The New Stages of Grief

 

This is the year of strangeness. A year back no one would have imagined the position they find themselves in. But beyond everything else, there is hope that lingers on. Because hope is what makes us human. That and worrying about a future we know nothing about. Amongst our closest ancestors and relatives, we probably are the only species that worry so much about what the future holds for us. The big primates seldom do. And that is an evolutionary marvel that probably allowed the homo sapiens to race through and become masters of the world around. All that we do is with an eye on the future. Even “Carpe Diem” that tells us to seize the day loses its sheen after a few glorious years. Because if something is an absolute in this world, it’s regret.

 

There are events in world history that change a lot of our daily lives. Let’s take margarine for example – first thought of as a butter substitute for the French Army and the poorer sections of the society it became the saviour as World War II ravaged the world. And then it fell from grace again as the world attained prosperity. Often, it’s all about being at the right place and the right time but more often than not, it is about missed chances.

 

The strangest things however were playing out in our minds and the phases of grief were playing out in a completely different order. In the beginning of the year there was disorganization and despair all around. Information was scarce, the hubris of the human race was at full display and we were winging it in the true sense of the word. Then came the shock and numbness when we couldn’t meet family, things went from bad to worse and there would be a glimmer of hope which would then die down. But we picked ourselves up and moved on to yearn and search for meaning between never ending calls, the need to head back to work even though things were not quite the same. Some of us were luckier than the rest and this was the year I felt we finally began the see the invisible hands that moved every economy. There were people out there braving the virus while we kept safe at our homes. We are now in the reorganization and recovery phase with the hope of a vaccine helping us go through the process to get back to normalcy.

 

At your workplace too, you truly realize who you are. This was a year when the usual stressors at work were mostly at bay because something gigantic had usurped their places as our key irritant. This was a year when you needed to find our who you are – at home and at work.

 

But the truth also is that if you didn’t bother to find that out, it’s all good. By the time the year was halfway through, Linkedin posts almost made you feel that everyone on the world had gotten a minimum of two PhDs with all the time they had in the world. Thankfully for me, I had mentors who told me it’s ok.

 

So here we are, having survived 2020 with a story we can tell our grandchildren. And probably given the strangeness of it all, instead of ringing in 2021 at the stroke of midnight hour, maybe we should pause and observe a moment of silence for all those who we had to leave behind.

 

See you in 2021.

 

PS: Stages of Grief is an amazing concept. If you want to read further, I recommend starting with the book On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. It was written in the late sixties so modern scientific understanding has really taken this forward.

 

My Favourite Girl

Didima’s no more. Today morning at around 7:30 am while the world was wondering what to have for breakfast or where to find their next sanitizers, Didima said her au revoir and off she went. And it’s an au revoir and never a goodbye.


vasamsi jirnani yatha vihaya
navani grhnati naro 'parani
tatha sarirani vihaya jirnany
anyani samyati navani dehi

Almost every child growing up in an Indian household would have heard these lines somewhere irrespective of his or her religious affiliations. It’s a verse from the Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 Verse 22 and one of the most famous.


It says as a person puts on new clothes, discarding the old, the soul too gives up the old and useless body and accepts a new.


The soul in Hindu scripture is indestructible and I would want to believe that the purest soul that I have ever met would come back to this world. For suddenly today the world seems a little more barren and a little more colourless. Little Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, so goes the nursery rhyme. Didima was made of Pure Love. I have never found anyone so full of love for everyone. I have never found anyone so forgiving, so selfless and so full of life. I have never seen anyone with such curiosity about everything in life with a true desire to learn. I have never seen anyone so diplomatic and yet stern and I know it was because her love was unconditional. Everyone she met, she made them feel special. She made them feel that they were the most important person in the room and they loved her back. My friends from childhood remember her, my mom’s friends came down to meet her for one last time. The world stopped for her.


Didima was my most favourite person in the whole world and I probably was her fifth (after the 3 children she brought into this world and her amazing husband). And as my Filipino friends had taught me, being in the Top 5 is always a great thing.


She gave me some of my earliest books. She gave me some of my most treasured gifts. But most important of all, she gave me the gift of writing. Anything I have ever written is because of her. My parents believe that I got my writing genes from her. People called her up asking her to write something for their children’s birthdays, weddings and sometimes even funerals and she could break into verse anytime.


During my teenage rebellious years, I had said I perhaps put Sukanta Bhattacharya as a poet higher than Tagore because of his realism. And I, a veteran of many school debates had been brought to my knees, my arguments demolished, without making me feel bad about it.


So here’s Tagore for you – “ami Mrityu cheye boro, ei kotha bole jabo ami chole.”

 “I am larger than death, saying this I will leave”. (From Mrityunjoy – The conqueror of death) 

There are few people in this world who find God. I think she did it. She had such faith in Jesus that she believed in earnest that all that she would ask for will be given. And in her I found the true embodiment of secularism in India – a practising Hindu finding her personal God in Christ. Since childhood I have seen her straddle the boats of Krishna and Christ. My grandfather’s family came from Navadweep, the heart of the Vaishnavite movement in Bengal and her own family Deity as a child was Raghunath – an incarnation of Vishnu while her children went to Catholic Missionary Schools.


Often I have been asked at work why do I rarely say a no to a challenge? I think the answer lies with Didima. I have never seen her say a no to anything that life threw at her. She faced it, found a way to solve it and moved on. With a smile.


