The First Funeral I Attended as a Child
I understood nothing except that adults could also be afraid.
They dressed me in white and told me not to ask questions, so of course questions were all I had.
I was seven the winter my grandfather died, and the first thing death did was rearrange the furniture. I came home from school and the drawing room sofa was standing in the corridor, upended, like it had been sent out of class. In its place, on the floor, on white sheets, sat more adults than I had ever seen sitting on a floor. The television had been turned to face the wall. Someone had stopped the clock in the hallway, actually stopped it, and that frightened me more than anything I had yet seen, because clocks, I had understood until that afternoon, were not things that adults were allowed to touch.
Dadaji was in the middle of the room and everyone said he was sleeping and absolutely nobody behaved as if he was sleeping.
That was the first crack in the world. Not the death.
The performance around the death, and how badly the adults were performing it. These were people who could do anything. My father could repair the scooter, argue with the electricity office, remove a splinter from my foot while telling a joke so I would not notice the needle.
And there he stood in the corridor next to the exiled sofa, holding a steel glass of water somebody had given him, not drinking it, not putting it down, a man who had suddenly forgotten what hands were for.
The house smelled of marigolds and camphor and, underneath everything, ice. They had put slabs of it under the cot, and it dripped into trays with a sound like a tap counting. Aunties arrived in waves and their crying arrived in waves, rising when a new relative entered, settling, rising again. I remember thinking, with the cold clarity children are not supposed to have, that the crying had rules, and that everybody except me had been taught them in advance.
I asked my Chachaji when Dadaji would wake up. He was the joking uncle, the one who pulled coins out of my ears every Diwali. He looked at me, and his face did something I had no name for then, a kind of weather moving through it, and he looked away and said... "Go sit with your mother."
A coin man with no coins... Question one, unanswered.
In the evening they took my grandfather away on shoulders, with a sound of chanting, and I was not taken along, being too young, and when the men of the house came back at night their heads were shaved and they smelled of smoke and river. My father's bare scalp in the lamplight made him a stranger. I had never seen his head before. Seven years old and I remember thinking: I did not know my father had a head under his hair. That is how children process a cataclysm. Through the nearest available absurdity.
Then came the diya, and the diya is the reason I can tell you this story at all.
They lit a small oil lamp in Dadaji's room, on the windowsill, and the pandit said it must not go out for thirteen days. Someone must watch it, keep the wick fed, guard it from drafts. The soul, someone explained above my head, in the way adults explain things above children's heads believing them deaf, needed the light for its onward travel.
Finally. A job. A rule that made sense. Fire, wick, oil, do not let it die. After three days of a house whose every rule had melted, here was a task with edges, and I appointed myself to it with the entire ferocity of a seven year old who has been useless all week.
I sat with that flame through the evenings while the adults murmured in other rooms. I learned its moods. It leaned when the door opened two rooms away. It flinched at the window's gaps, so I stuffed the gaps with newspaper. I fed it oil from a copper spoon, a spoonful at a time, terrified of drowning it, because a flame can drown, that was my first discovery of the week, light can be killed by the very thing that feeds it.
On the ninth night I woke thirsty at some black hour and went to check on my flame...
My father was already there.
He was sitting on the floor of Dadaji's room in the dark, in front of the windowsill, and he was crying.
Not the aunties' crying, with its waves and its rules. Something worse, because it was trying so hard to be silent, a big man folding a storm into smaller and smaller squares so it would fit inside him without making a sound. His shaved head shone in the lamplight. He looked small... He looked, and this was the thought that split my childhood in half, he looked like a boy.
I stood in the doorway doing the arithmetic that nobody prepares you for. My father was somebody's child. My father had just lost his father. Above me, the ladder went up and up, and every rung on it was somebody's child, and every rung was afraid.
Nobody explained death to me that winter. They showed me their fear of it, one adult at a time, and that turned out to be the whole explanation.
He saw me. I remember bracing to be sent to bed, the week's refrain, go sit with your mother, go to sleep, not now. Instead he wiped his face with his shoulder, the way workmen do when their hands are dirty, and he patted the floor next to him.
We sat together and watched the flame. He asked if I had been the one stuffing newspaper into the window gaps. I confessed. He nodded, one professional to another, and said the wick would want trimming by morning. We did not speak of anything else. His storm sat there folded inside him and my hundred questions sat unasked inside me, and the diya did what fire does, it moved, and gave us both something to look at that was not each other.
It was the best conversation of my childhood. It contained almost no words.
I would like to tell you I understood grief from then on, but I understood nothing for another thirty years, which I gather is the standard schedule. I grew up, I moved cities, I wrote sometimes, always around the edges of things. When I finally read other people's poems about grief, long after, what startled me was the relief of it, strangers confirming that they too had watched the adults perform and seen through the performance, that they too had been seven in a doorway once. Poems about family did the same thing from the other side, and I began to suspect that half of what we call literature is just people comparing doorways. The first one I ever wrote myself came out of that copper spoon, of all things, and I keep it filed under memory, because that is where the smell of camphor lives now.
Last February my father died, on a Tuesday, with less warning than we were owed.
And in the blur of that week, in his house with its sofa in the corridor and its clock stopped by hands I did not see, somebody lit a diya on a windowsill, and I heard a voice from the kitchen saying the flame must be watched, and I felt the old job description settle onto me like a coat kept all these years in my size.
I sat with it through the nights. I fed it from a spoon. I stuffed the window gaps.
And on the ninth night my daughter, who is six, appeared in the doorway at some black hour, thirsty, and found me on the floor in front of the flame, folding my storm into smaller and smaller squares.
I saw her seeing me... I saw the arithmetic begin behind her eyes.
I wiped my face with my shoulder, and patted the floor.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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