Prose before hos: loss

Noted

Back when I was employed by organizations, and shit would go down, my employers expected me to deliver work. It felt surreal to work for those who felt nothing. It was something I never understood.

I recall the death of my beloved pet dog—Circuit. I was at work and left the office after dropping a mail to my senior colleague about it. Of how I needed to be home with my grandfather while my family would go cremate him at a pet crematorium, all of which was sudden and unplanned. I don't think it was a lot to ask for. A day's leave. A day I had clocked in on time. I shouldn't have had to explain over and over and yet I did.

I remember the first time I had a panic attack (an actual panic attack) that led to a state of breathlessness among other things and I told my boss (at the time) that I'd need a day to recuperate. They went ahead and posted an Instagram status about people feigning excuses to not come to work on Monday. It was something that was brought to my attention by another colleague, and I wish I had actually feigned an excuse on the day of, to garner that response. It broke my heart. For everything I gave out to people, they couldn't bring to deliver empathy?

I swore to myself to not forge any professional relationship with anyone who felt that their trauma and misery were less than true and be that person to anyone, ever.

In the last month of my last desk job, Delhi was under attack. My work required my presence at an art exhibition opening. My organization wanted me there to update real-time images and statuses from the venue. We approximately were 2-3 km from the university where the firing opened and things were not looking good, the mobile reception was erratic and mobile internet was completely down. I was attempting to work through the dongle at the venue and worried shitless about the intermittent updates I was getting on the state of the city and the riots. I had worried parents call to check on me. Later that evening, there was another art exhibition opening and I had had enough of grinning and keeping a facade. I asked my colleague if she had heard about her alma mater and how it was under attack in the riot which had spread to the part of the town. I can never forget how she kept grinning and responded, "If I paid attention to that right now I wouldn't be able to deliver my work."

And sure, I have no malice towards a person trying to work. None whatsoever. You're there to work, work is what you're there for and you're delivering it. But again, the lack of empathy was disturbing. This was at a time the colleague's digital presence reflected they were at unease whereas in person they're unfazed. I suppose it's a balance as good as any.

That night was intriguing for several reasons but I'll limit myself to conveying the promise I made to myself. If I ever held a position of power, I would be empathetic to the geo-political situations around me and be cognizant of the needs.

18 months into this episode, I find myself upset by the fact that I need to deliver a piece to count as my "weekly submission". Make no mistake, I have no employer, it's not commissioned. It's something I do as a personal project to maintain my sanity and yet, here I am glued to the news of the shitshow in Kabul, and the test cricket news, and how perhaps my grandfather would have reacted to both the stories—two ends of a spectrum— and delivered his reasoning. I can't get myself to work for a lot of reasons but needing empathy in my heart and finding the time to grieve is on the top.

I have a story to tell and a deadline to meet that I am failing. I could push myself and do a hack job but the whole point of this exercise is to not do a hack job. Am I turning into the ones who I hate? Maybe I already have.

I have nobody to blame for this lapse of judgment; where I believed I could blame someone else for the lack of empathy and push work away for a day. Turns out, things never end, only people do.

0Comments

, by Snobster

In anger, loss

Don't Look Back In Anger

Someone recently asked me what stage of grief I am in after I discussed the seven stages with them.

Denial, I told them. Still processing all that's been going on, and still trying to make sense of all that's happened.

Except, I think, I may have moved on to the second stage. Anger.

I was supposed to travel, starting today. I don't know what really transpired (I know exactly what did) but this was going to be my reclaiming my life trip, with a near stranger for two days.

Covid (in his case) and a minor accident (in my case) prevented that plan from happening and I couldn't be more glad, at this moment, to admit that it didn't happen. Perhaps, it is my anger or PMS (due date 7 days later) or whatever else, but everything right now is amplified. All my emotions are charged and I am really fucking angry.

Angry at people, who don't care for my wrath or me. Angry at friends, who do not understand what it's like to grapple with the loss of someone, angry at over-friendly pals, who want to help with good intentions and yet are not understanding of what I've gone through and going through, and then with those, who haven't been there at all.

There's nothing but a lot of aggression and hate for one and all and I'm living with all of it, compressed and packed for it to be preserved like a vial of bitterness, to be slowly injected over time, over months and years, and I'm afraid, it might never change.

Last week, my therapist had asked me to allow myself to blow off the steam, if I felt the need to, and I told her I'd been doing that. Over tweets, small mentions here and there with friends and strangers. To think, I fully understand her today would also mean to admit that I wasn't quite blowing it off because it's coming over at me like high tide.

I want to howl and I want to break plates and I want to scream and tell people to fuck off. Fuck off with your plans to meet, hang out and fuck off with your fake concerns. And at the same time, I feel absolutely and hopelessly alone, scrambling for someone to talk to, hear from and hold on to. Anyone. Yet, everything and everyone frustrates me.

More than that, I think it's the idea of waking up daily and see the faces of the remaining members of the family. The ones who have outlived him, and hearing everyone talk. It is all too much to take, stuff that starts at 6 am and somehow in that moment, when you're half asleep but fully conscious, you hear his name and feel like he's there, in his room, waiting for the newspaper and sipping his first cup of tea, asking about how you're doing and what your day looks like.

