new york

No I have never been there. Watched a lot of movies about it, though. Some of them a waste of time. Sometimes, I just let them play and don’t focus on the people or the plot; it is the buildings that get me.

I love them – glass, concrete. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I were there on the day of 9/11. Ottessa Moshfegh has already written something mildly appalling about that.

When I am in a cab in my city, going somewhere I probably don’t want to be, I blur my gaze and channelise the sadness within me through a Wall Street tunnel (do they have tunnels in that area?). It is only pretentious or lame when confessed to a wrong crowd, so the decision rests with the reader.

The flat I have is bigger than anything anybody in my tax bracket in NY can afford. It keeps feeling emptier day by day. I picture furniture in all the empty spaces, think of changing the ugly pink of the walls to a bright white – the only colour of walls that appeased my parents (rented flats in Delhi don’t give you much wiggle room anyways, in any context). They consoled my brother and I by saying it would be a hassle. But then everything is a hassle, something to be dealt with.

I remember chai on those walls, I remember the muddy afternoon light in the “drawing room” (living room, as if you are to die in the others. Look alive!), the quietness. The TV felt like an odd thing in the afternoon, even though MTV was the best during that time, and so was Star World – all adults are caught up with things, show the children some breasts! On one of these afternoons which was not like the others – my daada was visiting – I watched Percy Jackson with him. He said he told me better demonic stories when I was a child, and I had to agree. Chudails in white sarees on hairpin bends in the mountains, an underwater girl who came out in the afternoon to play with roaming children, a teenager who wanted to become a cricketer, but fate led him to haunt the village graveyard, the man who turned into a snake – American adolescent demigods had nothing on them.

That was the last time he visited us. He had started to forget things; went out to get a haircut in just warmers. Could not remember Vyjayanthimala’s name when tumhe yaad karte karte came on TV. Forgot that his son had been angry at him for decades.

Forgetting is the second skin we all comfortably slip into; it’s like a bed warmed over time by us, a beverage kept on the table you reach out and take a sip of. Over time, I decluttered my brain to bring in new memories – university, new cities, new feelings, new people. I made a separate list of people dying. Sridevi, Lata Mangeshkar, Bappi Lahiri, Jagjit Singh, Rajesh Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Pandit Birju Maharaj, Dilip Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Kundan Shah. People who were a part of the lives of the first adults in my life – my parents, grandparents. Naturally, these people and their crafts have assimilated within my tenure in this world. I used to maintain a notebook when I was in school, full of artists who killed themselves – I was insufferable but also suffering.

The act of suffering gets worn out and overdone when you do not channelise it anywhere. The first adults in my life all maintained intense notebooks, wrote each other letters, put down all expenditures on the back of cylinder bills and train tickets. That is what I learnt. I now have 4 notebooks in rotation at any given time. I write about the same thing in all of them.

I have to carry a notebook at work, it pleases me, to note down things, to strike out the things I have done. The past two weeks had been very busy, in the way that forced me to live within a routine – every day felt the same. I felt newer, different. I kept taking on more work, I cooked, I cleaned everything, over and over. Just before this busy week started, I got the news of my grandfather passing. In a city he had never visited before his illness. Away from everybody, his village, his group of old men who played chess and read newspapers together. I knew something had happened, but my mother kept the news from me until I was done with work.

The week before that had been tough for my father and I, specifically. He had stopped talking to me. I thought that was why he sounded small on the phone; I thought I had messed up again. I texted him, apologising, telling him everything will be okay. It was not about me. It was not about his child; it was about him, an orphan child over the age of 50.

I did not go to the funeral. I did not react when the empty body was shown to me on call. Nobody asked me how I was feeling, not even people I had decluttered my brain for. I was feeling nothing; I was keeping the Grief Agenda tacked to a board at the back of my brain, for later, in private. I carried on. I went to the beach, I drank a lot of old favourites (gin fizz, rum and coke, beer and a beer and another), read Stoner, wrote in my journal about everybody else and their hurt. The day I heard the news, I cried a bit, cried until I slept, but the signal was not strong enough for others. I made jokes about it, told it casually to people here and there, so that it felt casual to me. It did, it did, it did. Until, until, until.

It has been over three weeks since he has been gone. I am sitting in the office right now, teary-eyed, shaky breaths. I resent how nobody asked me how I was. I resent how I could not see him once more (at this point, dear reader, the writer had to retire to the office washroom).

The general syllabus of the aftermath of death is getting covered, albeit a little late.

Alive and well, grandparents are like the strongest line of defense against death. Once they succumb to it, it’s your parents at the frontlines, and that just weakens the general spirit. I cried when my father turned fifty, I am crying now because at the end of the day, it gets over. In my personal life, I am stuck in a life where days rush by me; for him I keep praying that each day feels slower than the previous, so that even the one or two days I manage to visit home I am able to make it feel worthwhile.

I took out old photos of him today and stared at the unfatherness of his boyhood. Laidback, skinny, loose shirts – the exact same elements of my youth that I get reprimanded for.

Pushing bad feelings down is like sticking a seed in the soil - it is bound to sprout upright, escaping the mud. I have grown angrier and quick to cry lately. I cried for a top that got dirtied beyond the point of cleaning – an accident caused by the breeze and a lack of clothespins. I cried so much, demanding the exact same top, all while being self-aware of how childish I sounded. Dear reader, whether you have deemed me cringe or pretentious is still to be discussed, but you must have gotten an idea that it was never about the top.

Last night I came across a Mahendra Kapoor song my father has hummed all my life, I wrote it down in a notebook, then brought the old list out, the first ever adult of my life had to be put on top.

I do not know how to end this. I keep adding paragraphs and cutting them off, saving them in another doc for a journal entry.