Breathless
Death draws a veil over the living. Like a somber version of the game, my sister Zoya and I played as kids. We’d get under the bed sheet when Mom was spreading it over the mattress. We’d bounce the sheet and catch fleeting glimpses of each other as the soft cotton rose and fell over our bodies. We’d try to escape half-heartedly, but our little bodies continued to move around in circles playing peekaboo.
We’d be in the middle of the room, yet lost to the outside world, and perhaps even lost to ourselves. Until our mother would tire out and pull away the sheet from above us. And the world would come rushing back in.
*
“Wait a little longer, you need to cook the spices thoroughly before you add the chicken,” Mom says standing next to me by the stove. She stirs the spoon gently in the karahi. “You need to develop some patience, don’t you?” She smiles and nods at my stomach, “you’re going to need a lot of it very soon.”
I watch a strand of henna-colored hair loosen from her bun and rest on her cheek. The mole on the right side of her lip rises as she smiles. She raises her left hand and pushes back her bifocal glasses before turning towards me.
I want to reach out my hand and touch her, the karahi chicken be damned. I want to feel her soft skin against mine. I want to inhale her light, earthy scent as I rest my head on her shoulder. But I maintain my distance.
As soon as I touch her, she will disappear. My mother died a week ago.
*
The life that is slowly growing inside me already demands sacrifices. The first one being that I cannot travel halfway around the world to be by my mother’s side as she walks the tightrope between life and death.
I tell my husband that I want to drop everything and travel to India. And I think he should do the same. Zafar reminds me that we are in America on a work visa, and we need to remain employed in order to retain that visa status. We may not be able to re-enter the U.S. for several days or weeks due to travel restrictions for non-immigrant visa holders like us. If we lose our jobs in the meantime, we may never be able to return. He tells me to think about my health, our future, and our baby.
“You’re selfish,” I yell at him before convulsing into sobs and collapsing on the couch. I know I’ve taken a cheap shot but I can’t stop myself. He wipes a glint of tear in his eye and sits next to me, holding my trembling body and smoothing the back of my dress.
This was supposed to be the time for a babymoon, our last few months of freedom before we prepared for the sleepless nights. Instead, the sleepless nights have arrived for very different reasons, much before the baby.
I put my arms around Zafar and grab the t-shirt on his back, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” I repeat like a prayer.
“It’s ok,” he whispers until he realizes that I am no longer apologizing to him.
*
“Didi, you should go and get some sleep. It is getting late there.” Zoya’s haggard, round face framed by uneven home-cut bangs glows through my laptop. “Mitali and I will continue calling for the oxygen cylinders.”
My sister, her friend, my friend, a cousin-brother, my husband, and I—all of us spread over three continents have spent the last three hours following up on oxygen cylinder leads online. We’re calling numbers posted by friends, acquaintances, and celebrities on social media, looking for that elusive cylinder for my mother. We’ve paid eight times the price for the current one but we can’t stop yet. We need a replacement before the current cylinder runs out and can be taken for refilling.
“Let’s find one soon and then I’ll go to bed.” My eyelids are heavy, but I know I cannot stop just yet. Zoya is five years younger than me, this baby sister of mine. But it feels like she’s grown so much older in a handful of days. This was supposed to be the time for organizing college festivals and participating in career fairs during her third year of engineering. Instead, my sister is running around from one hospital to another, trying to find a bed for our mother.
I should have been the one doing this—the one breaking down in tears at hospital entrances, the one driving through the city of mayhem looking for oxygen cylinders. She is asymptomatic but my heart shudders to think what would happen if she was hit just as hard as Mom. Zoya should be in quarantine herself but even that is a luxury we cannot afford.
Several calls go unanswered. Few calls are answered but the cylinder has already been picked up by another family in need. There is no dearth of desperate families and friends toiling to give their loved ones a final fighting chance. Zoya finally locates an empty cylinder an hour away where someone has just died. Our cousin-brother volunteers to pick it up and get it refilled.
I reluctantly retire to bed. I am woken four hours later by Zoya’s Hello dripping in tears. They found the empty cylinder but there was a long line at the refilling plant where we were told that they have to prioritize oxygen for hospitals. First, we couldn’t get a hospital bed. Now, we couldn’t get oxygen since we do not have a bed. It’s a vicious cycle that can only lead to one outcome.
Zoya doesn’t need to say what happened next. I know what has happened.
*
My mother’s funeral, or rather the lack of it, brings memories from another era to mind. Nani’s funeral when I was a curious seven-year-old, Dada’s funeral when I was a cynical teenager, and several others that I’ve witnessed over the years growing up in India.
