The Grief Poem That Went Where I Couldn't
It was read at a funeral on a continent I couldn't reach.
My grandmother died on a Tuesday, and the earliest I could legally leave Canada was never. That is not me being dramatic: my work permit renewal had been sitting in a government queue for seven months, and the rule was simple. Leave the country while it is pending and you may not be allowed back in.
Back in was where my job was. My apartment, my dying houseplants, my entire fragile adult life. Back home, in Kolkata, was where my grandmother was being carried out of the house she had lived in for fifty-one years, wrapped in white, covered in marigolds I could smell from memory but not from anywhere real.
My mother called at 4:40 in the morning.
I knew before I answered.
Nobody calls at 4:40 to tell you something that can wait.
"Dida is gone," she said. And then, because mothers stay mothers even while their own mothers are being carried out the door: "Have you eaten?"
I said yes... It was 4:40 in the morning. We both let the lie stand.
Here is what nobody tells you about mourning from far away: your body refuses to believe it. Grief is supposed to arrive with evidence. A hospital corridor smelling of phenyl and old ceiling fans. A house crowded with relatives arguing too loudly about arrangements. A body, small and finished, that you can touch once on the forehead and finally understand. I had none of that. I had a phone screen and a time difference of nine and a half hours, which meant I was grieving on Tuesday for something that, in my kitchen, was still technically Monday night.
So I did what any reasonable person does.
I looked up flights I could not take.
Then I did something less reasonable... I went to the airport anyway. No ticket, no legal way to board anything, just the train to Pearson and the escalator up to departures, where I sat at the big window at the end of Terminal 1 with a coffee I never drank, watching planes lift off toward the east. There is a specific cruelty in watching a plane leave for a place you cannot go... There is also a specific comfort. I sat in both, the whole afternoon, while a toddler two seats over narrated every takeoff like a sports commentator. Dida would have loved him.
Cremation in India does not wait for immigration backlogs. By the time I got home from the airport, she was already ash and river. My cousin Rikta sent a voice note that evening: "The shraddha is on the thirteenth day. If you want to say something, record it. We will play it for everyone."
Play it... A phone propped on a plastic chair, my voice crackling into a room of incense and relatives. I recorded eleven takes that night and deleted all eleven. Every single one sounded like a man reading a card he had bought at a pharmacy. Deepest condolences. She lived a full life. Words with all the blood drained out of them.
At two in the morning I gave up on speeches and wrote a poem instead.
My first in nine years.
It was about her hands. The way she fanned steam off my rice with the corner of her sari because she believed hot food straight from the pot would ruin my stomach. The tin of Nice biscuits she kept on the third shelf, always slightly soft from the humidity, always offered like treasure. The way she peeled lychees for me until I was embarrassingly old, because, she said, my fingers were too impatient and I bruised the fruit. The last line was just a question I could not stop asking: who fans the rice now?
It was not a good poem by any workshop standard. It rhymed in two places by accident. I typed it into an email at 3:15 a.m., subject line "for Dida," and sent it to Rikta before I could reread it and lose my nerve.
She did not just play a recording.
She printed the poem on the back page of the shraddha booklet, next to the photograph of Dida from my uncle's wedding, the one where she is laughing with her whole face. And on the thirteenth day, in the front room where I had spent every childhood summer, my seventy-year-old grandaunt stood up, put on her reading glasses, and read my words aloud to sixty people while I watched through a shaky video call propped against a bowl of fruit.
The poem got on the plane without a passport. It went where my body was not allowed to go.
That is the part I still cannot explain to people who ask why I write now. I could not touch her forehead. I could not carry her. I could not stand in the smoke and say goodbye with the rest of them. But something I made at two in the morning in a cold apartment crossed an ocean, entered her house, and was spoken out loud in the room where she taught me to read. My grandaunt kept a copy folded in her handbag. Rikta told me two neighbours asked for theirs. My mother, who has never once commented on anything I have written, said only, "You got the biscuits right," which in our family is a standing ovation.
For months afterward I kept writing, badly and constantly, because it was the only door that opened in both directions. I found I could finally write about the grief directly instead of around it, and then, slower, about memory itself, how it sharpens exactly the details you never thought to photograph. The third shelf. The soft biscuits. The sari corner moving over steam.
A year and one month after she died, my permit finally came through. I flew home. The house smelled the same, which felt impossible and then felt like a gift. I sat in her room on the bed with the mosquito net still knotted above it, and my mother handed me Dida's copy of the Ramayana, the fat one with the red cloth cover she read from every evening of her life.
Folded inside the back cover, soft at the creases from being opened and refolded, was my poem. The printed page from the booklet. There was a turmeric fingerprint on the corner, which meant she had held it in the kitchen... Except she could not have.
She never read it. She was gone before I wrote a word.
"Your grandaunt," my mother explained. "She reads it here on Thursdays. She says the room listens better."
I have since done braver things with my writing. I entered a piece into a monthly poetry contest and lost, then entered again. I have read in front of strangers with a shaking page. None of it has ever mattered more than one badly rhymed poem, folded into a red book, read aloud on Thursdays in a room I could not reach.
Who fans the rice now? Nobody. But somebody reads the question out loud, on a continent nine and a half hours ahead of me, and I have decided that counts as an answer.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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