One of the doctors in the administrative line helped expedite the laborious process – Dr Ravi Rao. This is how I knew him then. I was able to get my mother home by the evening because of him. He dropped me home later that afternoon and stayed for the last rites.
Mummy, for whom punctuality had been the deity she worshipped every waking moment, was cremated on time, shortly after she was brought home for the last time.
Andrew was one of the men who carried my mother’s flower-bedecked body to the waiting hearse. The vehicle for her last journey was decorated with her favourite flowers– Mangalore mallige. In my memories, it was this jasmine I confused with that last living memory of her when she asked me not to forget my packed lunch. In my head, her departure began with that goodbye.
Andrew was in the front, along with my father, holding the tightly woven mat of plantain palms on which she lay.
I didn’t need to look at my watch. I knew it was 5 p.m. We had the last slot at the crematorium. Andrew’s flight to Boston, Massachusetts, was in five hours. I was supposed to have been with him, to help him complete his packing and close the house. My parents were supposed to pick us up and drive him to our place, where we’d have an early dinner before we dropped him at the airport.
I walked up to Andrew and told him he should be on his way.
‘I’ll push my ticket back,’ he said.
‘No,’ I heard myself say. ‘Just go.’ I didn’t turn to look at him.
Please go while I have the strength to tell you to go.
The key to getting me started on the days I was iffy about going for a run was stretching – a set of six exercises. The moment I felt my quads and calf muscles, an alarm went off in my body. I was ready.
That post of a certain bare-chested mammal had set me back this morning. Like there wasn’t enough on my mind already.
Pooja Patil looked young. Very young.
My phone was in my pocket, and I was not pulling it out again. Not for a while.
Just before I left, I stepped on my balcony and made a 15-second video of the bougainvillea that swept across the terrace. It was picturesque.
Meena Iyer. Pooja Patil. Days turn to weeks, to months, to years. And answers slip between the cracks.
I had started running after my mother’s death. It is my time with her. I hear her in the rustle of low-hanging branches or the whistle of the wind. I see her in the stray leaf that drifts and settles on the ground before skipping along with me.
I run on weekends, but when my head is buzzing, I hit the road four to five days on the trot. Any time, afternoons even. It’s as if I’m looking to catch an answer that’s floating somewhere in the troposphere, hoping my toes will carry me to it.
I couldn’t feel the world around me like I usually do this morning. The sound of whirring vehicles, the shuffle of pedestrians, the kid on the bike, the lush pink carpet of tabebuias or the sharp rays of the sun, all of which I usually carried with me. My two-kilometre loop around Cubbon Park, which led me past the State Library and out of the grounds, was the favourite part of my routine. Sometimes, I ran that loop four or five times.
I stopped for the flora and fauna, on occasions, to watch how and where the light fell at different times of the day, like it were making a point, closing an argument. Offering closure?
Today, it felt like I was seated before a monitor displaying two pictures – Andrew Brown and Meena Iyer. No matter how much I ran, I couldn’t get away from them.
Meeting Meena the previous week had parched my spirit. At first, I couldn’t think or feel. I was numb. Then it all came rushing to me, a gargantuan wave.
After Mummy’s death, every now and then, a bloodied picture darted in and out of my mind space like an erratic wireless signal. It stirred violent thoughts. I wanted to crash my head against a wall, crack it in two. The frequency had reduced over the years, but in the last few days, there was a new trigger. Twice during my run today. Already. The first time, I flinched. The second time, I hit the pavement and grazed my right knee and left palm, ripping my favourite tights.
My friendship with Meena was a chequered space, a chess board. We had our moments as friends. The odd chat at the school cafeteria, a few sleepovers, her material generosity and her openness in wanting to include me in outings with the StyleStahs. The rest, the times she ignored me, fell in the dark squares.
My only exposure to friendship as a schoolgirl was that of being a project. Meena was trying to make me better. She was teaching me style, moulding me, making me presentable.
‘You should wear more shorts,’ she would decree, pointing at the length I needed to achieve. More like a waist belt. The two pairs of shorts I owned were right for havildars she told me. ‘They’re called shorts for a reason.’
Meena was constantly correcting my posture, and then, as we grew older, my pronunciation. When there wasn’t anything to correct, ‘Lower your volume,’ she’d caution me. My decibel level was barely above a whisper.
I was an oddball growing up, even in my tiny family. My mother was the social one who had a lot of friends, college pals from her Mangaluru days she stayed in touch with. She had quite a circle at office, too, most of them women, who came home for tea and snacks after work sometimes. Myfather had a couple of pals, with whom he went out for a drink sometimes, but he always knew what to say to whom.
I didn’t have my mother’s charm or my father’s comfort level around folks. When we were invited as a family for a meal, I stuck to my mother; it was only after a lot of cajoling that I would leave her side. Once I mixed with the other kids, exhausting most of Meena’s tips, I would play the circus clown, not knowing how else to communicate with them.
My mother embraced me whole and soul. She didn’t try and change me, make me like the daughters of her friends, one of whom was in the movies. She let me be.
Andrew espoused me in the same fashion – the dinks and dents. He didn’t talk down my scattered communication skills, my vacant expression or my hesitant social manner. ‘Your strength,’ he had told me when he was just 21. I had no idea what he was talking about then, but I have an inkling now.
