Grief holds poorly when one is airborne.
I learnt about my Ani's passing, in Delek Hospital in Dharamsala, hours after I had booked the ticket to fly out to India from California. The three days since my first hearing about her hospitalisation had been spent in anguished indecisiveness. I had wanted my father to accompany me so he could say his final goodbye to his older sister, a Buddhist nun. But new concerns over his health as well as complications arising from the pending Green Card applications for him and my mother had prevented me from making an immediate departure. When I boarded the Air India flight from San Francisco to Delhi, it was too late.
My seat on the plane was in the middle: between the window and the aisle. On either side was seated an Indian gentleman, each of considerable girth, their physical generosity matched by a propensity for yapping. Their inquiries, answers, anecdotes and complaints, traded in Hindi over my head were full of knowing authority, as though America had bestowed on them an entitlement which they could not wait to flaunt in their home country. I feigned foreignness, both to the language and the country, but my pretence came at a cost. I was now assaulted by an overload of information, and I couldn't even show I was affected by it. Squeezed between the two – rendered immobile, insular – I felt like an island. Grief was its only inhabitant.
It was like a boulder had been forced on my heart, cold to the touch, enormous in mass, unforgiving in weight. A deliberate effort, almost an unnatural struggle, was required of me to draw in each breath. When I exhaled, my lungs hurried to vent their fullness, as though guilty of the bounty of life left to them, as though ashamed of the accompanying noisiness.