In the Shadow of Loss: A House Bereft of Light & Presence

Madhuri travels within and grieves her mother’s absence, which leads to displacement and doubt, and seeks solace in the essence of memories. exclusively for Different Truths.

I stood, unsure of what to do. The urge to flee was replaced by paralyzed submission. which cemented me to the place. The morning light is there, but something vital has gone missing. The colour of light is playing on me now. The tree mountain of Gulmohar, the massive jungle of riotous magenta, mad monsters, and a hundred nests, came crashing down, leaving a harsh light. We underestimate the power of light; we don’t often understand what we cling to and what makes us function until we lose it.

In my childhood, this place, my Ma’s house, was where my family gathered to celebrate. Adhering comfortably to a Bengali trope, all my pishis (father’s sister), uncles, and aunts had talent. But home existed within the yellow walls of my mother’s kitchen and the endless people and neighbours leading to it. All were fond of my mother’s cooking, and she regaled them with all this hospitality. She was Annapurna.

 But the house became acquainted with grief after my younger brother passed away, and then there was only sadness around the place. My father passed away two years later, a broken man. Ma was soon bedridden and refused to be part of anything. It was no longer a house; it was a place of mourning. Ma never made meals or entered the kitchen. Only grief floated around and crept onto its walls, plants, and trees, etching at the fabric of the place. Grief is just like love; it just doesn’t have a place to go.

Every crack and groove of the place, though familiar to me, seemed as far as I could be from home, me alone on an ice floe. I suddenly became a terrible non-believer in things. I was searching because I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all its complexity. Everything was possibly potent and possibly fake. I even doubted things whose truth was verifiable. Some asked me to see a therapist, yet I knew no one could solve this or ameliorate it. The whole house felt foreign and mysterious, its ordinary sounds and sensations became muted, distant, and abstract. One absence altered the space. It was like a black hole that absorbed all energy.

Today, the large living room was bathed in a cool green light, reflected from the tree outside, planted by Bapi (I called my father endearingly), when we moved here. The garden was quiet. The light bounced from Bougainvillaea, Krishnachura, and Jasmine, cocooning the place with that soft green light. All gone. I let the grass mats down, to heal the nothingness. Things have scattered, and now all are gone. Alone feels like an actual place to me, a state of being. “You are not alone,” my mother had said with her weight on the bed, transparent and effusive, “Yes, tumi aacho,” I responded. Somewhere is here now. It was me. I feel it in a way I haven’t felt in ages. The me inside of me occupies my spot in the unfathomable milky way. The outside world hummed on. Mourners try to enliven the space, but Ma is gone. Her monolithic and insurmountable presence just waned.

I could sense time lengthening and the suspension, at least for a few hours, of all responsibility. I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish people from one another, the incidents, the events, the years, the particulars, until one day when something strange, an interference, occurred, an ultimately strange disruption that remains a caesura in my life. Of the four in the house, only I am left.

 We are forced to inhabit close quarters; we are told to be accessible to all duties, yet now I feel peripheral and the house sepulchral—the soul of the house gone. Everything feels inappropriate, and indecent, for a while. Before I dive into the wreck, I can’t deny the old life sitting on the surface. And now the essence of Ma, the adjective defying all too familiar fragrance that seeped out of your bed, seeped out of every corner of the house, and I suddenly felt the embrace, while you merged into the light.

Photo by the author.