I held Mummy’s broken bones in my hand. It had been fifteen days since she’d been cremated on a pyre of logs, not far from her Delhi home. The fire had baked and split her skeleton, and then the larger pieces were manually pulverized. A crematorium caretaker handed these fragments to us in a cheap polycloth bag. My brothers-in-law and I bought a painted ceramic urn from the funeral supply store for fifty rupees and transferred the remains into it. We covered the mouth of the urn with a piece of fine red cotton, tied the cloth with string, and draped the urn with a strand of marigolds. That looked much more tasteful. Mummy was always one to do things properly, to be mindful of appearances.
I picked out a few errant bits of bone from the bag. They were odd shapes, mostly unrecognizable, some stubby, some shards, like pieces of fibrous calcite, with an occasional blue, green, or red sheen. A few were tough, but most were flaky and brittle, from either her osteoporosis or the fire. I did not feel terror or revulsion as I’d imagined, only tenderness for the fragility of her body. Over the past year I would watch her rise very, very slowly from her bed, as if performing a pantomime. She’s like a broken sparrow, I thought. Just a bag of bones.
I secretly put a few pieces of her in my jacket pocket to keep her close.
In addition to the urn, there was a solid twenty-pound bag of ashes, some hers, some from the cremation wood. It took a dozen people — kids, grandkids, partners, servants — to scatter them across her beloved roof garden on an unusually clear Delhi afternoon. Most days the smog could kill you if you stayed out too long; it certainly shortened my mother’s life. In the ash, we occasionally saw something the bone gatherers had missed. Oh fuck, a tooth, my niece said, bolting away as if she’d been bitten. I can’t. I just can’t. Sorry, Nani. She stood by the parapet, her face active with distress, shaking out her hands, while the rest of us continued to scoop and spread cups of ashes. I smiled at my niece addressing Grandma, who’d normally be on the roof at this time, sunning her tiny, shrunken body and being served lunch. Our jackets and trousers turned gray and brown with Mummy’s dust.
The garden, modest in size, was soon covered everywhere with ash — on the low creepers, the roots of miniature fruit trees, the dry winter grass. There was still more, and nowhere to spread it unless we wanted to smother the vegetation, so we washed our hands, ate lunch, and drove to a neighborhood park, the one Mummy and her friends strolled in before Covid, and scattered the rest there, quickly, before the gardeners knew what we were doing.
I was moving apartments in New York when I learned she’d died. I missed her cremation, which happened within a day, but I arrived in time for her memorial service and the rituals involving her remains. My presence was apparently key to the release of her soul. But I wasn’t staying with the rest of the family in my mother and sisters’ duplex. There were too many people there, flitting between rooms and floors, marking our family’s version of collective grief.
For us, grieving doesn’t typically include checking in or hugs or crying together.
Thanks for everything, I ventured to my oldest sister. How are you doing? She’s an alpha manager in Mummy’s mold.
What thanks? she snapped. Doing what’s needed, that’s how I’m doing. She kept on a whiteboard a list of tasks that she relentlessly coordinated: tracking travel for a dozen people, sorting Mummy’s saris and files, chasing bank managers to close accounts, hunting down the missing attorney who held Mummy’s will, bribing bureaucrats for the documents of death, and planning meals for the clan. Everything held equal urgency.
Meals are an obsession of a subgroup in my family who especially focus on meat dishes. An endless variety of these arrived on the table every day I was there, home cooked, store bought, or delivered from specialty restaurants all over South Delhi: mutton burra kebab, guloti, chicken seekh, rahra gosht, lamb biryani, with sides. I could barely get myself to taste the cooked flesh, so I stuck to my mother’s diet, which was simple dal, vegetables, Indian cheese, and quinoa, which she liked and made me bring her every time I came. I spent time with the hordes during the day and into the evening, but at night I could not bear to be in the house. Mummy’s frigid empty room with the hospital bed, her breathing equipment stored away in cabinets, her medicines and personal effects cleared out already, and especially the red chair by the bathroom on which she had passed, sitting quietly with her inhaler as her heart stopped, the stains of her release still visible on the fabric despite a deep clean — taking in all this made my heart go cold. In any case, the only space for me was on a futon in the living room. Her body had lain in that room while the servants had fixed her face and combed her hair before the cremation. I wasn’t scared of ghosts anymore, but sleeping alone there in the dark would have been deeply unsettling.
