While scrolling through my inbox a few days ago, I froze. After forcing myself a few glances at the screen, I shut my laptop and let myself break down. What was the email, you ask? A reminder from the flowers and gifts retailer Ferns n Petals that my mother’s birthday was around the corner and I should give her a “gift of a lifetime”. Last year, I sent flowers and a greeting card to her. She was in Delhi and I was 2,000 kilometres away in Bengaluru. I marvelled at the magic of e-commerce as I watched her open the parcel on video call, with her smile lighting up the screen. I also sent her a plant and a bird-shaped pot to keep it in. Another gift, a sea-green Carvaan radio, had arrived a week in advance. But this year, I could do no such thing. I felt an urge to reply to that email: I don’t have an address to send her anything. She’s gone, leaving behind the gifts.
The pot still sits in the balcony, along with all the others she had bought on her own. When the plants got the parcel containing the news of her death two months ago, they had ceased to be green, as if suddenly scorched by Delhi’s relentless sun. Her chair, on which she would sit and talk to birds about things she couldn’t say aloud, too became melancholic. Though made of plastic, it took on the shape of her absence. The plants are starting to reluctantly come back to life now. The chair too looks less hostile to the presence of others. Soon enough, it might allow someone else to sit on it as well.
The dust-laden Carvaan sounded the same when I finally switched it on. The first song that played was Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh. Tears welled up in my eyes as Lata Mangeshkar sang the lines kisi ke itne paas ho ki sabse door ho gaye. You’re so close to someone, that you’ve become distant from all others. It hit home. In the middle of the song, I got a notification on my phone. It was Google Photos, reminding me about a memory from May 10. It was a photo of the cremation. My mother’s body was wrapped up in plastic, and so were we. The pandemic had robbed us of a last goodbye and stolen from us an essential part of processing grief: closure. My mother battled and held the upper hand against cancer for over eight years. Ever since the pandemic started, she had hardly stepped out of her house. On the day she went to get her first dose of vaccination, she contracted the virus. Two weeks and many sleepless nights later, she passed away, alone in a hospital. We were one of the lucky ones, we were told. We got access to a bed, oxygen cylinders and a ventilator at a time the country was scrambling for them. On May 10 alone, 3,754 people succumbed to the virus in India. The fact that my mother’s death was part of this larger statistic didn’t help. It made it all feel like a storm in which several houses were uprooted. Despite the collectiveness of it all, the destruction of each house means the destruction of a whole universe. I felt anger. But more than that, I felt uprooted.
Amidst it all, I found myself re-reading an online article I had read months ago. In the piece titled Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about the news of her father’s death. The news is like a “vicious uprooting”, she says, yanking her away from the world she has known since childhood. The following lines stand out: “Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”
The good and bad part about grief in today’s time is that technology is at the centre of language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Earlier, we could choose the time of the day to sit down with a photo album and allow ourselves a journey down the memory lane. We could choose whom to meet and allow into our personal space at a vulnerable hour. Now, the past is everywhere: a text from the Fab India store I once bought her a sari from, urging me to come again on Mother’s Day. An email from MakeMyTrip, asking me to resume booking tickets to Pondicherry, reminding me of a promise left unfulfilled to take her there, hold hands and watch the sunset over the sea. A reminder from Google Photos that two years ago, on this very day, I was sitting with her in a park, with hibiscus flowers blooming in the backdrop. On Facebook, where her profile exists, where she still exists, and people can comment their condolences. On most days, I find it perverse. On others, I think of it as a digital graveyard, a place where people can visit and offer metaphorical flowers. There’s no escaping it now: Our memory and our grief, like much of the rest of our lives, is shaped, slaughtered and strewn back by technology. Perhaps, that is why I am writing this on paper. To remember her as she was: like a cup of hot chocolate on a chilly winter morning, like a gentle kiss on the forehead after a long day, like a paperback found on the shelf. And above all else, like home.
Shruti Sonal
(The author is a Bengaluru-based writer who had conveniently forgotten how troublesome Delhi summers are)
(shruti.writes26@gmail.com)