Exactly a year back, dadu had passed away. And I always knew that this day would come and she chose a Sunday. The entire world she had touched landed at her house. She caused no disturbance to anybody and off she went on the ides of March. Julius Caesar was her and my Dadu’s favourite Shakespeare.



Can an exit be more poetic?



And can memories be more beautiful?

Family

You never chose them and yet they are the only ones who will never leave your side. You get upset with them, bang the phone down, and yet on the next day you call up when frustration tends to grip at your very heart.

They come in all shapes and sizes; they come with unsolicited advice, they come asking questions you do not want to answer and yet you end up answering them. You add them up as you grow older and when some of them leave you behind, you realize how much you miss them.

Sometimes you believe that the friends you meet on the way can replace them and you take solace in witticisms which say you can choose your friends, not your relatives. And they truly are a great pillar of support as we had found out when we moved to Singapore. As we increasingly leave the cities of our birth, we let go of one of our biggest support systems – family. In the increasingly insular and selfish worlds of our cities, we never realize what we are missing. In a life spent travelling between cubes our horizons start to close in on us till all that is left is a phone in our hands and noises in the airwaves between us.

I guess there comes a time in one’s life when we miss our families the most. And growing up in a large joint family, my life in this metropolis feels surreal at time. Because, whatever be the situation, you just want to know that they stand behind you.

And when they do, you stand tall.

Roots

I often feel part of a large banyan tree spreading its branches out. I am one of those branches that have spread out too far and late into the nights the roots sing to me. It tells me to read more of Tagore, listen to the music that’s making waves in my homeland. It tells me literature is best enjoyed in the language you grew up with; music is best enjoyed when you don’t have to struggle to understand what’s being said.

As I look around me, I realize the banyan trees are falling all around us. Growing up in a cosmopolitan environment, we grow up today in a strange patchwork of cultures where probably our mother tongue, leave alone Sanskrit is not even uttered once during the year. The language we all speak in is English as it becomes the language of business and we want our children to know it and converse in it, even if it means they no longer know the rhymes that we grew up with as kids, no longer do they fly kites without a rhyme or reason.

A new form of linguistic imperialism seems to take over the world and it strikes hard at the roots. Maybe the future branches will remember where they came from but they may no longer be connected to their roots. The question is not one of jingoistic nationalism but rather a question of loss. Learning a new language is no longer a passion, like most things around us, it’s just good business sense.

As it happens, somewhere deep down we feel determined to not let our roots wither. Our accents remind us where we come from. We realize that our idiosyncrasies were made up by our upbringing and somehow there’s a promise that we will never let them go away; for better or for worse.

And that’s the last rebellion before winter comes and the roots wither.

The Six Ten Six

So the grandparents celebrated their 66^th and I made a flash trip to Kolkata. There in front of all the Bongs I scored brownie points by showing this. Then I scored some more brownie points by saying I so work for the Brazilian and Argentinean markets. Then as this kept happening and I was eating my fill of great Bong food and watching football, a sudden burst of creativity struck. While it’s not the best of sonnets, it certainly does justice to the 66 years of awesomeness. Here’s to 75^th. Let’s plan for that now!

Will the Bard wrote many a song;

But none as sweet as this!

So when I told him of the Land of Bong;

Li’l did he want to miss!

Away from Venice where the merchants rode;

Far from the Prince of Danes!

He travelled on the Midsummer Road;

And landed up in Duff Lane!

Will the Bard looked far and nigh;

To find the hero for a song.

Then he saw him standing high;

Beside his love through life long.

Driving around the lanes of North;

He closely held her hands.

She wrote poetry as it came forth;

And I do have a few strands.

Will the Bard nodded wisely and said;

This is a story to be told.

This is a match in heaven made;

66 years young; not old!

The Next Generation

enerations change. And a friend had once written a story which began with the line – heredity skips generations. I believe in both. Actually today in my family, I see four generations standing side by side, with one more decade about to begin.

Slowly they are arriving, the next generation of the Banerjees and the Bhattacharyas. Tiny but feisty, all of them are claimed to be more intelligent than our generation. Their grandparents are convinced about the authenticity of this fact. Well, that’s brilliant. As far as I am concerned I am pleased to be the uncle who will help them elope when they are old enough to elope or let them stay in Mumbai when they run off from home to become a Bollywood star. So clearly you see I don’t have any speck of intelligence that I can be proud of.

The next generation will be a strange one. They will be the ones who will grow up with friends, rather than cousins, they will have their own strange accents, they will probably make a big fuss about visiting India when their parents discuss about it. The huge collections of books in Bengali that we have hoarded with every penny that we got from our elders today wear a deserted look. Didi and I splurged on books rather than on clothes or anything else and what a collection we built. But there were always so many more books to buy. Our parents wait for the next one in the family to devour them. And they know how impossible that might be. By that time, they might get bored with me as well. As I have been growing up, the cynic in me buys up more Dilbert than is healthy for the mind.

But I think they will manage. They are the children of the new millennium, smarter and often more connected to roots than we have been as for them roots will not be a city like Calcutta but it will be the whole country and Oh what an incredible country that is. And I know their parents; of course I do!!! And I am sure, they’ll be as paranoid, yet lovable as ours have been.

Of course there might be others being born closer to them, geographically and probably they will hit it off as we did when we were younger. 2011 I think has 12 months like every other year. So possibility of adding to their cousin group seems logically feasible.