Instead, I’d taken lodgings, as usual, at an Airbnb in the same colony, the Indian version of a gated community. It was less than half a mile away, just across the nallah, or culvert, that intersects the neighborhood. Nallahs are a feature of many tony Delhi neighborhoods, vestiges of a time when it rained more and there were no sewage pipes. Some years back, the colony association had enclosed the length of the open drain, about thirty feet wide, with a raised park, because noxious fumes were making residents keel over. Crossing the culvert to reach my private space allowed me to psychically separate myself from the parental house, even though the distance was modest, just eight minutes’ walk. The previous time I was in Delhi, for a late-summer reunion, my mother had said to the cook after dinner, Make his bed in the TV room. Put his clothes in Sahib’s old cupboard. I looked at her and said, My stuff is at the guesthouse. You know that. She tilted her head and waved her arm in exaggerated umbrage. Look at this boy. What he’s saying. You must take an appointment to see him. The servant continued making up the sofa bed until I stopped him. There was an even larger crowd in the house then, family and health aides and physical therapists and cleaning ladies, in and out. By the evening, I needed a release from the constant circulating energy, and from the rigid structure of twenty-four-seven home care, the unceasing sequence of blood pressure and oxygen monitoring, the attaching and detaching of nebulizers and breathing tubes, the continual discussion of bowel movements and medicine schedules.
I always suspected that my mother knew what was going on at the Airbnb. I told her I needed to stay there for work, to take early and late Zoom meetings. Of course, I’d come home every day and stay for meals. A wisp of shame, like a tendril of brown smoke, lingered around my half-truth. Now, even with her gone, the shame persisted. I’d internalized her scrutinous eyes, which missed nothing, including what was undisclosed. She’d birthed me. She knew my body. Was it obvious to her, my sometimes single-minded craving? Could she read it in my face after I’d been around her all day, in that apartment turned into a nursing home?
Unlike New York, Delhi is a place I sleep alone only if I want to. I mostly don’t, and there are choices each night for who shares my Airbnb bed — not endless ones, but real. Occasionally I’ll have the strange sensation that it’s the same body I’m lying with every night, that it’s only the faces that change, like masks. It’s been like this on all my trips, four in fifteen months, to help manage my mother’s care. A gravy train of young, fresh-faced, slender, nubile lads, inexplicably keen to lie naked with “Daddy,” a word of love that signifies both my age and how erotic it is to them. I have more sex in a couple weeks in Delhi than in a year in New York City, more brown, furry, tasty, full-bodied sex, with guys who have no compunction about spending the night the first time they come over.
This trip was no different, but my urgency was, my need to be soothed was. I was having difficulty sleeping, so romping all night with only short periods of rest worked well for me, and by the morning the boys looked tired and grumpy. I’m sorry if I disappointed you, they said. Or: Did I keep you up, Daddy? Or: Can I stay a little bit longer, Uncle? All were variations on Why the fuck couldn’t you let me sleep after fucking me so long and hard?
For the first time, I felt like a real user with these men, an addict, an energy vampire. Skin-to-skin contact seemed essential to my getting through the night, the force I drew from them an elixir critical to my spirit. As I got ready to return to my dead mother’s house in the morning, seeing their bodies lying in repose on the stained white sheets, unable to rise after the marauding of the night, I experienced if not intense elation, as in the past, then at least the other residual of passionate contact: the affirmation that I was alive and fully seen and sensed by someone beautiful.
In this way I am an alien in my family. No one else seems to need what I do, except my late father, who in his last years complained bitterly about not getting enough physical attention from my mother. He was at the age where he’d lost all filters, and Parkinson’s disease had made him anxious and feeble and ineffectually belligerent. He regularly asked me to intervene when I visited, to remind my mother that she had wifely duties to fulfill, no matter his condition, and not just the managing of his care. I spoke to her finally, but only to ask her if he was doing anything that made her uncomfortable and to suggest she sleep apart from him. It could have been a moment of great awkwardness, but she was entirely matter-of-fact about it. I’ll take care of him till he dies, but I’m not obliged to touch him anymore. That awfulness is done. She said she had to hold his hand at night because he was like a child in the dark, grasping and afraid and crying out from nightmares. She said I was not to worry on her behalf, because she had more than enough strength to kick him away when he misbehaved.
