of their trails through the Australian bush giving them a sense of themselves, her stories were the Songlines that kept alive the trails of death that she followed through life and used them to define her own identity. I was raised on her mnemonic leitmotif of lament.

She’d repeatedly say that the arthritis and asthma would kill her one day like it had her mother and brother. Although, she said that she’d prefer an accidental death like that of my parents and brother because that kind of death dealt one short swift blow. Easily bearable. Whereas her age and sickness were dragging her by her hair like a heathen while she was imploring for crucifixion.

The queen of spades, from a game of Hearts, peeks from underneath the pillow. So that’s where we’d lost her. We’d replaced her from another one from another deck of cards. I wonder what we’d have done without these cards and the games we played with them. We always laughed a lot while playing cards, laughed really, hard, hard till we squeezed tears from our eyes like juice from lemons. Smiling takes a lot more strength so we’d deliberately cultivated a weakness for loud laughter.

The room was turning dank and December cold and death began adding a blue coldness to the chill of the nightfall. A full bladder impinged itself upon my awareness.

As soon as I turned the light on, the ant family came into clearer view in the white light.

The ants had become visibly populous- the family had now grown into a colony. Here and there, several from the colony had broken away from the wave of the queue and were lying in contorted death positions.

In the bathroom the yellow bulb in an amber shift spread a warmth of light as I switched it on. The jet of warm urine spurting from my body sent a sliver of chill down the spine and I shuddered raising rows of goose bumps on the bare portions of my arms and thighs. I wondered if she’d died with an urge to urinate, it was the only urge she had left and it kept growing stronger with time even as her bladder control kept growing weaker.

In the end there wasn’t a single bed sheet or mattress that hadn’t been soiled with urine and no matter how hard I scrubbed or what strongly incensed detergents I used, nothing softened the stubborn urine stench. We began to be attacked with urine whiffs whenever air eddied from fans, windows or doors. However, with time our olfaction must have grown an immunity to it because the stench stopped occurring in our conversations as well as consciousnesses.

She told me once that she always counted the 7 steps to the bathroom door and as many back in the lampblack darkness of night. The infirmities of old age and inherited ailments had made simple things hard for her, she said. For example it was simpler for her to take the seven measured steps to reach the bathroom in the dark but harder to flick the light switch to light the way; the beds’ positioning required her to step angularly at its foot, a step she couldn’t risk taking with the arthritis. The straight seven steps were safer, even if darker; a compromise in the face of a compulsion.

Since the last eight months she hadn’t taken a single step to anywhere. I began taking some steps to arrest her slowing down but her spirits were visibly abandoning her in little bits every day till she was only up to playing a card game or two. No lure was enough to rekindle her self-indulgence; movies, lunches, books, shopping, strolls, sun basking, all my steps were in vain. Gradually even her lifelong pre-occupation with the narration of the brutal deaths of her family had left her. The television, which till now had been the glib third one in the house, she began accusing of inducing headaches in her. So it now sat idiotically in a corner, dumb and unblinking, adding more silence to the silence.

The asthma had imparted a permanent nicotine-redness to her eyes and a permanent pigeon-chested distention to her lungs. The arthritis had impaired most of all her phalanges, vertebra and knee and elbow joints and imprisoned her in her bed. Pain lines ploughed across her face as though it were a piece of agricultural land. Karma she said. Karma, the hook on which she hung all the elements of life as though it were a clothes line that would sun-dry and straighten everything out.

Whose karma was this? This cruel denouement of her life being played out before the already one time orphaned me?

The rat poison is there in the kitchen, I wouldn’t even need to go out to buy it, she said.

This made us smile; our smiles had the spontaneity of a miracle. And to think of it, it took a death wish to work these miracles, which had become an impossibility under the given circumstances. But these miracle smiles of ours were as unalike as our karmas.

I smiled thinking the rat poison was a joke generated by her various frustrations. Her smile was the impish kind that’s exchanged between co-conspirators. Our blink of pleasure got arrested in mid-smiles like a shock, on discovering that our smiles were headed in different directions.

However, with the repetition of the rat poison innuendo our smiles began carrying the same appearance and import; they quivered with pain and fragility but they were also the smiles born out of a common consensus. The mad mad possibility of the death wish possessed us both although my courage oscillated crazily, much unlike the will of her seriousness. But not for long, because pain has a way of getting to you. And it did. Her deliberate karmic deterioration from a woman of bullish vigor, who had lived and endured many deaths and was left to tackle the raising of an orphan during her retirement, to a disease ridden, loss infested, pain enduring shriveled version of her, finally broke me. I knew morality as I did death, as a word. Someone else’s words. It was only pain I saw and comprehended then. And in the end I gave in to it. It would be a short soft blow like she wanted and we wouldn’t have to go out for the rat poison even.

On the window seat the ‘Geeta’ with its metaphysics of karma, wrapped in cloth of a sacred red color, besides the plate of leftover food, the wave of the ant colony stilled in

a death freeze with rat-poisoned rice grains stuck in their pincers like burdens.

I was cold and hungry. There’s nothing that can stop the urges of a body. Not even a corpse. I wrapped a shawl for warmth and cooked a packet of maggi noodles for the hunger. And now what? What happens after one does what I had done? Wait? Wait for what? I don’t know but waiting seemed appropriate. But waiting in the same room seemed inappropriate so I went to my own room and lay down to wait. I caught a whiff of urine as soon as I lay down. Odd. It had been a while since we’d encountered this smell. I thought of getting up to inspect and then I thought of waiting for confirmation. A few minutes later, another whiff and I jumped out of bed. On her bed there was a damp patch in the middle and even as I stood looking, the bed sheet was blotting the urine and enlarging the wet patch. I felt a deep relief. She did have the urge and didn’t die with it, this must count for something at least. I don’t know.

I suddenly knew what to do. Call the police and report the death. The wait was over. But the drama grew bigger. Men of law arguing on morality put up scenes in courts of law, day after day. The good and bad, the right and wrong were weighed and re-weighed; I’d inadvertently raised confounding thoughts among, not only qualified lawmen, but three or four, one fourth blood relatives. These relatives, who shared globules of similar blood and some impressions on DNA strands with me, claimed a much larger share. Acres of land and floors of houses belonging to our common ancestry bound us dangerously and everyone clamored for the best parts. The creak of arthritic limbs and rasp of an asthmatic chest were sounds they’d never heard of. Several deals later divisions were made and such connections were severed. Everyone had their aces in the right spots. I wondered what had happened our pack of cards with the missing Queen of Hearts. But it didn’t matter anyway; we’d played all our games. The only thing I took away was the

‘Geeta’ as they gave me a life term to figure out the finer points of my karma.

By Anita Kainthla