Desperation so pungent it ought to have been bottled and sold as perfume; the national army deployed to burn corpses in mass cremations. In April 2021, India was breaking records in all the worst ways -- with upwards of four-hundred thousand cases a day and dizzyingly low resources, the country turned to chaos. Medical personnel were begging their patients for the resources that simply nobody had; those who could stood in lines for hours hoping to purchase oxygen (at whatever the cost), only for violence to break out when there was just none left. For a nation that, just two weeks prior, had been giving away vaccines to its global counterparts, everything about this crisis felt like losing ground in an uphill battle.
This is World War III, I so clearly remember thinking the day my grandmother was hospitalized with COVID-19 herself. This is where it ends.
A mad dash began: we behaved like a well-oiled machine (or a crazed orchestra, depending on who you ask). My father and his two sisters didn't sleep for five days straight, each one of them cashing in favors for oxygen tanks. My first cousin, the eldest of all of us, morphed into an adult far quicker than I remember us ever being allowed to. Siddharth, find more! Look harder! Even my mother, who has never been able to decide on a plan in her fifty-two years of existence, spent all day calling friends-of-a-friend-of-a-friend for...well, at first, a hospital bed, but if not, a ventilator would do. No? Okay, spare hope will do, too. My mother once told me she married my father because he's good in a crisis. For the first time, I saw proof: he was trapped in a precarious dance, coordinating dozens of people with millisecond precision from half the world away.
Blind naivete led me to believe some miracle would see us through. That I would be visiting New Delhi in June, getting mildly annoyed at mosquitos and my younger cousin's endless questioning. My grandmother's oxygen rising and falling unpredictably did nothing to quell my hope -- hopelessness simply wasn't a word I knew, and I thought it would be too cruel an irony to have the mother of a first-responder die this way. I clung to moments of light -- my aunt, with zero formal medical training, learned to operate a CPAP machine in twenty minutes; how can you watch that and not believe in God afterwards?
I yelled at my mother, complained about chemistry and teachers who have "no concept of what time is". I danced along to the radio, and "did my part" by asking a never-ending stream of questions about my Daadi's condition. I'm sure I even convinced myself that doing so would absolve me of all my high crimes and misdemeanors of never being a good, devoted enough granddaughter.
On May 3, 2021, I awoke to the sound of my sister on the phone, telling my mother to "come home right now". I lay in bed, awake for a few minutes, repeating every shloka I had ever learned to myself. My mother once told me that Amitabh Baachan recovered from an untreatable disease when millions of devoted fans prayed for him. I didn't know my grandmother was already dead.
I wandered out of my bedroom to find my father on the floor dry heaving. I don't think I've ever seen my father on the floor, crying, or awake past 10:30pm before. The garage door opened and my neighbors came rushing in. One was crying like it was her own mother who had just passed, and another pushed past his wife to give my father a hug. I've never been the best with talking, or traumatic situations (not that I've ever had much to deal with), but watching our neighbors wake up in the middle of the night to comfort a grown man who for a couple minutes felt like a little boy...I can only hope the people I surround myself with ten years from now are half as decent.
One neighbor came up to my room, where I had turned off the lights and pretended to go back to sleep. To this day, she remains the only person to have asked me if I was okay. Then she told me to be strong, for my father.
What is strength? Should I have cried with him, or pretended like nothing happened? To be honest, I don't know. Weeks later, my mother told me that my grandmother talked to my father a few times before her death. One of those times, she asked him if she was going to be okay, and my father said yes. The world made my father a liar. I'm not sure what I should've done about that.
The aftermath was the strangest combination of sorrow and oblivion. It felt like swimming underwater, large portions of the next few days completely muffled from my memory. I didn't miss a day of class, I remember that much. The Kubler-Ross stages did come -- I would later find myself furious that, despite education and money and power and status, in the eye of the storm I was useless. I looked at my father and wondered if perhaps I didn't deserve to feel anything, not when I had barely known my grandmother and can hardly recognize myself as Indian. I reached for memories with my Daadi for comfort, and found I had none. I'd always assumed I'd have more time to make them, and didn't notice how long it had been since we'd last spoken until it was too late. I read somewhere that every ten years, our bones completely regenerate themselves. I grew oddly obsessed with this fact -- it meant that the last time my relatives saw me, I was quite literally an entirely different person. It meant that I couldn't grieve something I never truly knew. I was a tree without roots.
When I was younger, I scolded my mother for "never doing anything even slightly adventurous," asking her boldly, "I mean, c'mon, what's the riskiest thing you've ever done?"
Without missing a beat -- "I moved to a brand new country, where I knew nobody, when I was in my twenties."
I had laughed at the time, because although I knew logically I was the daughter of immigrants, I felt far removed from the narrative thrust upon me by that title. My mother has read more American classics than my English teachers, my father knows the American tax system better than his accountant. There is nothing "foreign" about my parents; assimilating must have been easy for them. Furthermore, as the spoiled rotten littlest child, I've often thought that my parents will never understand my plight as mixed. They could never relate to the hours I've spent trying to convince myself that there's still an Indian buried deep in there, that I can still pull her out -- this particular battle, I was convinced I was alone in fighting. When my grandmother died, India refused to release the body, for fear of further spreading the infection. She was mass-cremated on taxpayer dime, robbing my family of the only thing we truly grasp in death -- ritual. It wasn't until then that I realized their battle -- as actual immigrants -- is much harder. If I was a rootless tree, my parents were trees yanked out of their soil, forcefully separated from everything they knew. As good as they were at pretending it wasn't true, I had felt the instability my entire life. Our Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, and even ordinary, taco Tuesdays were always four people big. We had to fulfill the role of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and entire support systems, all by ourselves. We were a nuclear family, cosplaying as more. I hadn't lost my grandmother at all, because the only version of her I had ever intimately known was her son.
Perhaps the best way I have to describe grief now is residue: the centimeter shift in my worldview, the fractional part of each day I dedicate to reconciling the before and after. The fresh wave of guilt that washes over me every time I accidentally speak of her in the present tense. I walk with a thorn in my foot, a pain so subtle I can forget it while watching Black Widow or taking the SAT, but pervasive enough that I can never quite stop bleeding. But even that analogy is weak. There are no words for our strongest emotions -- as Rudy Francisco once said, tragedy and silence have the same address. There is just the remarkable tendency we have to count our blessings, tend to our wounds, and march on.
In the grand finale of this pandemic, part of me can recognize that I'm not nearly as alone as I once suspected. During times when my biological family has felt (and been) lightyears away, neighbors hand-delivered food for weeks, and colleagues drove for hours to make us chai in our living room. Flowers piled up on our doorstep, and when we finally held our makeshift, kitchen-floor posthumous pooja, people I had never met joined via Zoom to help send my grandmother's soul onwards to the next life. Part of splitting your soul across an ocean is loss -- it's never a clean break. But perhaps the other part is community. Maybe the tribes of Indian American girls I discover everywhere I go is not a coincidence -- maybe it's proof that my grandmother's blood is still coursing through my veins, no matter how often I skin my knees in American soil. Maybe this found family is my inheritance.
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