I remember the house teeming with people at my grandmother’s funeral. Women wailing at the top of their voices, hugging and crying into each other’s embraces until their tears merged, until even the most demure women and most stoic men broke down and the whole house mourned as a single being.
The bathing room would be filled with men or women, depending on the gender of the deceased, gathered around a table where the body was placed. They took turns giving the ghusl, a full-body deep cleansing interspersed with prayer, before wrapping the person in spotless white pieces of cloth or kafan to prepare for the journey into the afterlife.
My mother had once stood next to me with her hand on my shoulder as Zoya and I stepped forward with our cousins to do the final deedar, a last viewing, of my Nani’s body before she was taken away by the men in our family to be buried at the neighborhood graveyard.
Fragments of memories from these funerals come back to me as I realize that my mother will never get to have what others before her did.
Zoya and my aunt hurriedly poured some water over the body instead of the elaborate ghusl before Mom was packed in an overpriced body bag. There was no janazah procession from the house to the kabristan. She made that journey in an ambulance rather than on the four shoulders of her loved ones. After waiting for two-and-a-half hours, my uncle swiftly offered the namaaz-e-janazah prayer and bid farewell to his sister.
Even my father could not be by her side. He is strapped to the oxygen cylinder that had arrived late for Mom.
I know I should be more grateful. At least she got a funeral, however flimsy it might have been. The city is teeming with funeral pyres in parking lots and parks, and the cemeteries are running out of burial spots. Strangers are performing the last rites for many bodies.
As a teenager, I had wept quietly at my Dada’s death. I eyed the aunties who wailed so openly with skepticism. Were they trying to outdo each other and prove who is closer to my grandfather? But now, I miss those brazen tears and stifling embraces. I miss the behavior that I had once deemed as theatrics. I miss the slow and deliberate ritual of ghusl performed together as a group. How much of all that was for the living, rather than the dead.
“She looks so much at peace,” Mom had remarked after hours of crying as she looked at her own mother’s dead body once it had been bathed and readied for the janazah.
I’d never get to say that about my mother.
*
I wake up from a nightmare. My body is sweating but I cannot move my arms or legs, as if I’m tied to a cross and pinned down in place.
In my dream, I had woken up on the bed in my small, one-bedroom home in Delhi. The mattress was covered in a cream-and-purple colored floral sheet. I recall that bed having a large storage compartment where we kept our extra bedding and fancy kitchenware that was too precious to use every day. The two sturdy Godrej cupboards were in front of me with leaves and flowers etched on their mirrors.
I knew from the eerie silence that the house was empty even before I stepped off the bed. I walked into the kitchen where the two-burner gas stove on the countertop was bereft of any utensils. The window was open, and I could see the small ledge where Mom often threw scraps of roti to feed the crows and sparrows. A small fridge stood at the other wall. We could never get a bigger one because it meant rebuilding the cabinets around it, something that could never quite fit into our monthly budget.
I walked into the familiar living room. There were two divans for sitting or sleeping with more storage beneath them. The shoe rack was covered with a fluffy mattress that doubled up for seating. My favorite bookshelf stood in the corner, whose bottom half opened up as a Murphy desk and often became our dining table.
It was a small space, and everything served more than one function. As I walked through the empty home, it struck me that my entire family had been wiped out. I was now left with the task of going through each and every object in this one-bedroom hall kitchen space and figuring out what to do with it.
Four lives once existed here, and now only I got to decide what to do with the purple-and-cream bed sheet that I’d always hated.
As I lay pinned and sweaty on my real bed, the sinking realization crept in that this nightmare was already partly true. My mother is dead. My father is doing only marginally better. My younger sister—how long would she be able to survive in a place that was crumbling on all sides?
*
The bright sunlight streams through the small gaps in the blinds as I toss and turn in bed. The empty spot next to me and faint sounds from the other room tell me that Zafar is already awake.
I drag myself out of bed and walk into the living room where the familiar sounds of Lallantop, a New Age digital news media platform, emanate from his laptop. I ask him if anything has improved, and he shakes his head. This YouTube channel, unlike most mainstream TV channels, reports from places like crematoriums and graveyards where the truth cannot be molded like clay to make a vessel of one’s choosing.
Several top politicians, including the Prime Minister, have been campaigning in state elections and marveling at the large crowds in their rallies until recently. The Chief Minister of a northern state claims that there is no oxygen shortage in his state and makes front-page headlines.
