Grief, Gatto Bai, The Year 2020
Grief is strange in the times of Corona. Last night, my husband’s uncle passed away. This has been the third death in my family in as many months. How do I grieve? From a distance, of course.
A long distance, in my case. Most of the family, and all of the dead ones, have been in Maharashtra. And we (the husband and I in this case) either cannot or do not want to travel all the way there. Nobody even expects us to. So we grieve, but from a distance.
When I was young(er), I used to hate the 12 day long charade that followed after a death. The endless crowd of visitors, every distant relative joining for dinner, day 1 process, day 3 pooja, day 12 ceremony, day 13 rituals, person after person offering consolation for a grief you are trying to forget. Sigh! what can one do against god’s wishes? Sigh! And repeat.
I am old(er) now, and I recognise all the rigmarole to be what it was meant to be – an outlet. I almost wish I had one now. I dearly wished I had one in April.It was my grandmother. The one I lost in April. She was the only grandparent I had left. I still remember her young(er) days – her fussing over the chulha every morning, the stories she would tell us while she fed us that sabzi we all hated, the set of her lips when she would get stubborn, the touch of her leathery skin when she caressed my cheeks.
She was the only person left who I spoke to in Marwadi. I remember her attempts of talking to my husband – Hindi being their common language – and then asking me, in a low voice, yo kai keve? What does he say? I would tell her, but she would rarely have a good answer in Hindi, so she would make him sit by her side, tell him how wonderful his mother is, and caress his cheek too. Some things only she could do.
When she was cremated, none of her grandchildren were with her. It was the middle of lock-down phase 1, even all her children couldn’t be with her. We all grieved from a distance.We had WhatsApp, though. We dug up our pictures with her, we shared her videos, posted audio renditions of her stories, reminisced over how she spoilt her great grand children. I wanted to be with my family then, to hold someone’s hands and cry, to sit together in a circle and laugh. It hit me only later that week that this entire WhatsApp group would meet soon enough – we met every year – and she won’t be there, for the first time ever. We would remember then, all over again, her warmth and words and stories, in grief part 2.
Of the many stories she told us, I still remember the story of Gatto Bai. Gatto Bai was a little girl, whose parents went on a 7 month long pilgrimage, entrusting her to the care of her seven bhabhis. Grandmother would tell us, in a sign-song voice, how Gatto Bai was thrown into a well by her sisters-in-law for a petty fault. But a peacock found her, she would tell us, and after listening to her tale of woe, the peacock decided to feed her, secretly, in her hiding place in the well.The peacock would also try and coax her out of the well.
“Out you come, Gatto Bai,” he would tell her every day, “it’s been so long, it’s already time to prepare for your wedding! Out you come!”
“How do I come?” she would ask the peacock, “my parents are away on their pilgrimage, and my seven bhabhis all threw me here.”
Gatto Bai had a happy ending, eventually. She survived 7 months in the well, and when her parents returned, the peacock led them to the well, and got her out. Just in time, though. She had survived, thanks to daily-checkins with the peacock, but it took her several weeks to get healthy enough for her wedding.
Welled up like that, nobody does well. Not grief, not Gatto Bai.
If only there were a peacock.