Month: February 2022

I have spent the past two months at home visiting my parents. Having spent two years away, there was naturally a period of settling back into each other’s rhythms and learning about how we had changed and grown. The most obvious change perhaps was that I was working now. I had hard deadlines for things I was working on, even if they were personal pieces. I did not want this trip to interfere with the system of working I had set up for myself in the UK. Before my trip, I began preparing my parents for this shift. I told her she had to give me the space I needed to work on the daily. Sure, there would be quieter times, but I needed the time and space each day without the distraction. I threatened that I’d find a co-working space if the house got too loud. She did not take this particularly well – and naturally so. I mean, we were meeting each other after 24 months apart, and here I was, telling her I would leave home to step outside at the most minor inconvenience. This was just strategic though. I knew it would leave an imprint in her mind, and I was right. This entire period, if I’ve been working, if I told my parents I had something I needed to do for work urgently – they have been nothing but accommodative. Classes have happened, project vivas, marking, and a slew of commitments, especially in the past fortnight. They have understood, learned, and adapted. I am ever so grateful.

This is not to say that I’ve just been working. I should say, that one of the first things I did when I came here was figure out precisely when I was comfortable working. I did not like the idea of working when everyone at home was free – that was the time I would rather be with them than alone in the room on my laptop. So it was, then, that I found quieter hours – the late nights, and some (although my parents will dispute this), early mornings. A few hours in the afternoons where I knew both parents would have meetings, and some such. I learned their schedules and adapted as well, and for that, I am incredibly grateful.

Naturally, of course, this has led to some discoveries about my patterns of work. One in particular stands out, and is the subject of today’s meditation.

When I was at school, all my academic work was confined to my room, which was on the first floor of our house. My mother spent a majority of her time downstairs. Given this was the case, although I had an inkling that I enjoyed working with music in the background, and I had a certain preference for multitasking, wearing earphones was prohibited. At most, I knew I could get away with background music at a quiet-ish volume in my room. Loud enough for me to hear without my mother ever finding out. This was predominantly so I could hear anything she said if she called out to me, but it also served the very helpful purpose of knowing when she was coming up the stairs. That never really changed what I was doing, but I was prepared for the break in my work that came with her presence – the conversation and liveliness she brought into my otherwise silent space.

With this pattern of work being habit, and my impending move to a hostel, in my final year of high school, my mother took it upon herself to impart critical trainings in the art of focusing my mind to work irrespective of my surroundings. She was the most disruptive. I say this with a lot of love, because I came to appreciate that she would interrupt my studying with lovely snacks, good gossip and humour, and some of the memories I hold on to dearest, but man, sometimes I think back and wonder how I got anything done at all. She told me she was going to disturb me, and she disturbed me every single hour almost. The boys hostel did not stand a chance. I knew then, when she was talking to me in the middle of a practice paper or some such, that earphones would solve everything – but I kept that secret hidden away, employing it the second I got to University.

There, earphones were usually my go-to-DND signal. Within my room, I knew my roommate and I shared a love for our own space, and so wearing earphones meant that we were on full focus mode and in our own private bubbles for a little bit. My love for working with background chatter and sounds I wanted, discovering podcasts and the art of watching TV shows while working – these were learnings from five years of experimenting with things that played while I got on with life. I carried that with me to the UK too, especially since I live with a family – and earphones provide the cut-off from the outside world I sometimes need when I work, and the opportunity to listen to something I want to, instead of perhaps, the construction from a neighbour’s house.

I got used to working with sound of some kind. Even on days I didn’t have my earphones in there was the relentless chatter of the hostel, or the hushed whispers in the library. I lost the ability to work in the silences I was used to – that I grew up on. Till I got back home.

You see, rules don’t change just because I’ve grown. I came back knowing I would only wear earphones if I was in a meeting or watching a YouTube video or some such that would disturb everyone else at home if they heard it. Otherwise the audio from my laptop or phone was fair game. And so, I began to work in silence once more. Yes, my mother disturbed me on occasion, but for the most part, if I was working on something – she understood I was busy. Yet there was silence. No music in the background, no big monitor to multitask on.

Even at night, when my parents went to sleep, given the opportunity to play music and watch something in the background as I completed tasks before logging off for the night – I chose, for an entire month, to go back to working in silence. That has been a discovery and a half, because I thought working with sound had become so hard-wired into my system that I would be unable to concentrate in silence, especially with how much my mind wandered. That’s been useful. It is probably something I will carry with me, and I know has brought some confidence into my system because I no longer lean on the crutch of my earphones to help me focus. My brain doesn’t feel like it needs external stimuli to switch on that mode anymore – and being able to work in the quiet again, comfortably, is something I am thankful for.

And Amma’s conversation in the background too.