Except he's not.

All that's left are people who don't quite understand and don't really care.

That breaks me, minute after minute and day after day. I feel like there's nobody and despite all the noise about help and solidarity and friendship, it's all farce.

0Comments

, by Snobster

In death, grandfather

Béh-Papa

Over a week ago when my grandfather got on the ventilatory support, and we thought we were losing him, I revisited a friend's beautiful ode to her mother. She had penned that two years after her mother's demise, it was heavy and heartbreaking, at the time. I re-read that in the dead of the night (as I do with most of my reading) and howled until I couldn't anymore.

Somehow next day, I remember texting her out of the blue and sharing with her the details of my grief and his sickness and how reading the ode about her mother was hitting in a different way than the other time when I did. This was the first time I shared this with anyone, most of which I had skipped from my friends or anyone else who was enquiring. She was gentle and graceful and offered me the sanest bits to hold on to. I recall her telling me details of the prayer ceremony that followed and shared her ways of expressing herself, including how she held tight to the things her mother was fond of, from the colour of her nail paint to others.

One of the most beautiful things she shared was her experience of leading her mom to the end of her life. She told me that when it's time for him to go, I should hold his hand and communicate to him, to be brave and that he will be loved forever. She gave me the analogy of going to the school for the first time and being dropped by a parent. Both the entities are scared and terrified of parting and yet they must. That's how I should take it and send him off with all my love.

Somehow, each time that week I thought of this, I ended up crying. It was the only thing and the way I could cry other than listening to certain numbers.

During the week, things looked up, perhaps the one time he came off the ventilator. Even if it was for 12 hours, it was a ray of hope, a sign that he wasn't ready to give up just yet and I held my belief that he will pull out of it.

Except he didn't.

He would tell me daily, over evening tea, how my grandmom entrusted my responsibility to him before parting and how it was on him to be responsible for me and take care of me. My grandmother passed away years ago, and I feel, I have grown leaps and bounds since, as things ought to be. Yet, there was this sense, this burden he carried about being there for me.

This hasn't been my year, for anyone who knows me, and somehow, he didn't know or understand the magnitude of grief and trauma I have been carrying for a while. I spent the majority of the year cooped up alone and only met him once a day at best, only when forced out to meet him when he'd summon for me. He would say the same things, "Did you eat breakfast? You should not starve yourself for so long. How is Ph.D. coming? When is your freelance payment expected?"

Somedays I would be short and most others I would indulge him in a conversation on subjects other than my intermittent fasting, pending payments, and research. We would talk about news, politics, his postings, he would ask about my friends, we would discuss celebrity gossip and how he made things out of his life when he was at rock bottom, each time.

Perhaps, it is on me to have conveyed in a way that I'm self-sufficient and I need no mollycoddling. I had stopped asking him for money for books, for clothes, or other indulgences he would gladly sponsor. I had even stopped taking the monthly pension treats, for the most part, I was too depressed to ask. I felt like a colossal disappointment each day and didn't feel like I earned it at all.

I remembered all this and more, when I saw him for the first time in the ICU, a day before he passed away. Literally, 24 hours before it happened, I went inside the ICU and howled infront of him. I begged him to get better and fight his kidney failure. He was conscious, oriented, and communicating via his eyes and shrugs. He was restless and expressed how he wanted me to remove his tubes and the injections and he wanted water. He wanted to be home and did not want to be in the ICU. He held my hand as tightly as possible and pinched me hard every 30 seconds. It didn't hurt, instead, it felt like a disservice on my part. How much he wanted to get out of where he was and how hard he pleaded for me to make it happen. I held his hand during the duration and cried throughout and managed to tell him that he has to be brave and continue to be my inspiration so we could enjoy the treat I owed him from my first international byline. He had been waiting for that and would follow up daily until he was home.

None of that happened.

Instead, 24 hours later, I held his hand and stared at the monitor when his heartbeat was dipping. I told him to be brave and to go to his new abode lovingly, that he will always live through me and the name I carry. It was time for us to part in this life and if we were lucky, we would meet again, in a world where there are no calories or sugar content and an uninterrupted television with a cable connection that we could stream. I thought of the things he wouldn't know, from the minute he shut his eyes and wondered if he'll ever know how much he meant to me, something I felt I never communicated enough, despite the world knowing all about it. That's the big problem with me, I can't ever let anyone know what they mean to me, not even after they're gone. Only, everyone else will hear me rave all about it.

I bid him goodbye and hoped he is happy in his new home and that it was loving and comfortable and right up his alley.

I am so proud to be his granddaughter and so lucky to have been named by him and raised by him and carry his blood in my veins. He was the most fantastic father-figure, a role model I grew up with and I am incredibly honoured to have been chosen to carry his legacy forward, till however long it lasts.

I just hope and wish he knows this, where ever he is today.

