Dr. Sharma, the treasurer of the Indo-Canada society, pulls me into the hallway. He wants to know if I am worried about money. His wife, who has just come up from the basement with a tray of empty cups and glasses, scolds him. “Don’t bother Mrs. Bhave with mundane details.”
I wonder if pills alone explain this calm. Not peace, just a deadening quiet… Sound can reach me, but my body is tensed, ready to scream. I hear their voices all around me. I hear my boys and Vikram cry, “Mommy, Shaila!” and their screams insulate me, like headphones.
“Why does God give us so much if all along He intends to take it away?” Kusum asks me.
“Nothing I can do will make any difference,” I say. “We must all grieve in our own way.”
“It’s a parent’s duty to hope,” [Dr. Ranganathan] says. “It is foolish to rule out possibilities that have not been tested. I myself have not surrendered hope.”
Kusum and I take the same direct flight to Bombay, so I can help her clear customs quickly. But we have to argue with a man with a uniform… Kusum won’t let her coffins out of sight, and I shan’t desert her though I know that my parents, elderly and diabetic, must be waiting in a stuffy car in a scorching lot.
“You bastard!” I scream at the man… “You think we’re smuggling contraband in these coffins!”
[My mother] grew up a rationalist. My parents abhor mindless mortification.
The zamindar’s daughter [my grandmother] kept stubborn faith in Vedic rituals; my parents rebelled. I am trapped between two modes of knowledge… like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between worlds.
“In the textbooks on grief management,” [Judith] replies—I am her confidante, I realize, one of the few whose grief has not sprung bizarre obsessions—“there are stages to pass through: rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction.” She has compiled a chart and finds that six months after the tragedy, none of us still reject reality, but only a handful are reconstructing. “Depressed Acceptance” is the plateau we’ve reached.
“God provides and God takes away,” he says.
I want to say, But only men destroy and give back nothing. “My boys and my husband are not coming back,” I say. “We have to understand that.”
Now the old woman responds. “But who is to say? Man alone does not decide these things.” To this her husband adds his agreement.
I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking.
