
BENGALURU: The profound grief of losing a loved is one of those human experiences that nobody wants but everybody goes through. Suddenly, or slowly, they slip away from this world, leaving behind heartbreak that one must learn to live with.
What is also left behind are objects – maybe a wedding ring your mother never took off, maybe a grandfather’s rocking chair where he read the paper every morning, or maybe the room where a relative remained bedridden – viscerally evoking a time, a moment, or memory where the one you loved was beside you.
It is these objects, and the memories they evoke that exObjects (Om Books International; Rs 695), an anthology compiled by Shinie Antony and AT Boyle, delves into through the personal accounts of 11 different writers. “What do we do with this stuff? We, the living, sort it out, give it away, throw some, keep some.
Slowly these objects, pixelating dully in the background until then as mundane possessions of others, come to mean something more. They become more ours than theirs, those who are gone. In time grief loses its raw flamboyance and settles down into a prosaic number of finite things left behind, those articles of continuum and belonging, carrying within them, words and voices, quirks and little eccentricities. Entire people, actually,” says Antony.
For the duo, the concept of the book began years ago with Boyle losing her parents to Covid. “Together for nearly 70 years, they were dead within seven months of each other. As soon as the hospital call came, I opened my iPad and placed 10 fingers on the keyboard... No matter where we call home, we have much in common. Everyone experiences loss; the challenge is finding hope through the individual processes of grieving,” says Boyle.
Including contributions by 11 writers like Jerry Pinto, Vikram Sampath, and Shashi Deshpande apart from Boyle and Antony, who are vastly different from each other in their styles and areas of expertise, what binds the book together is that these accounts go beyond portraying loss, looking at their subjects as whole people.
Antony says, “There is nothing ‘mere’ about loss. Grief is a trial by fire, so, you sort of go beyond the grief into a new world where the sentimental gives way to whole, real people as they are in memories and the objects they used”. Antony continues, “Shashi Deshpande’s dressing table mirror, given by her grandfather, is still in her family.
To Vikram Sampath, his mother’s room stood for her, and he was loathe to change a thing in it. The love letters that Jaishree Misra’s late parents wrote to each other, Belinda RushJansen’s candlestick... There are items of clothing, fireflies, and even a key to an ancestral home that no longer exists. These writings go beyond the obvious, to beautiful spaces.”