It was hard to take all this in, because I was concerned about my mother and also empathized with my father’s desire to be held, given what I knew of my own yearning for physical contact, all the things I did to meet that need, the way I felt shaky inside when I didn’t know where my next chance was coming from, especially in New York. I confess I even had a poor Dad response at that moment. Part of me wondered why my mother couldn’t just give him a hug from time to time.
I recall a moment of clarity after this conversation. The dots connected between contradictions I hadn’t fully parsed before, bits of things I’d heard and seen my whole life: my father was the more affectionate partner, and he loved, even respected, my mother, and apparently this gave him permission to be a pig. My mother did what she could to preserve her self-respect in an arranged marriage, but there was, in her nature, a piece that predated my father: it was easier for her to show affection with words and caretaking than with touch.
. . . . . .
As a small child in India, I was held and coddled constantly, no deprivation. I was the precious son born after two daughters. My father tried to grab and kiss me, but his beard was prickly and he smelled like stale cigarettes, so I’d push him away and run to my mother’s soft arms and breasts. She had such joy in holding and beholding me, feeding me. There was no way for me to know that this was unusual for her, this willingness to be close to another body. Her skin was for me, my own and special possession. As I grew older, she began training me to sleep alone, and I hated it. I could not understand why I couldn’t nestle with her every night. Sometimes I’d wake up afraid in the dark, afraid of ghosts, and run to my parents’ bed to climb in next to her. My every pore knew her smell, the milky, talcumy fragrance in which I wanted to be enveloped at all times.
When I was ten, my parents went abroad to work, and I was sent to live with my grandparents in Delhi. I saw my parents only in the summers and didn’t live with them again until the eleventh grade, and then only for a year and change before college. I did get to hug my grandmother’s body, to rest my head on her fleshy arms, at least until I hit puberty. Then no parent or grandparent wanted to touch me, and I didn’t want to touch them either. I was so coiled up, I thought I would break. It would be years and years of skin deprivation and constant masturbation until I figured out sex with men. After she sent me away, I didn’t hug my mother with any sincerity. I got very good at abrupt hellos and goodbyes, and so very good, the times when I was with her, at reducing her to tears with my gruffness.
At twenty-one, I went to America for graduate school. I came out to myself and had no meaningful contact with my parents for years. My father wrote me long letters asking me what was wrong. I don’t remember letters from my mother. Everything in my life was out of sync, and it was the kind of hell that has to be traversed alone. I needed to find a version of myself that I could live with before I could face them.
At twenty-nine, I had a loving boyfriend and a stable job, finally, and I went to Delhi to show my mother who I was. I wanted to touch her again, at least in spirit, to reconnect as my authentic self. To break through the years of distance that preceded even my self-discovery. To show her that I had found love on my own terms. I was terrified.
When I told her, Mummy was getting ready for a dinner party, cleaning her face with her special Anne French lotion, brushing on foundation, putting on her bloodred lipstick and a hint of mascara. Sprinkling talcum on her neck and bosom. I watched her just as I had as a child, the beautiful performance before the long dressing table mirror. She was stunning still.
She didn’t look at me once as I revealed my whole heart. Fine, she said, when I was done. You’ve said it. Now get moving, please. We are late for dinner.
I said, I’m OK if we don’t go.
Why? she said. We’re all selfish and do what we want. I’m going to the party.
At the event she was genial and animated, as she always was in social settings. There was no way anyone could tell that beneath us tectonic plates had shifted.
. . . . . .
We rebuilt our relationship as friends, painfully. I didn’t keep much from her — dating, friendships, breakups, job changes, buying and selling apartments — all the banalities from which we make meaning. I enjoyed our phone conversations over the decades. I tried to support her in being more patient with my father, who harassed her to find a miracle cure for his galloping feebleness. She counseled me on managing an ever-shifting, maddening boss. Never argue with an insecure person. Say, Salaam! Absolutely brilliant! Then do nothing. Works with your father every time. We would laugh and say we were peer coaches to each other. She’d tell me her spirits lifted and her day brightened when we spoke.
But I could not help feeling, always, the undertow of her deep disappointment in me, and our hugs when I visited her were sideways, cursory. No accomplishment of mine sparked as much joy in her eyes as, say, her grandson’s wedding and the hope of a great-grandchild. Occasionally I’d see a bit of the rage she’d swallowed, as when she kept up a correspondence with my partner after he and I separated, counseling him long beyond the point of necessity, and passing on to me dribs of their exchanges even when I asked her to stop. Once, in Delhi, I was out meeting a man, and she summoned the servants and neighbors when I didn’t respond to her texts. She was about to call the police, when I came home. Her face was twisted by years and years of aversion. People get murdered and dismembered in this city. You need to let us know where you are at all times. I was fifty-one years old. I wanted to tell her that at one level I was all right being dead to her.