“Let’s try and not be a crybaby,” the solicitor general representing the central government tells the Delhi government in court.
The acrid taste of vomit rises in my throat, and I make a rush for the bathroom. The first trimester is over, but this sickness refuses to leave me. I am sick of the lies and excuses. I am sick of hearing that the system has failed as if the system is a black box made of robots rather than real people living among us.
I hold my stomach and bend over the sink. It feels unfair to procreate in a world where loved ones, acquaintances, and strangers are dropping dead. A paternal uncle. A maternal second aunt. A neighbor. A friend’s father.
I widen my throat and make loud noises to eject the waste from my body. The more I try, the more it seeps back inside. Until I feel the metallic, pungent substance flowing back down the esophagus and settling again in the pit of my stomach.
*
The phone screen glows in the dark living room accompanied by the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock. Our clock doesn’t have a second hand, but it still makes a ticking sound which is amplified in the early morning silence. I had a fitful sleep between midnight and 3 am until a nightmare, not an uncommon occurrence these days, drove me away from the intermittent surrender of my body. I grew tired of spending more time trying to fall asleep than actually sleeping, and came over to sit by the large living room window.
The window overlooks a stop sign at the intersection of a one-way and two-way street. The window faces east and a few steps away beyond the tall buildings, rooftops and treetops is a large lake—Lake Michigan.
Even though I cannot see it from my window, I know it is there.
My mother appears from somewhere, as she often does these days, and stands by the adjoining window. She’s wearing her favorite lilac nightgown with purple flowers. She bends to examine the leaves of the prayer plant that my office colleagues sent to convey their condolences. The rising and falling of its leaves remind me of my mother’s palms rising in prayer five times a day. Perhaps she never prayed for herself; just for the rest of us.
Her prayers must have been much stronger than mine. After all, I prayed for her and she’s dead. She prayed for me and I’m multiplying.
I touch the meditation app and the sound of crickets rushes in to fill the silence. The familiar voice of the instructor emanates from the phone. Begin by finding a relaxed spot, settle into your chair or the floor, rest your hands on your lap, and gently close your eyes.
Now bring your attention to your breath, she encourages. Breathe in and focus on where you feel the breath in your body—from the tip of your nose to the lungs filling with air and the rising of your stomach. Now hold the breath and gently count to five. One, two, three . . .
I continue holding the breath even after she has crossed five. Now focus on the out-breath, as it gently leaves your body, she says. I count to eleven until I can no longer hold my breath and let out a huge sigh.
My mother died gasping for air, the simple breathe-in breathe-out formula no longer working for her body. A stream of warm tears streaks my cheeks. The tears from my left eye always rush faster than the right one.
I have discovered a multitude of ways of crying in fourteen days. At this early morning hour, the tears fall quietly and effortlessly. The practice that was supposed to still my mind triggers my heart.
*
Zafar and I step outside on a warm spring afternoon after my husband spent the entire morning coaxing me to get outside for some exercise.
I don’t see the point of it—of the exercise, of life in general.
A large section of the main street in our Chicago neighborhood is closed off for a dining out program. Tables, chairs, and umbrellas are spilling over from the sidewalk onto the streets. An old pub with an entrance shaped like a beer barrel beckons people with a chalkboard advertising two-dollar shots during Happy Hour. A local photographer adjusts the framed display pictures with fifty-percent-off red stickers in his gallery.
Across the street, a pizzeria-plus-bar is teeming with small groups of people huddled around each table. A group of young friends laugh and chat at the top of their voices as they take swigs of the beer glistening in the sun. A middle-aged woman is engaged in an unhurried conversation with an old couple, presumably her parents, over a large pepperoni pizza.
My eyes linger at their table before I peel them away and continue walking. I could easily feel envious of these people if I didn’t know any better. But I know if I stand in the middle of the street and ask how many people have lost a loved one to the pandemic, many hands in the crowd will go up. The losses may not have been due to a lack of hospital beds and oxygen cylinders, but they were losses, nonetheless.
The loud laughter and easy conversations mask the anxieties tucked and stowed away in the furthest compartments of their minds. I know this since I’ve spent the last year bringing extra groceries for my elderly neighbor, fussing over the health of my best friend with a compromised immune system, eating hot dogs every Sunday from a place down the street as a way of checking in on its owner in her seventies, and shouldering my colleague’s work after the passing of his grandma in a nursing home.
*
I log in for the Zoom meeting at 9 am to present my team’s quarterly goals in front of the entire Engineering department of ninety-eight people. One by one, the faces pop up on the computer screen.
