The Tangible Absence

Yesterday was the fundraiser party for the 2017 Kolkata Rainbow Pride Walk. For the first time in many, many years, I missed it.

I NEVER miss this, if possible. In fact, I get people pinging or calling me for weeks before the event to know what I will be going as (since I am the one known for turning up “in costume”). This is also the one event in the pride year when the community and my cubs are sure to meet and greet Mr Jia, as the man makes his yearly goodwill appearance to help raise money for community events throughout the year.

And yet, this year I did not go. My normal MO for these parties is to leave the monkey with my parents, dress up to the nine pins, hop in a cab – alone or with cronies, get to the party as early as possible (I am usually the 3^rd or 4^th person to arrive), and just mingle. Then, once he is done with work, Mr joins us at the venue, we drink, dance, laugh, sing, and eventually, drive home (shedding cubs like autumn leaves along the way at their respective abodes).

This year, there is no father, and the mother has been sent off to Chicago to help her deal with the grief of losing her childhood friend and partner of 44 years. What this essentially means is that I am sans backup childcare providers. Of course, there is another set of grandparents, but they (as ever) are completely useless in this scenario. Yet another way in which the old man’s passing has changed my life.

These are the big changes, the inability to stay at The Sunday Adda beyond 6.30 pm for the last couple of months, the inability to go out to meet someone after 6 pm, not having monkey stay over at dimma bari for weekends (which essentially means no exclusive “grown up time” for the last few months), knowing that monkey will not disappear from home for 5 days during the “pujo” to spend with the oldies (yet more curtailing of grown up time).

These gobsmack me every time they occur. Just thinking about them, and dealing with them... tidal waves of agony. Finding an incredible piece of costume jewelry online, that would be the perfect accent piece for this party, knowing I won’t buy it; waking yesterday morning and knowing I am not going -- that’s bad enough. But these are not the things regularly bringing me to my knees; not even close.

It is the everyday small things, the glaring, tangible, visible absence, the tiny and forced deflections from a decade long routine that truly bring home to me what I have lost. I am sure plenty of people think I am overreacting with how prostrated I seem to be with this. I have withdrawn from most of my social activities. I no longer feel the desire or the ability to mingle, make small talk, or even engage in the regular activism. The only thing I seem capable of leaving the house for, anymore, is the weekly adda on Sundays and even there I get antsy after 6ish. It probably seems too much to observers. After all, people lose parents, it’s a fact of life, a part of the cycle – so to speak – and while it hurts and grieves one, I can see the thoughts in some minds of why I am reacting to it quite so badly.

What is different is the relationship I had with the old man and the kind of proximity we shared for the last 15 years or so. Not only is it a fact that from about age 10 until this year, every time someone asked me who my best friend was, my father featured on the list, near the top – no less; not only is it a fact that we had the kind of meeting of minds, conversations, exchange of ideas and worldviews that I share only with the closest most precious people; but he was also a daily part of my life, and my monkey’s, for so long.

It is accepted that once children, especially daughters in India, grow up and get a home and family of their own, they “move out” and settle into “in-law” centric domesticity with reduced contact with birth family. In fact, most daughters see their parents for a couple of months a year, over visits during school summer vacations. This does not, of course, in any way take away from the mutual love of parent and child; but it does, I think, make absence something one is more used to. This has, presumably also happened in the case of my brother, who went abroad to study some 14 years ago. He has since been able to spend only the odd couple of months with the parents every other year or so. So, I assume, he does not, they do not, have the daily, constant tiny, insidious reminders that assail me constantly. Of course, this means he got a lot less of quality time with the old man, and I feel privileged and oh so grateful for the one and a half decades of daily closeness I was able to get. However, it also means that every single day, every single part of my domestic routine, is coloured by absence now.

 I never really “left”…. I moved out, but kinda didn’t. and for the last decade or so I spent almost 6 days a week 9 am to 8 pm over at my parents’. From making breakfast, to going together to pick up the monkey from school, to hours of sniping, and “in” jokes, and cribbing, and just being, to being dropped home which was another opportunity for more talk, my days were so intricately entwined with his! For monkey’s school performances and dance programs, it was he who drove us to rehearsals and events, and they were the ones who came to watch as the plus 2. All monkey’s “very important” errands were run by dada, up to 5 times a day, and stayovers meant solo dada time with special breakfasts.

Just getting through the day with absolutely nothing to do and no one to talk to until monkey gets home from school is like a gulf of “missing”. Not leaving with the man each morning to go over to make sure the old man eats a healthy breakfast is a gulf of missing. Visiting the parents’ flat once or twice a week to air it out feels alien. Not seeing the old man in his “work” chair feels fundamentally wrong. Having only one or two cups of tea, when the old man and I alternatively made and drank so many through the day feels like such a loss of value in life. Having to make our way home on the visit days, via public transport, is like a hole in my center, which should have been filled with off colour jokes and old man’s road rage. I alternately sleep through entire days and nights or can’t sleep at all from all the disruptions to my schedules and the pangs that doing or not doing pretty much anything brings.   

Last weekend, monkey and I spent the Saturday night at the flat, after a long time. This was, I later realized, the exact three-month mark. The day passed as it does these days sorting out stuff – bills, papers, computer files, all relicts of the old man. At bedtime, monkey sat down almost in my lap (which she hardly does anymore) and started saying how long it has been since she had last stayed over. Which reminded both of us, rather forcibly of WHY she does not stay anymore, and led to tears.
She fell asleep soon enough, but fidgeted all night dreaming of and talking out loud to dada. And I could not sleep at all. I didn’t stay over much when the old man was around. So that was a departure from the norm to begin with. But trying to sleep in that bed, on HER side (since I could not bring myself to lie down on his side), and seeing that empty space every time eyes travelled that way; seeing in my mind the last two months of him and his pink coverlet being such a fixture there; seeing a fast forward slideshow of horrendous images from illness, hospitals, morgue, and crematorium every time I closed my eyes – it was not a pleasant night.

I had never realized how constant grief and loss would be. I had no idea of how, in the middle of a bus ride, in the middle of a mundane train of thought about what to make for dinner and when to pay school fees, my mind would suddenly devastate me with totally unconnected and unnecessary images from the last three months of illness. I had no idea that most comments people made in daily conversations would somehow trigger a memory – good or bad. I had no clue that I would be unable to watch a movie or read a book where anyone lost ANYONE without having to struggle not to break down visibly.

I had no idea how I would dream him alive each night. Dreams beginning with the loss and moving on into some kind of miraculous “he’s back” leading to such deep philosophical discussions. Ridiculous dreams with him riding bicycles inside the house while mom rants at him for losing his mind in his old age and monkey laughs hysterically at his antics. Dreams where he inevitably gets sick again, and things rapidly unravel into more horrible and grotesque possibilities than he had to live through. Dreams in which I can actually, finally understand what he was trying to say that last day, when the ventilator made it impossible for us to understand, something he wanted so much to convey that not being able to was making him SO visibly angry and frustrated. Dreams in which he simply gets up from that blasted ICU bed and simply demands to go home.

I am alternatively yearning and terrified of dreaming. I am functioning and yet I know I am not. I am coping and I have no idea how to cope.

I want to run away.