Afsos

This is a personal essay that I wrote after my grandmother passed away. It was first published in Canthius, Issue 10 in 2022.

Bahot afsos ki baat hai

The year is 2013. We are driving home from the airport at night in my father’s van. My parents have just returned from a trip to Chicago, visiting my father’s brothers and their families. My mother doesn’t say anything but we have already heard the news. Later, when the family in Chicago asks her why she didn’t tell them, why she didn’t share her grief in the moment, my mother says she didn’t want to spoil the mood, didn’t want to bring the heaviness with her wherever she went. In the van, we are quiet. It is my father who finally speaks. “Your khaloo passed away yesterday.”

My khaloo had been sick for some months and we had been praying for him with intermittent reminders from our mother. When I hear the news, I feel a tightness in my throat, a little prick in my eyes. I think of my aunt, of how empty she must feel. I ask my mother for her phone number but the idea of reaching out to her fills me with dread.

Days pass and I don’t call. My siblings call her but I still don’t. I wait for a week, when the intensity of the loss might have waned a little, when I know I cannot put it off any longer. I pull out the calling card that I had purchased and carried around in my wallet, as if it was a thing that required safekeeping, no less important than my driver’s licence and credit card. I ride the elevator down to the main floor of the hospital where I am working at the time. My teeth silently chatter, as if I suddenly have the chills. My palms feel sweaty, my feet slick and moist, trapped inside cheap flats from Payless. In the noisy atrium of the hospital, the smell of rubbing alcohol and burnt coffee hanging in the air, I make the call.

My aunt picks up. I ask her how she is doing.

I’m sorry for your loss always felt to me like an awkward thing to say when someone passes away. How could a word so commonplace as sorry be used to express sympathy at the loss of a life. It always felt hollow to me, especially when compared to the Urdu equivalent, Sunke bohot afsos hua, which roughly translates to, I felt a lot of sorrow upon hearing [the news]. But these were also words that I had never uttered before and they were foreign on my tongue. English was the language I was most comfortable with, even before my family immigrated to Canada when I was twelve years old. Before then, I had visited India only a handful of times in the summer, and after that, just twice as a teenager. My Urdu, awkward in day-to-day conversations, loses its footing entirely in the expression of grief.

“Aap apna khayal rakhrai?” is all I can manage to say to my aunt. My aunt assures me that she is doing alright. I keep asking are you okay, are you taking care of yourself, do you need anything, and she answers in the affirmative twice, in the negative the third time. She puts me out of my discomfort by asking me how I am, how is Idrees, my husband of then five years whom she has never met or spoken to, and asks me to convey her salaams to him and his family. I am relieved to find her voice upbeat, almost chipper, no trace of afsos in it, as if all the grief inside of her has vanished, or is momentarily forgotten, at the sound of my voice. I want to express regret at the loss of her husband, but I can’t bring myself to say anything, much less, bohot afsos ki baat hai. My uncle was in the hospital for a long time, and I know he suffered greatly. I did not reach out to my aunt or my cousins during that time. It had been nine years since I had last seen them. I convinced myself that they didn’t need me to reach out to them; my reaching out added no value. Who was I but a foreign cousin that dipped in and out of their lives, our blips of small momentary connections followed by large swaths of silence, of an absence so complete it was as if I did not exist in their world at all. What could my sorrow, my regret, possibly mean anything to them when they had lost someone so vital that the entire landscape of their lives was now altered. What use would those blips even serve now?

My aunt passes the phone to my cousin and my tongue loosens a little because she too starts asking how I am and where I am working and what I am doing. I answer, grateful for the small talk, for the swerving away from the real reason of my call. No afsos. I remember the room where the phone is in their home. A large spacious living room with just rugs on the floor, no sofas. A room with sea-green walls, the room where we would spread our jaanimaazs next to each other when it was time to pray, our heads wrapped in cotton dupattas. Maybe there is a table on which the phone rests, some books and magazines next to it, a stool so one can sit while speaking. I don’t know how much of this is actually true and how much my imagination constructs. My memory falters.

The call is coming to a natural end and I am relieved it has all gone so smoothly. I ask my cousin to pass the phone back to my aunt, so I can say a final salaam to her before hanging up.

