We three sisters meet in 2019, after ten years of estrangement – although Neela, the youngest among us, lies prone on the floor, dead.
In the harsh gray of a late New Delhi winter evening, on the sixth of January to be exact, she rests wrapped in white, her dull gold sari beneath invisible, strung with strands of roses and tulsi to stop her smell souring in our noses.
Neela is a picture of repose; eyes closed, face evenly laced with turmeric and sandalwood, nostrils stuffed with cloud-like cotton wads. But surfaces lie; they don’t reflect a person’s inner life.
Kamala, the eldest among us, and I, stare unseeingly past her supersized front door as the night streams down in long vertical shards of blue-black rain. Glossy droplets curdle against our skin from an open window, sharp, cold. The night shower has a raggedy, low, desolate, buzz – a sort of murmured apology for our unpleasant, undesired experience.
The two of us have worked from seven pm on into the icy, thickening dark, on her still warm, pragmatic flesh, to get her into this state of readiness, – and now we sit in wait for the hearse to take her away. We will not be going to the cremation grounds. Merciless rain, the late hour, cultural conventions, poor safety measures and zero knowledge of the area’s topography will serve as our convenient reasons. The funeral service director does not care for our guile, our fabrications for any one of our reasons, only his invoice.
A tall, glowing brass lamp stands at Neela’s head for company. Its single wick is meant to be a symbol of the glow of the soul. Kamala and I, though seated beside her, are separated by margins of hostility that make the crossover to sibling companionship impossible.
As a matter of fact, the lamp is the only glowing thing in her darkened Hauz Khas landscape that flounders under a power outage. In this complete blackout, there is only one thing that surrounds us with its ominous presence: pitch-black darkness.
The doctor we summoned after a hurried internet search, mercifully arrives, swaying in the gloom. Good-natured, unmindful of the showers or the darkness the power trip amasses, he writes down the cause of death as cardiac arrest.
At 35 years, is Neela’s heart now open to the world beyond? Is her raw soul plotting its way through future wanderings? Or is she still caught between worlds, with her sense of self unobliterated, because we have not called a pundit to oversee her last rites? We have no way of seeing or saying and perhaps, we don’t care.
We are here on this benumbed night, not out of love for her – she is inherently unlovable for both of us – but because she has no one. No friends, husband, children. In fact, Kamala learns of her death on the phone from her maid who in the same breath demands her salary. Her neighbors do not show up for her funeral which is highly unusual for a close-knit North-Indian community. Their homes too, remain, sunk in darkness and this would undoubtedly stand up as a ready excuse for them.
To us, however, their absence speaks of something else. Her ungenerous spirit, her blade-edged speech and actions that must have rankled them from within, the rancour eventually spreading out. Our decade-long break from sisterhood has been for precisely this. To rid ourselves, our nervous systems, of the cruelty that drifted from Neela as naturally as steam off boiling water.
The parting of our ways with her became inevitable.
Kamala and I, meanwhile, chose to drift apart for fear that any talk of Neela, which invariably there was bound to be, would heal one wound for us but tear open others. Having blurred the edges of each other’s presence for the last ten years, we are now finally together beside Neela, simply because we are sure of our distance from her.
In the years running beneath this one, when we have known Neela’s small and big cruelties – her unending viciousness, her petty acts of revenge, her deliberate betrayal of our confidences back in our childhood, her malicious falsehoods about us during our hellish adolescence, her de-stabilizing of our friendships and marriages – we have both cracked from within and let some of her malice seep into us, settle down. And we have lived with frayed nerves, complexities of hatred, rising tides of anger and a constant pain that clings to us like the sense of being stuck in a place we hate.
It is befitting, perhaps, that Neela’s only mourners are frogs; their din makes this silence not only acceptable but almost an urgent necessity.
“What gives Neela the right to lower us into her own darkness, stretch her shadow beyond her life?” I ask Kamala.
Kamala, who I had forgotten has enormous, long-lashed, kind brown eyes and hair the color of dark honey with specs of sunshine in it.
The rain rains hard. The coarse night, its dripping trails of water, slams up cold against our insides.
In an urgent rush of words, she says, “Nirmala, you and I have put a distance between us, as we have with her, for fear of keeping awake our known, familiar demons. We have lived through these years pretending these devils were not there, that we have escaped them. But they were always around, hidden in shadows, refusing to go unnoticed. Today, with her passing, something seems to have clicked within.”
Slowing down, she continues, “I know now we will keep the fiends she planted alive only if we continue to agree to the terms of her sad, stunted world, to its impositions. Perhaps, her pressures, her prickly self-containment, came from the trappings of her own anxieties from which she could not run. Let’s not see her end as the end of our relationship but a space opening up for us – maybe, just maybe, making our world more live-able.”
“Are you saying that rather than hold on to animosities or chase her ghost we should savor this lightness we feel, this unbearable lifting of shadows?” I ask.
Kamala nods. “Let’s start afresh, Nirmala, with a beginner’s mind, so that moving on, away from the recesses of Neela’s mind, feelings and actions, is easier, a little less jagged.”
We hear the godawful horn of the hearse.
The time is three am. As the black van, its ungodly exterior scratched and bruised, departs in the steamy dead light, and as we let Neela be carried on embers into her future life, the electricity that had been gone for so long returns.
Funny how inanimate things can acquire new meanings in our minds.
As we both sit in this newfound illumination, relishing it, we are, in this moment, unaware of how violence, too, can quietly seep into the mundane.
Just as the lights come on, so do the bats. A hoard of them wheeling and diving across her living room in cheerful curiosity. This way or that or that way or this, they can’t decide. They are oblivious to the distinction of indoors and outdoors and cascade in slow motion, black on white. To us, the sight is hallucinatory, other-dimensional, menacing and piercing all at the same time.
A baby bat settles upside on Neela’s portrait, an oil painting of herself that she had probably commissioned, and backlit to perfection to play out her persona to the galleries. The baby bat locks eyes with her. And then it wings its way towards us, bringing something ragged in his breath, something that she has wilfully left behind for us, something we cannot escape – a past rising to meet the present.
Illustration: Suman Mukherjee
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