I dart around my tiny flat in Lucknow, northern India – the city where I live and work far away from my family.
My husband has been admitted to the hospital and is in a sudden coma. He is thousands of kilometres away in our home city of Chennai. I have a long trip ahead of me.
What does one pack for a journey like this?
I bring down my large brown suitcase with a thud from the loft and place it on my bed.
He is already dead. I know.
Damn my intuition.
My daughter calls to confirm the news. I feel queasy and swallow the bile rising in my mouth.
My friends find me on the bed, tossing random clothes into the suitcase.
Madhavi Johnson. Source: Supplied
“I need to be by his side,” I repeat with a guilty sense of obligation. But it is my children I wish to hold, hug, and tell them everything is okay.
On the 10-hour drive to Delhi through the gloomy winter night fog to catch a flight home, I am filled with a sense of dread.
My daughters… what are they up to? Have they eaten? Are they sleeping? They must be scared.
The word of his passing has spread far and wide, drawing friends, family and strangers to our family home. He is laid out on a large block of ice in the centre of our living room. The oil lamp kept by his head burns through the night, and the water from the melting ice flows down the mosaic floor.
Hours later, I enter our home. His skin is clammy, his face calm. I float towards my children, away from him, and from blurred faces and muffled voices.
No histrionics. Just hold yourself together.
I give my daughters a hug, shutting my eyes tight. No grieving privately, no resting our tired hearts and souls in a quiet place, at least not for the next few days.
Huddled in a corner away from me, the rest of my family discusses his funeral. I, his wife, am not consulted.
Only a son can light the funeral pyre of a parent and frame a pathway for the soul to head straight to the heavens. The elders recommend a male family member to light the pyre as I “only” have daughters.
Our firstborn, my brave 19-year-old daughter, eventually climbs into the van that carries him, travels to the crematorium and flicks the switch to light her father’s funeral pyre. My sense of pride and relief gets drowned among the gasps of disbelief from the spectators.
We close the front door behind the last of them and try to pick up the pieces of our lives.
“Mourning is a social event,” my mother explains to my children. This is when the community comes together to help with the process of grieving, she emphasises. My girls are confused. Does that also involve strangers giving us free advice on how to redesign our lives?
Madhavi Johnson. Source: Supplied
The three of us have been thrust centrestage under the glare of the spotlight and are expected to act out parts we have not had a chance to rehearse. When the show finally ends, there is no applause or encore – just practised indifference from strangers who await our inexorable collapse.
Unsolicited opinions and suggestions are thrown at me as I struggle to accommodate the expectations placed on me as a single mother and a widowed woman. My demeanour and decisions are judged constantly. It is assumed that my faculties have dissolved with his demise.
I am angry. Why am I, the one who is alive, considered a failure? Is my life diminished and my personality negated because of his death?
I ignore invitations to social events. The presence of a widow is considered inauspicious. I do not want to subject myself to commentary by being present. I feel empowered taking these small steps, but I also have a deep sense of vulnerability. Only those who support my rules and goalposts are allowed into my personal space.
My heavily mortgaged, barely occupied, new Chennai home is emptied. It will be rented out to pay off the loan. Surrounded by boxes and memories, I struggle to let go of the dreams we had built together.
I remembered the email my husband had sent me the night before he passed away. “God has great designs for you,” he wrote. What did he mean?
Madhavi Johnson at the Ganges. Source: Supplied
The urn with his ashes is buried in our garden, waiting to be immersed in the holy river. Eager to return to work, I take his ashes instead to the sea close to our home and give him a send-off.
Ten months later I am in a rickety bus heading to Varanasi for work.
A young man unloads our bags from the bus.
I introduce myself, “Namaste, I am Madhavi. Can I get a cool drink somewhere?”
“I know you, madam. Myself, Lakha.”
The young man gives me a wide, trusting smile that reaches his eyes. He folds his hands and greets me. “Happy to meet you very much.”
Lakha gives me a glass of water from a mud pot. I follow him to the room I will occupy for the next three days of the training I will facilitate.
My head is pounding. Lakha sees my misery.
“Why don’t we go to the river? It will be cooler. Just a short walk from here,” he suggests.
The neem tree on the shore’s edge is in full bloom with little pale-yellow blossoms. Birds chatter, hidden among the shiny leaves of the tamarind tree nearby. Waves and swirls in the water form patterns and dissolve with the evening breeze.
The cool breeze is soothing. I perch on the gnarled roots of the neem tree and watch the holy Ganges river, mesmerised by its purposefulness.
An old man stands by the shore, washing a buffalo. It turns its head away from the river, allowing him to rub its back with a wad of straw, occasionally flicking his tail to chase off flies. Man and animal stand framed against the river – their lives intertwined, their existence symbiotic.
Madhavi makes an offering at the Ganges. Source: Supplied
I should have brought him to this peaceful spot, I think to myself of my husband’s ashes.
Temple bells clang from faraway amidst a faint hum of chants. Little girls walking barefoot urge pilgrims to buy punnets made from dried leaves filled with rose petals and a mud lamp with oil and wick. The pilgrims’ bargain with the little ones to beat the price down, before lighting the lamp and offering the flowers to the river.
Young boys jump into the river and surface with shiny hair and wet shorts. Dripping water, they run back towards their makeshift starting line, laughing and screaming.
The world around me seems brighter.
“Shall we go, madam? Dinner will be ready.”
Lakha helps me up. We cross the wispy fog settling over the yellow mustard fields and walk towards the sound of bells and hymns.
The holy river flows on.
Madhavi Johnson (she/her) is from Chennai, India, and lives in Melbourne with her partner. She worked with UNICEF in India, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Kenya, Namibia and New York. Madhavi published her first collection of short stories titled in 2020.
Related reading
Writing from pain: the whys and the hows
