Written by: Swapna Kishore
3 min readFeb 28, 2004 12:00 AM IST
First published on: Feb 28, 2004 at 12:00 AM IST
Six years ago, my father died in the hospital on New Year’s eve as the world prepared for an evening of partying. He had been ailing for two years and was but a pale shadow of himself; the end was not really unexpected. But it was the first death of someone close to me and I was not prepared for any of it — in terms of emotions, social interactions, logistics.
As my husband handled the hospital paperwork, I fumbled with my address book to call relatives and friends. A cousin told me how to make multiple calls from a PCO using a single coin. Fortunately I had enough coins, because I did not register what he said. As it was late evening, we decided to take the body home the next morning. The men from the mortuary — slightly drunk and wearing gloves — yanked the body on to the trolley. I winced, then remembered that father was beyond pain.
Sleep was uneasy that night as we tried to reconcile to the idea of death amidst sounds of merrymaking. Next morning, in a city nursing a hangover, we picked up the body. The hours that followed went in procuring the “ladder to Heaven” — clothes, flowers and dhup — and in preparing him for his final journey. People streamed in to pay their last respects. As his only child, I performed the last rites. When the priest asked me my father’s gotra, I realised how little I knew about him. A cousin supplied the answer.
That evening, I rushed around arranging for the subsequent set of activities — the immersion of ashes, havan, prayer meeting — using checklists prepared by helpful cousins. Being New Year’s day, many people greeted me cheerfully. Others, aware of my bereavement, offered condolences. I kept switching my expression appropriately and ended up totally disoriented and exhausted. For the following week or so, I was too busy to feel anything.
A neighbour told me that death hits one after the rush is over. I understood what she meant a few months later. During my evening walk, thinking about a childhood incident, I found a gap in my memory. I’ll go home and ask father, I thought. That was when it hit me. He was dead. Gone. Forever.
After obtaining his death certificate, I started on the transfer of his assets and other paperwork. But whenever I opened his files I got distracted.Those yellow, crackling pieces of paper captured an era of transfer orders and government circulars and brought back memories of ever-changing houses and schools. There was a group photo in which I could barely recognise my father. His degree certificate showed a caste identifier that he dropped later. When? Why? I did not know.
I began assembling my portrait of him by juxtaposing fragments of my memories and the bits contributed when relatives and friends wrote or visited to condole. Gaps remained.
Now it is almost four years since I learnt anything new; it is time for closure.
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