What do you picture in your mind when you think of death?
Maybe you picture a loved one who passed away. Maybe the word induces nightmarish images of blood and gore if you’ve witnessed accidents. These are normal thoughts.
But I always imagined it as a magic trick. One day my grandfather was lounging on his old chair watching me color giraffes and whales in my little coloring book, the next day onwards the chair was empty… like some magician had waved his wand and opened a portal in our house and taken him away. That’s what I told my friends in kindergarten… complete with sound effects.
‘Puff!” and grandpa was gone… I used to say.
When my parents came to know about my imaginative explanation, they deemed me too young to know the truth and left the matter unclarified.
So all through my childhood, death was a black hole, a portal… it happened in a flash and then was gone.
When I grew up, I understood what death really meant… but somehow the image of a portal and a flash remained, maybe because after grandpa I had never been witness to a death up close.
That changed when Mom died. I cried a lot. Dad held my numb body and looked ahead at the pyre with dry eyes as Mom was cremated.
I cried again the next day and the next. But then after three or four days, I had to forget about it and move on. I had a husband and kids of my own to take care of.
After my husband went to office and kids went to school, I would go to my parent’s house to check on dad. It was after a few days like this that I observed that death could grow. It wasn’t over in a flash.
It grows on the ones who were closest to it and closest to the people it took. I watched it grow on dad… like tentacles that grab you and pull.
Or like strange roots that grew out of the earth instead of going in. At first they grabbed onto dad’s legs. Whenever I went to check on him, I found him on the sofa blankly staring at whatever was there on the TV. He remained like that for the entire day. I never saw him move for the few hours in the afternoon that I spent there. But at least he used to answer when I asked something.
But then the roots grew further up and bound his arms and body. They wound around his neck and up his jaw, finally sealing his mouth. In a week, he stopped talking. Nothing elicited any response from him. There was not even a murmur of a reaction to anything I asked him. But at least I knew he was alive because I could see his eyes move. Whenever I asked him something, even though he wouldn’t reply, his eyes followed the source of the question and landed on me. At least he looked at me, even if it were empty eyes that looked like they were going to cave in any second.
Then one day the roots wrapped around his head covering his eyes. He became blind to the light that came in through the windows. He became blind to the flashes of images on the flat-screen TV. His eyes were open but his irises were stuck… anchored to the center of the dry white. His pupils were dilated, as if he knew he was being mummified alive by death’s roots and was scared to close his eyelids.
Death had cocooned dad, wrapped him up inside its winding black roots. He was dead, except for his labored breaths. I knew he was gasping and I knew if the roots tightened their grip any further his breath would cease.
I had to do something. Death was the adversary here and only life could fight it. The only life I could find in that house was the memory of Mom. That is one thing death cannot touch… memory.
Since breath was the only grasp dad had with the world now, I rushed to Mom’s wardrobe and brought back a red saree that was her favorite. I held it up to dad’s nose. Surely, if he still could breathe, he should be able to smell the saree. It should evoke memories of Mom. I was sure it would.
After a while, I heard a low grunt. I held the saree closer to dad’s nose. I could see little quivers on his face and neck. More grunts erupted as he struggled to free himself from the grip of the black roots. I sat by his side and caressed his head as slowly he unspooled himself from the strong clutches.
Once he was free, the dry eyes burst forth with tears like a hole had been poked in a dam. He hugged Mom’s saree to his chest and wailed. I held him as he sobbed salty tears into the red fabric.
Dad fell asleep after he’d spent the tears that had remained clogged all these days. He was sleeping on the sofa hugging the saree when I left him.
When I opened the door to his house the next day, I found him hanging by the saree on the fan. There was not even a breath to salvage.
As I stood at the doorstep and stared up at the hanging body, I saw starkly what the wily creature had done. Death had lowered its mighty branches and strung him up by his neck. Once death has marked you with its cold tentacles, you are owed to it and it will claim you by whatever means necessary.
Below his dangling feet lay the black roots that he’d shed yesterday. When they saw me, they started crawling towards me.
