Prose before hos

 I think I've finally cracked the code about people rekindling their friendships from school in their middle age— to find known people from their life and to have them join you in the journey when you become the care-taker instead of your parents taking care of you. 

Among them is someone close to me, one of my first readers other than my family, who continued to visit this page, even when we were pursuing completely different journeys and had transformed into two wholly different people. We kept in touch through the years, annual birthday calls and if we were lucky, maybe even met once a year. But as we got to different stages in life (job for her and another university for me), it got harder to keep up.

In the last six months, I've steadily aged. I recall when my mom turned 30. I remember overhearing conversations and I remember being an audience to concerns. I remember when her mother, my grandmother passed away and I remember the trauma she went through. She aged between those years and she transformed as a person. 

Unknowingly, I've been down that road for a few months now. It didn't strike that the big, bad world of aging caught up. I'm now responsible for the well-being of my parents, and not just in theory but in action. This was a big concern when I was watching my grandfather in the hospital, lose his will to live each day and yet, it didn't occur that this experience will be brutal and transforming. When he did pass away, this gnawing thought of carrying down of the responsibility was looming in my head but the application hadn't hit in a way as strong as this. 

Two days back when I discovered the fire and woke up my parents in the dead of the night, it was terrifying. What was worse is that the day preceding that episode, I was at ease. I was singing through the day, prancing around the house, and being uppity about everything else that I forced for it to fall in place, including my state of being. I guess you can trick yourself into believing that you have got to pick up and chase a goal, any goal and that immediately transforms pity to strategy. I was down that road until of course the very real issues of mortality and responsibility came knocking down my life as reminders. 

"Hello, darkness my old friend."

At 7 am, things escalated further and an hour later the cops got involved. I lost my police station "virginity" (if that's a thing) and saw the insides of a police station, dealt with the hostile staff and basically lived a ridiculous experience which was straight out of an unreal fictional web-series that would be trending for it's "representation" of the authorities in poor light. 

Lol. 

What may sound convoluted to you is my reality. My life is a bag of complexities and problems that nobody I know in my age group is going through/will go through/has to ever go through. People have spouses, partners, extended family, and strong friendships. I have my scholarship to fall back on and roleplay all these characters to make up for their absence. I have to give myself company in this solitude of being that person who's holding the fort, who has to be responsible for the meals of the family in the absence of the gas stove working and even when we are facing inaccurate and false allegations against my parent. All of it. 

Somehow, none of this is ever interrupted by a windfall gain, a random man I like calling to tell me how he likes me back, my friends physically being here in any capacity, and having some form of security. With my grandfather, I lost that layer of a blanket, the safety net that I had looking out for my parents and me. Now, it's down to me to help them and help myself. I lived through the first of many such episodes waiting to happen and that I didn't cry is an achievement in itself. Didn't cry yet. 

When I called my school friend this evening, the same person who's been one of my first readers here and in life, who's seen me since I was 4 and we were in each mess together till we graduated from school, she heard the first word from my voice and gathered something was off. 

At some point over two long drawn phone calls with her, she and I found more than the similar ground to bond over. A renewed "interest" even. "I'm terrified each time the phone rings, there's some bad news."

It got a bittersweet smile out of me. It's something my trauma about losing my loved ones is made of and something I've written about in great detail here. She and I have lived through difficult moments of being in emotional duress and being in the roles of caregivers with our respective families unknownst to the other. We only ever realized in this call today that even though our journeys post-school may have been vastly different and the personalities we acquired over and above the existing lining carried out from the school may have been shaped differently, we are the same people with largely the same paranoia and wired to respond in an absolutely similar manner to unfair situations and be the first to stand for our respective family members, not just for the heck of counting heads but also as primary caretakers of the situation, regardless of however much it distresses us. 

We can outgrow silly school things and change our course of lives, but maybe we can't change who we were and how we knew each other inside out and how that wired us back in the day. 

The older I get and the more sense of weight that gets added to my shoulders, the more I find myself going back to being the same person I was when I was 15— always wary of people and largely distrusting everyone and everything, with little regard for niceties, and finding it easier by the day to settle deep in my skin of the personality— a fucking fighter till I die. 

There's a lot to be grateful for. It's never too late to express your gratitude, even in the worst of times. 

I saw a call to action post on social media, by a former classmate, I'm assuming for a loved one in her family. Her friends/our other classmates were sharing it all around—requesting anyone who has any information about an available bed for COVID. Breaks my heart every time I see someone struggle to get medical attention, especially as someone who's spent half her life in and out of the hospital. There's nothing more frustrating than seeing the lack of resources for people, everything else including your personal politics and bitterness, etc aside, nobody should have to deal with seeing someone suffer. I have seen people plead, beg and cry for a hospital bed, for ICU and ventilatory support these last few days and while my grandfather may never come out of there alive, I hope people realize what we are signing up as individuals to live in a city where the diseased have no hope to seek treatment, regardless of a pandemic or not. 

Around the same, I saw a middle-aged gentleman climb a tree, in front of us. What started as a giggle, "oh look he's chasing a squirrel", soon turned into watching him scramble to pluck branches off the Neem tree. People use it for medicinal properties and as someone who's had a friend drop a giant branch of Neem tree leaves when I had chicken-pox, I understand more than ever. Someone once did that for me and I'm eternally grateful for that gesture. But more than anything, I don't want to imagine what his circumstances must have been to have walked all the way to a hospital parking compound and do this. In fact, I felt pathetic for texting a friend at the moment, while live-updating her my state of being.