After Covid took my father and almost killed her as well, she tried to rally, but the disease was relentless. The crises came in waves: bronchial and intestinal complications; vertigo; falls; surgeries; frequent, sometimes long, hospital stays. Each visit I thought would be the last. One day in the hospital she told me she wanted to die. Her lungs, weakened by years of asthma, were devastated by Covid. She was tired of trying to catch her breath. She asked me to find out how she could do it. I did some research, which turned up very little. I tried to interest her in card games, to speak to her about her memories, to meditate together, to watch a movie. She’d try, but then she wanted to lie down and put on her breathing mask, to argue with the nurse for the strongest possible steroid. She had no energy for stories, hers or anyone else’s. All she expressed was a litany of her distress. How can they say I’m improving? They don’t know what I feel inside. She said the doctors were misguided, trying to wean her too soon from the machines and the potent drugs. Only more pills reassured her.
Once I held her hand as she lay struggling to breathe in her hospital room. Hearing her wheeze made me feel as if I too couldn’t get any air. It was a bird’s claw, her hand, slight, bony, the thinnest skin. The arm attached to this hand had lost most of its flesh. What remained hung off the bone like crepe paper, like it could rip from elbow to wrist if you pulled too hard. It was marked with bruises where blood had been taken. Still, I felt some peace from that contact, and I thought she might feel it too. We hadn’t touched skin-to-skin like that since my childhood. I wanted us to stay that way, but after a minute she retrieved her hand slowly, as if for safekeeping, pulled it into the folds of her rough blanket. Discomfort was written on her face. Neither of us said anything, but I was so very sad, and angry that my gesture, both tiny and monumental, had failed.
I’d come to the hospital twice a day, take care of the basics, and then I could not stand to be with her. Easy, easy, my trick back at the Airbnb would say as I pounced a little too roughly on his body.
Mummy rallied once more before she died. She stabilized at home. She was working with her physical therapist, relearning to climb stairs. Her appetite had returned. Her face filled out. During our last summer reunion, she learned that she was going to become a great-grandmother. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, she said, and for once that was a sign of pleasure. The next time you come, it will be winter, she said to me. I want a front-opening sweater. She meant a cardigan. It’s easier with all these breathing pipes.
I love you, she said to me as I was leaving, and I was blindsided. Neither of us had ventured to voice that sentiment before. Please call me regularly. It makes my day to talk to you. Similar sentiments of love were repeated after I left, through WhatsApp messages and calls. I still feel the awful curse of my inability to return the words.
On the last leg of this final trip, I went with my family to Varanasi, on the Ganges. I saw the ghats, the broad steps into the river, where bodies are cremated all day and night, leaping flames, pungent smoke, burning flesh. I saw, for the first time, how greedy the reaper is, how he never stops coming. It was a gutting sorrow to realize all the moments of connection I had missed with my mother: more time in the hospital, more late evenings in her presence instead of with a stranger in bed. Perhaps we could have created a few more memories. Perhaps I could have found the will to say I love you too. That I still want a hug from you, Mother, as tight as we can without crushing your bones.
We hired a boat with a couple of scruffy priests and a photographer and went out to the middle of the murky river. We carried with us a black-and-white photograph of Mummy, printed at the hotel reception. At any moment, the photo threatened to fly away in the smoky breeze. The priests argued with each other and made me perform a dozen rituals, all rote and inexplicable. My sisters and I poured milk and yogurt and water and sugar into the urn of bones, and also stuffed in balls of kneaded dough, until the container was completely packed. It’s too late to feed her now, I wanted to say. I garbled several chants, and then it was time to scatter her remains and release her soul. This was my job as the only male child, precious beyond words when I was born. The urn was so full that nothing came out as I turned it mouth downward over the river.
I shook it and shook it, violently. Nothing. Everyone on the boat watched me, distressed. With my fingers I pried out everything that was blocking the mouth. Then I reached inside, for one last contact with her bones, now mixed with all the offerings we’d roughly made to her. Pulled out clump after clump, bones, milk, food, memories, and offered her to the creatures of the river and sea.
