I Still Buy Her Favorite Biscuits
The shopkeeper doesn't ask why; grief has regular customers.
Every Saturday at ten past nine I buy a packet of orange cream biscuits for a woman who has been dead for two years. Sharma ji rings them up without comment, the way a priest takes confession, and I walk home holding them like something that might still hatch.
They were my mother's biscuits. Not her only biscuits, she was not a fanatic, but they were the ones she reached for at four o'clock, when the day paused and the kettle went on and the house rearranged itself around two cups on the kitchen table.
She took her tea strong enough to insult the milk. And she dunked those biscuits with a recklessness that scandalized me my whole childhood, holding each one under until it was one second from structural collapse, then lifting it out in a single practiced arc.
She lost maybe one biscuit in ten... Into the cup, a soft brown drowning. She would look at it with genuine betrayal, every time, as if this had never happened before in forty years of dunking.
'Overconfidence,' she would say, fishing for it with a spoon. 'It runs in the family.'
She died in the winter, in her sleep, which everyone tells me is a mercy and which I have decided to believe. She was seventy four. The morning of the funeral I found a half finished packet of the orange creams in her kitchen, folded shut with a rubber band, and I put it in my coat pocket and carried it through the entire day like a hand to hold.
The first Saturday after, I walked to Sharma General Store out of pure muscle memory. It was her errand. It had quietly become our errand years before, and then, as her knees got worse, my errand performed on her behalf. I was at the counter with the packet in my hand before my brain caught up with my feet and informed me that there was no one left to eat them.
I bought them anyway.
It felt less like a choice than like completing a sentence someone else had started.
I have bought them every Saturday since. A hundred odd packets. I do not eat them... That is the part I have never said out loud to anyone, because it is the part that sounds unwell. They accumulate in the cupboard above the fridge for a few weeks, and then I give them away, to the watchman, to the children on the third floor, to the office, where they vanish without ceremony.
The buying is the point. The eating was always her half of the arrangement.
Sharma ji has never asked. Two years, over a hundred transactions, and not one question. In the beginning I thought he had simply not noticed, one customer among hundreds... Then I caught the small things. The way a packet was already set aside near the till on Saturdays. The way, when the distributor stopped sending that brand for a month, he produced one from somewhere in the back, dusty, precious, like contraband, and did not meet my eye.
He knew my mother forty years. He weighed out her sugar when it still came loose in paper.
Of course he noticed.
Last month, the monsoon came early and I arrived at the shop soaked, and while I dripped at the counter he did something he had never done.
He spoke.
'My wife,' he said, arranging the biscuits in a plastic bag with unnecessary care, 'liked one green soap. Neem wala. They stopped making it in 2011.' He tied the bag with a little flourish. 'I kept a carton in the godown. Two years I kept it... Sometimes I would just open the box and stand.'
Then he gave me my change and turned to the next customer, and we have never mentioned it again, and we never will, and that is exactly right.
Grief has regular customers. We come in weekly, buy small things for the dead, and nobody rings it up as strange.
I walked home in the rain thinking about how many of us there must be, all over the city, all over everywhere. The man buying one ticket to the cricket, seat beside him empty. The woman renewing a magazine subscription in a dead husband's name. An entire hidden economy of love with nowhere to deliver itself, so it keeps placing the order.
A therapist would call my Saturdays a ritual, and would probably want to know when I plan to stop. A friend, meaning well, called it 'not moving on.' But I have come to think we misunderstand what these habits are. I am not pretending she is alive... I know precisely how dead she is. I know it at four o'clock especially, when the kettle goes on in an empty kitchen. The biscuits are not denial. They are memory with an errand to run, and memory behaves better when you give it a job.
Around the first anniversary, unable to sleep, I found a page of poetry prompts online, and one of them said: write about a ritual you cannot explain to anyone. I wrote about the biscuits until three in the morning. It was the first time I had put the whole thing into words, the buying, the not eating, the rubber band on the last packet she ever touched, which is still in a drawer and will outlive me. The poem was clumsy. Writing it felt like finally declaring something at customs after years of smuggling it.
I have read since that this is common, that half of what gets written about grief is really about the small ceremonies, the errands and the empty chairs, because the big fact is too big to look at directly. You stare at the sun through a pinhole.
Mine is orange flavoured and costs ten rupees.
Yesterday was Saturday. I bought the biscuits at ten past nine.
But in the afternoon, at four o'clock, I did something new. I made tea, strong enough to insult the milk, and I set out two cups, hers with the faded marigold on the side, and I opened the packet myself.
I dunked one. Held it under, one second too long, on purpose. It went down exactly the way hers used to, a soft brown drowning, and I heard myself laugh alone in the kitchen, a strange wet laugh with salt in it.
'Overconfidence,' I said to the empty chair. 'It runs in the family.'
I drank my cup. I let hers go cold, the way it was always going to. And when I cleared the table there were two cups all the same, one empty, one full, both of them used, if you count what they were used for.
Next Saturday, ten past nine, Sharma ji will have the packet ready. Neither of us will say anything. Regular customers never need to explain what they came in for.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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