1Comments

, by Snobster

In civil war, corona

4.0

As I write this, we have entered the fourth phase of lockdown. In 2007, if someone had told us that we'd be nabbed at home at a gunpoint of a virus scare, I'd have told them to get off the internet chain mail spam.

But, here we are.

A friend and I both agree on the instance that there are multiple hot takes on the lockdown. There's a whole Anne Frank vibe with people in art, outside of art practicing hobbies and art forms and marking a day each. There are business entrepreneurs using infantile art to raise money. Confession: I placed a bid on a few and won myself a whole piece (it's not bad looking, thank you).

My point being, just as much as there is this entire sitch, there are those many hot takes, a sort of background noise to it.

Terms being added to our conversations including apps and software that help us perform better remotely. I don't mean food or grocery delivery but things like being recited bedtime stories in the absence of inspiration as you otherwise had for your child among others.

There is the personal end of things. Dealing with the lockdown. Reeling under the lockdown. I'm yet to meet one person who's not personally burnt atleast half a dozen bridges during this time.

If Dolphins returned to Italy then closer home, fuckbois are trying to score brownie points with women they'd never hoped to talk to.

There is an acute sense of disenchantment with existing relationships, inability to form new relationships, and then the audacity to curate new situations and budding relationships to walk into this lockdown with. I've been guilty of all. I've forged seemingly surreal new connections, been called out one too many times on being negligent and hurtful with people in my life and then seemingly been told to shut my face by people close to me, not one, many.

In a way, it brought up a huge void here, on this page.

What do I write about when people close to me tell me I'm effectively a ball of a make-believe world, with a little sense of understanding, and I have a problem understanding communication, authority, and boundary.

With the number of allegations I've come to live with, I've had to effectively take time off from taking my time off. I've been asked to be empathic and give people leeway when I haven't been on the receiving end of it, from those who I expected to love and kindness from.

The real pandemic has been on communication and our ability to express with gestures, actions, and words. Somehow, with the absence of our ability to do the former, the latter can't withstand the burden of carrying our lives with other people. I've found myself getting short with people I adore to bits knowingly and otherwise. I've also felt a total lockdown in people expressing their true emotions in this.

Effectively, I've found myself locked in a room of sarcasm, pity, unsolicited advice, and then reality checks all at once. There have been days when these revelations happened all at once and then on the other where they took time to simmer and come as backhanded insults.

Effectively, I've learned what a terrible excuse of a human being I am. I've also in turn given it to people. Neither of the situations has been helpful, to say the least. I'm also not proud of not having taken the higher road of silence, taking it in.

I'm after all a fucking human. I am prone to mistakes. I do things. I am responsible for the faltering. I do them again. Falter again. There are times I walk into a puddle of quicksand unknowingly and then on other occasions, I feel I'm pushed into it.

It's not a conducive or healthy environment to be in. What's more worrying is the aftermath of if and when this is over.

In the last week, my biggest learning is not about relationships but friendships. Apparently, you can read into years of knowing someone incorrectly, as something which is only seemingly in your head. God save us from daydreaming anything then.

Maybe this is a conspiracy theorists' job on how we should imagine our lives to be. There's a fine line between living and dreaming. If I have imagined a whole friendship, who is to say if I'm being gaslight or should I be allowed the privilege of free-thinking ever again?

If the last time, I wrote about my father and our complexities, this time it's my closest friends calling me out on my crap.

Admittedly, there's a lot. This is why friendships exist (among other things). We live through each other's idiosyncracies and we lighten those up and we hold them tight when they need us.

I feel I have overburdened people and they have underwhelmed me. It's a two way street of non-consensual activity. If they found my actions abhorring, I found their reactions appalling.

No one is to say that I'm not at fault. Perhaps, the whole fault is mine that I have constructed these notions of friendships in my head. Maybe, it's all me, as I'm being gaslight.

But god forbid, it's not me, the irreversible damage of second-guessing the one thing I know well, has been done.

In between questioning what's sacred and the bonds we all believed are unbreakable, the virus has questioned not only the world but also the way we think. It's accelerated and amplified our thoughts and reactions into effective results.

I could live with a bad friendship for years without making a fuss. Today, I find myself incapable of doing that. If I do as much as a point in the direction of a problem, I get a sharply worded response, which is, to be fair, an activity of equal action and reaction. Empathy is a construct of the world we inhabited in pre-COVID times.

I've been a strong believer in friends being support systems and especially true for me. I value my friendships close to my heart, I go all out for it. Until well, now, that the virus has left me questioning my own set of beliefs and principles.

Between media capital restructuring, changing world and societal interactions, layoffs, deaths, disasters, and the inability to cope up with our solitary self, our friendships are at stake.

I fucking hate COVID, motherfucking reality checker.

0Comments

, by Snobster

Pages

Prose before hos

Noted

Don't Look Back In Anger

Béh-Papa

4.0

About the Author

Lurk Here

Pages

Prose before hos

Noted

Don't Look Back In Anger

Béh-Papa

4.0

About the Author

Lurk Here

Hos in Different Area Codes

Subscribe

Stalker Count