I'm grateful to every single motherfucker who has abandoned my family and us in these trying times of dealing with immense pain and shock. You realize the magnitude of damage as you grow older, no matter, how many times you've seen people repeat their patterns. There's a very good reason my family raised us to be independent, even in times of grief and despair, for they have dealt with it themselves on numerous occasions. The variables may change but in the end, the conclusive result remains the same, people are massive arseholes, cunts of the highest order.  They are invested for as long as there is a spectacle to watch and treats to enjoy. Everyone wants a free meal, a glass of whiskey, or whatever else. Nobody wants you to hold you when you are bawling alone or watching a person die infront of your eyes. I've been there and much as I want these fuckers to perish in hell, I don't want to wish these trying times on anyone, not even those who have done us and my family wrong. We are living through hell and this, I hope, nobody ever gets to see this in their lives. 

Nobody can save your life and nobody can rescue you from living through the grief, but what people can do is have your back. There are a few people I am grateful to, especially this time when everything is difficult anyway. They have stood with us like rock and been family to my parents, more than the actual fuckers we are related to by blood. I hope the latter rot in hell, regardless of what becomes of my grandfather. 

My grandfather was orphaned at age 5 and he would tell us all daily, how nobody in the family has achieved the success he did, despite not being given 2 rupees to buy books. I wish he could have given every one of these motherfuckers a piece of his mind if he were conscious to see the shit we are dealing with. I truly wish he could see the vultures we have been living among, or hope he gains health for him and I to bond over this conversation. 

Every phone call seems like a thousand needles pricking inside my body, every minute. 

I don't know when this started but I became paranoid about death and the inevitability of it when my grandfather was escorted to the ICU with code blue a few years ago. He was sitting with us and chatting and the next minute he collapsed, his vitals dimming and the staff rushed him to the ICU infront of our eyes. It's an experience that takes a lot out of you, and I can't say I haven't been lucky to see him get out of it. 

He fought through it and many other similar dips and episodes. Each of these had one thing in common, the intimation was a phone call. That's the only thing my grandfather managed to learn using his cell phone despite our collective efforts. He has called us in the dead of the night, only for us to learn his glucose level is dipping and he needed to be fed something. 

On a good day, he could read an SMS and delete but he was very comfortable with phone calls. So much so, he would summon us by calling on our respective phone. I've had a few scares during dinners and other outings when I'd receive a call from him, despite my family being there, only to learn he dialled accidentally while trying to call someone else. 

Over the last few years, I stopped taking phone calls from most people. I think I was saturated after having spent my school and two colleges talking on the phone, and living through this hell didn't help. I stopped taking calls on the landline as well, the only mode of communication that works inside our residence. This was far more shocking to process because as a kid I was massively fond of reading our phone book, or any phone book in my access just about every minute of the day. I remember when I was allowed to use the landline to answer calls and protocols were set about how to greet people and how to wish them and handle calls. I was enthusiastic and I remember how eagerly I would wait for the phone to ring so I could perform all that I had learned. It was a responsibility my family bestowed on me, and as a first-born I knew I had to ace it. 

Lately, I haven't had the strength to pull through and take the news of any kind and face reality. I needed my time to process things, despite my stoic sense of being. Everyone at home raves about how nothing affects me and I can live through the phone ring all my life, but nobody knows the intensity of horror I live through each time the phone rings. 

The past week has been my version of personal hell. Every phone call meant information about something going wrong, whether it was directly from my parents or the hospital. We have been either informed as a family unit or as an individual about each time something went wrong; a dip, another dip, yet another dip. Yesterday, I was informed about putting him on ventilatory support through a call, when I was home alone and everyone else was at the hospital. My heart sank when I was told that they had to revive him using CPR and whatever little my sibling could convey between her sobs. If there was no phone, I wouldn't live with the constant anxiety of what next. I managed to cry, howl infact, first time in two days. It sunk in how I may never get a call about my grandfather's health and how he may never come home. 

There has been that sense of unrest, that anxiety for as long as I remember gaining consciousness, and each time I hear someone losing someone they love immensely but when push comes to shove is when you realize how deep the scars run and how some wounds are more septic than the other. 

Between the news update about his health, there have been non-stop phone calls between concerned few extended family members that my parents are gracefully handling. Left to my device, I'd not answer even one but I'm grateful to them for setting examples like these where they have outperformed their perseverance, so far. It's another topic for another day to discuss how and what happens when you see a family crumble under the weight of societal obligations and the lack thereof, and dealing with grief. That's a can of worms I don't want to go near today when I'm a fucking wreck. 

The order of phone calls has been peculiar-

Receive information first hand- convey to the family members by a phone call- convey to the rest of the family members after the members of the house have been informed- repeat. 

Despite this disco routine for nearly a month now, none of this has normalized, none of this is easy. Each time the fucking phone rings, I can hear the deep breathing my dad has to do to calm himself, I can feel my mom palpitating and my sister and I taking turns to console one another whenever the other breaks down. Every phone call so far has been a letdown, snatching hope until we are down to none. For the last few mornings, every phone call has brought a new horror story. The day starts on a note, a fresh page and then it's filled with the ringing of doom. 

We were all huddled in the car parking this evening as the waiting area at the ICU has been cordoned off due to Covid. We had each other's support, and yet, my grandfather wasn't around. 

All we had were his sinking updates, one phone call at a time.