I don’t think I can do this anymore. My manager starts off with the goal of today’s meeting. He had asked me to take as much time away as I needed. I took exactly two days off before returning to work. The vast swaths of unstructured time gnawed at my heart. I sat like a cow staring out the window and ruminating over the same thoughts over and over again. What if I had been with her in India? What if she was instead living with me in the U.S.? What if the ex-neighbors had never arrived unannounced after attending a wedding nearby? What if she had turned the guests away from the door? What if the city had enough oxygen?
Now, I wonder if I should have taken up my manager’s offer. A part of me wants to close the laptop so I don’t see everyone’s faces anymore and I don’t have to give this presentation. I don’t have to showcase the revenue we earned last quarter from the new features we’ve developed or the projected number of new customers we are aiming for next quarter.
I want to put an end to this.
My mother appears next to me, “Oh don’t worry, you will do great. You’ve worked so hard on this over the weekend. You’ve always been great at presentations and speeches ever since you were in school. Come on, go on.”
“Please, not now Mom.” I stare at her, annoyed by her incessant cheerleading. I want to yell, “Just leave me alone,” but how do you say that to someone who has already left?
I turn off my video and type, “Sorry, need a minute, be right back,” in the chat. It takes me a moment to dry my eyes with a tissue from the box that is now a permanent fixture on my desk.
I’m grateful for the acting classes I’d taken in college. I dab my eyes, put on a smile, and turn on the video.
*
It’s a girl. We found out in the ultrasound this morning. We’ve decided to name her Zohra, after my mother. It is an old-school name, but I hope my daughter will like it. I wonder if all her American friends and classmates will be able to pronounce it correctly. My friends and colleagues have done pretty well with my name, Asiya, after all. I hope the people around my daughter can extend her the same consideration.
“Promise me you won’t come here. No matter what, you must stay there. You must carry on.” These were my mother’s last words to me on a pixelated video before she was fitted with the oxygen cylinder.
These words were so different from the ones she’d said eight years ago when I was first headed for America.
“Do you really need to go there? Can’t you do something here itself?” she’d said one night as we were making the bed. I was close to finishing my Bachelor’s and wanted to pursue a Master’s degree.
“Would you still stop me from leaving if I was getting married and my husband was settled there?” I’d countered, while changing the pillow covers. I was younger then, and knew nothing about what it felt like to be a mother.
Behind my determination was a love for programming coupled with a desire to prove myself. Perhaps due to the scores of people who’d walked through our front door over the years and brazenly remarked to my parents, “You only have two daughters? No sons, huh?” These visitors never made an attempt to hide their unsolicited sadness even in front of me and Zoya.
“Daughters have to get married someday and leave their homes. Didn’t I leave my parents and siblings to come here and make a new home with your father? What is the harm in wishing the same for you?” my mother replied.
“I will get married when I find the right person. And we’ll decide where our home should be. But before that, there’s a lot more that I have to do. After all, poor you and Dad don’t have a son, do you?” I’d teased since the son comment had become an inside joke between us as we grew older.
She rolled her eyes and tried to hold back a smile, “Go ahead; do as you wish. Always such a stubborn girl. Allah knows what we’ll tell the people who ask why we’ve sent an unmarried daughter so far away. But at least promise me that you will take care of yourself. Eat well, on time, and get enough sleep. And don’t forget to call your mother.”
“I promise,” I’d hugged her. “And don’t worry, once I’m settled there, you will come and live with me. We’ll leave Dad and Zoya here, what say?” I’d winked.
“Those two will drive each other crazy.” Her smile turned into full-throated laughter that rose up from the depths of her belly stretching her thin lips and lighting up those almond-shaped eyes.
I try to stay with that memory a little longer, the vision of my mother laughing, as if from another lifetime. It is the first memory to have surfaced that is unrelated to her death and the pandemic.
I run my fingers over the ultrasound and place it on my bedside next to a picture of my mother holding me as a newborn.
I pick up my phone and tap the meditation app once again. The familiar sight of the calm blue waters and the chirping of crickets welcomes me. I close my eyes and try to take a deep breath.
The narrator’s soothing voice slowly fills the room. Find a quiet relaxed spot and focus your attention on the breath.
Breathe in…Now slowly and gently, breathe out…
Farha Mukri is a writer and software engineer from Mumbai, currently living in Chicago. Her short story has appeared in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hindu, Saevus Wildlife blog, and others. She also volunteers as a translator for Voices of Rural India, a curated digital platform that empowers rural storytellers. You can read more about her at https://www.farhamukri.com/.