My aunt is older than my mother, the second of five sisters. Of all our aunts, she is the most motherly. She knows our favourite meal – daal, chawal, and fried chicken – and cooks it for us whenever we visit. She sends her sons out to rent movies for us in case we get bored and want to watch something. What my siblings and I love best about her is that she keeps our mother out of our way, keeps her calm when we end up in a water fight with our cousins, dumping buckets of water onto each other as we run up and down the stairs, on the terrace, the main floor of the house, and even the ground floor right up until the main gate that leads outside. And our uncle, with his salt-and-pepper hair combed back, his black square glasses, hands folded behind him, simply smiles at our shenanigans. Our mother is yelling at us to stop, we have no extra clothes to change into, we’re all going to catch a cold, we’re going to slip and fall and break open our heads. Our aunt is reassuring her there is nothing wrong in having wet children, that we will be alright. We stumble back into the living room, clothes pasted onto our bodies, dripping water everywhere as if we had just come indoors after being drenched in a terrific rainfall. Our uncle is still smiling and we are grateful for his tacit approval. He retreats back into his office without a word, not minding the wet floor, the soaking children, their shouting and shrieking filling his home for hours.

My aunt comes on the phone. She says, “apna khayal rakho,” and then says my name. A nickname I have not heard in nine years. Something catches in my throat. I stay silent, unable to respond. I don’t make a sound but my aunt, my mother’s sister who has hugged me too few times to even matter, who has a special nickname for me that no one uses besides my maternal aunts and uncles, knows that I am crying. She tries to comfort me, says my name over and over again, but I cry and cry, not knowing what valve has burst inside of me, what sorrow, what regret, what great afsos has been unleashed.

Sunke bohot afsos hua

The year is 2020. It is the summer and things have calmed down here. The spread of the virus has slowed and after months apart, I am seeing my family again. In India, the virus has mutated and it is unstoppable. I see images of burning pyres on the news, clouds of dark smoke rising up to the sky. There are so many horrific stories. There is a WhatsApp group with our cousins and they tell us they are fine, they are under curfew, they have to stay at home. Then my uncle catches covid. Then he is in the hospital. Then he dies. And with a swiftness that is impossible to fathom, Bade Mama is gone. When I speak to my mother on the phone, I am chopping parsley and there is quinoa bubbling in a small pot on the stove, and suddenly I am crying. I haven’t seen Bade Mama in sixteen years but I can still recall his face clearly, a sturdy white topi on his head, the distinctive brown mark of sajdah on his forehead, his round sunken eyes and flat cheeks, and his dark, short beard.. He had a stern look to him, but when he smiled, he smiled with his entire face – crinkled eyes, upturned cheeks and all. But my afsos is that I cannot recall ever having had a meaningful conversation with him even once, only the tenor of his voice, loud and booming, filling up the hallway when he would return home from work.

I call my cousin in Chicago, Bade Mama’s oldest daughter. I know more about holding space for grief now and although I still don’t say I am sorry for your loss or attempt to do so in Urdu, I ask her how she is holding up. My cousin holds up the conversation. She talks about her siblings, how they are handling the news, she talks about her own children, the tears that drip quietly from their eyes without warning, but mostly she talks about her father, how kind and charitable he was, how people could come to him for anything and he would never turn them away, how much of a loving and supportive husband he was to their mother. It is as if I am learning about an uncle I never knew I had. She tells me about how all our cousins have been reaching out to her, telling her how much they miss Bade Mama, how much he meant to all of them. She tells me about one of our younger cousins, someone I hardly remember, who told her the only reason he excelled in school was because he knew Bade Mama would ask him about his grades, how he didn’t want to disappoint him, how he wanted to make him proud. I tell her the thing I remember the most was how tightly Bade Mama would hug us, how he pinched our cheeks as if to draw out all the sweetness he found within us. “We would have rosy cheeks afterwards,” I laugh, and even as I say it, I wither at the insignificance of my memory. Here is my cousin with his excellent grades and his bright future, and here are my rosy cheeks.

Apna khayal rakhna

The year is 2021. Nanima has been sick for a long time, in and out of the hospital, in and out of a coma, and finally my mother books a flight to India. I learn of Nanima’s death while I am working in a coffee shop. I am sitting at a table in the corner, facing the back wall. There is mellow, upbeat music pouring out of the speakers above me and the din of easy afternoon conversations behind me. I message my siblings, about whether someone should call my mother who is at the airport waiting to board her flight to India. We decide not to tell her just yet. Her grief will be colossal and irreversible. I don’t feel any grief just yet, just a simpler afsos, a feeling of pity for my mother who has now missed the chance to see her own mother one last time. I pack up my things, and as I’m heading out, I run into an acquaintance and we make small talk. I feel pulled to say, Excuse me, I need to leave, my grandmother just died, but I carry on with the conversation effortlessly.

