So, your mum died. What do you do now?
The white sheets billowed and filled the room with a flash of light, before being stretched across the carpet, as men moved furniture out of the living room and into the garage.
Everyone knew what to do, except for me.
My mum died that morning. And as soon as we got back from the hospital, the elders set to work.
Without a word, I helped my uncle move the settee. And sisters, under instruction from the aunties, made a candle out of ghee and a ball of cotton wool. That was the candle we’d top up and keep lit over the next few days. Above it, my dad hung a picture of my mum with a haar – a garland of flowers – stuck from its corners with sticky tape.
I don’t remember now if he had the picture to hand or if there was a period of trying to get the printer to work. But, in any case, within minutes the house was set up for mourning. And I remember thinking then, for all I’d dismissed my parents’ religion as ‘hocus pocus’, it served a noble purpose that day, offering an answer to the question: what the hell do we do now?
***
Six weeks earlier, Brook and I found a letter from the hospital on the kitchen table. My mum had been pushing it around since we’d arrived from London, and it was clear she wanted us to read it. It was her way of telling us she was dying. But it took a Google for me to work it out.
Once I did, I went up to her room, and found her praying on her bed. I waited for her to finish, then knelt beside her, and told her I knew, that I would stay with her, and that it would be okay. Two out of those three things were true.
Brook went home the next day, but I stayed on, and for the next six weeks, I was with her as much as possible.
***
It’s hard to describe those six weeks. They might be the best six weeks of my life, followed by the six worst. (But then a six-week period when nobody dies at the end is technically better.)
But the nature of that time, the looming shadow of death, pushed out any nonsense. There was no time for bickering, no cross words, not even much idle chatter. We talked, we watched TV, we went on day trips – all the time engaged in the moment, with one another.
Early in the morning, I’d come downstairs while dad was still waking up, and sit with mum in the conservatory. She’s been a ball of energy her whole life, but now she took a little more time in the morning to reanimate – hands out on the table, like leaves stretching towards the sun, ready for photosynthesis to occur.
It was in these moments we’d swap idle chatter for existential conversation. One morning, she asked me, “What do you think happens when you die?” I told her that there are a finite number of atoms in the universe, so we get recycled. “You could become this yoghurt pot,” I said, lifting up my Crunch Corner. It was of no comfort, really.
***
When she did die, there was no making sense of it. She slipped in the shower and had a stroke; alive but robbed of speech – a cruelty that meant for a few hours we could tell her we loved her, but she couldn’t say it back. There was no idle chatter, no existential conversation. Just a look of fear that haunts me to this day. And if there’s a sound to accompany that haunting, it’s her mum’s voice – my grandma’s – beside her daughter’s deathbed. “Where are you going, Saroj?” she cried. “Come back.”
***
Over the next week or so, mourners filed into the living room and sat cross-legged on the white sheets, facing the garland-picture of my mum, sticky tape periodically reapplied, buttery candle topped up and kept lit. Some would wail, a tradition in Indian culture. But not my gran. She sat on a chair, in the corner, still. Quiet. She didn’t know what to do. And there are moments, nearly four years later, when I’m not sure either.
