Lightning didn’t strike me but I know even if it would have, it could not have been worse. I guess I will start rambling on after few sentences so, I am warning you ahead. I received a call from my home and the news delivered was distressing. I do not call home often, usually they call me. I am trying to live in this little isolated world of my own, divorced from all worldly bonds and emotional attachments. Every call from home creates a little hole to peek in my little isolated world. It’s not that I hate my parents or family. They are the only people I love and they mean to me more than anyone else. This is a normal behavior of an adolescent I guess, normal since I am growing amid an American society.
Life and death are the two biggest mysteries that haunt every human minds, even more so thinking, active and intelligent minds. The only death that I have seen closely is the death of my grandfather. It was an unusual death in many ways, ways that I do not intend to mention here. I was only 14 years old then and the concept of death was alien to me even though I knew that being dead means not being able to find that person on this Earth or in this universe. I was very close to my grandfather and I was his favorite among all cousins that I grew up with, in my large family in my village. It has hardly been 6 years since I lost my grandfather and the pain has not healed yet and it seems I am going to lose my grandmother now. It’s unfair.
Can’t they wait? Death should give me sometime so that I can overcome the pain of losing my grandfather and those childhood days that I spent in his arms listening to folklores. It should give my grandmother sometime so that I can finish my college degree and go back home to see her. The tears in her eyes when I left for the United States have stamped an indelible image in my mind. I vividly remember her words, “You are going so far from me. I do not know if I will ever see you again before I die.” Even though she said these words in a serious tone, I knew this was just an intended humor. Her words have turned true, what an irony. I wish they had not.
My father did not hide anything; he explicitly said, “She is in her last stages. She is confined to bed now and cannot move at all. It seems she will not live for long. Do you have any of her photos?” As a grown-up adolescent, I know about this process of life and death, unlike Siddartha Gautam(Lord Buddha). But my incomprehensibility and inability to understand this process or to reason why this is inevitable is no different than Siddartha Gautam. When someone dies in one’s family, all the knowledge, understanding, rationality and pragmatism goes on a holiday trip to Bahamas, all it matters is that the person, whom they loved so much and who loved them so much would be no more in this world. No one can do without shedding tears.
Jaundice. That is what put her into this situation. This word will become associated with fear and hatred for me throughout my life. I know throughout my college degree and beyond, whenever I will come across this word, I will wage a war against it. I will try to learn everything about it with every opportunity, all its weakness and I will humiliate it. I might not be able to kill it but I will defeat it and will make sure it never invades me or my family in the future. Jaundice is a curable disease if treated properly and in a timely manner, if not, it brings death. Her jaundice was not caused due to contaminated fluid or food; it was due to degeneration of her liver aggravated by her diabetes. Diabetes runs in my family and so does high blood pressure. She was further afflicted by gastrointestinal complications. She moved with a diseased body afflicted by diabetes, high blood pressure and gastrointestinal diseases. Such a lethal combination will bring any mortal down sooner than one can imagine. She battled successfully these years, thanks to her healthy diet and traditional lifestyle in a serene, natural and rural environment.
Living amid strangers, all I can do now is reminisce my childhood days spent with my grandmother and wait for the final call from home. With every trrriinnnnggg now, my heart will skip a beat. The tears have started welling, it’s such a pain I have no one to share my grief with.
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