When I tell my husband that Nanima has passed away, I don’t feel any grief. When I tell my kids, I don’t feel any grief. I am only thinking of my mother and feeling something heavy for her, for what awaits her. My mother learns of the news after she has missed a connecting flight from Delhi to Hyderabad. Chote Mama, my mother’s only remaining brother, calls her. I don’t call my mother then. I am relieved that she knows, but now that she knows, there is nothing for me to feel, no more heaviness. The feeling of pity subsides and the sorrow emerges but my tears admonish me. I remember as a child running away from Nanima as fast as I could after sitting with her for the time that my mother demanded, pushing up against her body, soft and pillowy as a cushion, then squirming away to play with my cousins. “Nanima missed you so much,” my mother would chide and I would oblige, sit through the hugs and the kisses, then Nanima herself would let me go. But the grief doesn’t let go. My siblings and our cousins in Toronto gather together, read Quran, make dua and cry together. We hug each other as if we have lost something vital, something beautiful. I don’t try to articulate my grief or offer condolences to anyone, because I have come to accept that I do not possess the language to do so, especially when my own grief feels like an intruder, like I am not worthy of it. What is my grief when pitted against the grief of my cousins who grew up seeking out Nanima’s embraces, vying for her attention, rivalling against each other for the title of favourite grandchild. My afsos feels like something shallow, something that will disappear as quickly and as easily as it came.

I write in my journal the next day, trying to process my emotions, and in an effort to honour the memory of Nanima, decide to share what I wrote on my social media:

“My nanima passed away two days ago in her home in India. When you’ve lived all your life away from the people who are your family and the place that is supposed to be home, grief takes on a different texture, something that enters into the body and doesn’t have a place to anchor. What do I do with the sadness that I feel when I have no memories of my nanima besides the most rudimentary things about her. The way her silver-grey hair was always pulled back and tied into a braid. The way her braid thinned down to the width of cord near the small of her back. The thin white blouses and the cotton saris she wore. The way she smelled like salt and coconut oil. The buttery softness of her cheeks. The way her voice quivered when she spoke. The way my mother clung to her when it was time to leave. My mother’s grief is an ocean. And it’s as if I’m standing by that shore, watching, feeling the pull of her tide. At first it feels like nothing at all but a tenuous tether, then the weight of a womb falling. Maybe that the grief exists is enough. Maybe what is monumental is that nanima’s womb once held my mother and my mother’s womb once held me. Maybe the tether is not tenuous at all but a tightly strung cord that snaps with a volatile energy, an energy that reaches me and slams into my chest. We enter my mother’s childhood home and there is Nanima shuffling toward us, the end of her sari draped over her head. She takes each of our faces in her hands, planting firm kisses on our foreheads, as if she had been waiting for us for years and years, as if she had been waiting her whole life for this moment of reunion.”

My cousins share their memories of Nanima on our WhatsApp group and I share my post, knowing that it will never match up, but it is all that I have, and it is enough.

A month passes. It is time to visit my older sister in Florida. The last time I saw her was the summer of 2019, before the pandemic, and although there are dire warnings about a new variant of the virus, I resolve to go on the trip because I booked our tickets months ago and there is a new niece I need to meet. She is already seven months old and I am eager to hold her. It has been six years since my sister has had a baby. And I wonder if a new niece will have the same hold on my heart, if my love for her will be deep and moving, beyond anything that I have experienced, different even from the love that I have for my sons.

I love her instantly, of course. But there is some strange flutter in my heart when I look at her, this new person who has come into the world, and I start speaking to her in Urdu. I don’t know why I do this, it’s not a deliberate decision that I make, but it is Urdu that reaches my mouth and releases from my tongue when I see her. My sister finds this amusing. She tells my mother, “Hajera talks to her in Urdu, it’s so funny.” My niece’s cheeks burst out of her face, her eyes dance and she has a wise, restrained smile, like she knows something about me that I have not yet realized. Something about the irrational, fiercely defiant nature of the love that prevails between family, between aunts and nieces especially. I call my new niece by a nickname that no one else does, and I think of my own aunt, who I have not spoken to since that phone call nine years ago, except to say salaam on video call when my mother is speaking to her and I happen to be around. Her smile too, is wise and restrained, but also soft and radiant, just as I remember it. “Apna khayal rakhna, Baji,” my mother always says at the end of their calls, and I can see that she too, misses my aunt’s sturdiness and her quiet strength. When I think of her now, so far away in that sea-green living room, I think about all the lifetimes of love I have missed out on, and I can’t help but feel, bahot afsos ki baat hai.

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