My maternal great-grandmother, my Big Ajji passed away a fortnight ago. Ever since, I’ve been confused about how I was feeling. While it did not take me too long to accept that she had passed, particularly given her age and deteriorating physical condition, I did feel the sense of loss that came from her passing in pangs, rather than a constant cloud hanging over my head. It would hit me at the strangest times, knowing that my Big Ajji was no more, maybe on the walk to the grocery, and once, late at night when I was preparing for family law tutorials and reading about people who might have parental responsibilities toward a child. My confusion, however, arose from not knowing whether this was grief. You see, when my great-grandfather, and my grandfather passed away, I had a distinct sense of what grief felt like up-close: I was studying in India at the time, and was able to be with family in the immediate aftermath. This felt a little more distant.

Aside from the geographical bridge, what with me in the UAE and my extended family in India, my Big Ajji was the last of her generation I shared any attachment with. I, the first of her great-grandchildren, was always told how fortunate I was to share any time with her at all, yet, when she did pass, it didn’t feel like we were particularly close. After moving away for University in 2015, I only ever visited her when I went back to Bangalore, and I didn’t get a chance to meet her in-person after early 2020, with the pandemic making it impossible before I left the city I called home.

So, I was confused. I didn’t know whether grief could taste like this, packaged in this strange flavour halfway between the knowledge of absence and the holding-onto of memory. I was uncertain if, given how quickly I accepted things, I was feeling any grief at all. I viewed my grandmother’s acknowledgment of how much time had passed since – what with a counter – “it has been 8 days” on the family group, with a tinge of “yes, but we need to come to terms with things”. My nuclear family, Appa, Amma and I, were aware of and in touch with the rites taking place at home, but we weren’t fully present or in the moment. There were no Zoom calls live-streaming proceedings, and I even declined, politely, the opportunity to see her body on the day itself, largely to keep the image I have of her in my head safely intact. Locked up in my own palace of memories, bells, whistles and all.

My confusion would have probably bottled up that way had it not been for one evening last week, when my chikkamma initiated, and my family reciprocated a desire to come together to celebrate her life. It was unspoken, the invitation merely asking whether we wanted to get-together over Zoom, but it was apparent. We were there to talk about the Big A, matriarch of our homes and hearts. I dreaded this a bit initially. Our family Zoom calls are not known for being focussed. We are all over the place, even when we’re in the same city, and seeing each other on the screen is usually a wonderful opportunity to catch-up to each other’s lives in what I term ‘not-so-private bilaterals’. We did a few of these during the early parts of the pandemic, prompted by different members in the troupe. Those were planned to be focussed sessions too, in particular to relive nostalgic moments from family trips. They only partially accomplished that aim, the remainder time spent in parallel conversations across the board about what everyone is up to.

I was also skeptical because fiction books often use the trope of a “celebration-of-life” event as being an instantaneous healer for grief. As though the one collection and consolidation of memories from a whole life lived out would rid a human being of the heaviness they feel from within. In books I have read where these events do not offer resolution, the plot meanders and carries on with someone’s passing merely being a subplot to aid character development and growth. If life mirrored literature, this would have felt nearly perverse, particularly given that this sentinel of a woman had not just lived through births and deaths of human beings, but of entire nation-States themselves.

So it was that I turned up on Zoom, neatly dressed, feelings very much clogged. I only knew her for 23 years. Her children knew her for over 70. We hung around, and tried chatting about other things briefly, but chikkamma moderated the call so well, that she verbalised everyone’s emotions in asking one of my grandmothers to read out a prayer in Sanskrit, composed especially as an ode to Big Ajji’s life. My own mother read it out to me some time ago, but hearing the depth of meaning started to release some of what I was feeling inside – till it all came spilling out when it was ordained that we’d go around sharing our memories of Ajji till everyone had their turn, starting from the youngest on call.

And as I heard everyone chat, there was a lightness that started to lift all these thoughts swirling in my head about Big Ajji’s passing and the loss of a generation when I trace my direct lineage. I recognised and acknowledged that I did indeed feel grief, and I was actually grieving in the back of my head. I realised I needed to be with family to overcome that, and have the opportunity to see people who may have felt similar things, or different things, or experienced their grief their own way – all bound by this incredible woman who saw us all from infancy through to the large humans we have become.

So it appears that life does mirror literature in some respects. Celebrations of life do help. I’m certain Big Ajji would have had a chuckle at the fact that we all got together to talk about her. She enjoyed when we did that in front of her. No wonder then that we were on our best behaviour in her presence, and so we were in her absence. Even the internet cooperated. I have no doubt she orchestrated it all, pulling some strings up from where she is now – to impart one more lesson.

I know she passed peacefully, having lived a life of total acceptance and grace. And some naughtiness too. No wonder then, the entire time on call, I imagined her calling out to me, If we are all together, where’s the cake?