The big suitcases have come out of hiding. Opening them and laying them out on the floor is when the excitement begins. Before this specific act, there are people asking me, are you excited? I say a half hearted yes, to not disappoint the excitement in their voice. But, it really kicks in when the packing starts. Counting the number of days equal to the number of dresses/clothes I need. Add two for buffer. Pick out the dresses/clothes and stack them neatly. Then I see a bunch of them need to be ironed. I diligently iron them. Then the night clothes and essentials. Again equal to the number of days and two for buffer. Once the clothes are decided, then come out the pouches from hiding. Each pouch will serve a purpose. Medicines, makeup, jewelry, daily needs. Then there is the matter of footwear. I start planning footwear way before I pick my clothes. One footwear that makes sense and will go with all my clothes. A simple, comfortable pair of shoes. Somewhere after the footwear and before the clothes, comes my checklist on my phone. Randomly watching TV is when I start building the checklist. Once everything is laid out on the bed, a day or two before the departure date, all these carefully handpicked items move from my bed to the suitcase. Then it is a countdown feeling. Two days from now we will be at this place, doing this or eating this. That is when the excitement kicks in slowly.
The checklist is checked top to bottom and bottom to top, just to be sure. Everything in order, and we get to the airport. Once there, every aspect of mundane life recedes to the background. It is excitement and anticipation of the time, the boys and I will get to spend together 24×7, exploring, joking, laughing, discussing, wow-ing and taking in all the sights the place has to offer.
I guess this euphoric feeling of seeing the big suitcase coming out is something that has grown with me since I was very young. My family owned a yellow VIP suitcase. It was a hardcase, the top came down and there were metal snaps, that you pressed to shut them close. This is before suitcases had zips. What the current generation would call ‘Retro’. There were number locks, I dont remember if this particular one had a number lock. The inside covering was a golden yellow machine embroidered cloth, I think. Maybe my love for yellow started then. That suitcase coming down from the seven foot almirah meant we were going from Bangalore to Kerala for vacation. Lack of time and money stopped my family from taking vacations to new places every year. Those did happen once or twice, but vacation meant boarding the Bangalore-Kanyakumari Express from Bangalore Central Reservation on Sleeper Class tickets to Shoranur Junction. We got off there and took a bus with this yellow suitcase to my grandmother’s place. After a few weeks there, the suitcase went with us to Kannur, to my paternal grandparents place, filled with more uncles, one aunt and a handful cousins. A ‘fewer’ weeks there and then the suitcase boarded an overnight bus to Bangalore. Somewhere towards the end of maternal grandmother’s house and before the paternal grandparents house, my father joined us. My father preserved a lot of things. The original magazine covers from the 1970’s where my mother’s picture appeared on the cover. In the pile of junk I cleaned out, I found my 9th grade report card. My boys saw my marks in general knowledge and added it as a weapon in their quiver (smh). One thing I did not find, is the yellow suitcase. When I was small, the yellow suitcase seemed big. I guess now that I am big, it wont be bigger than a carry on. I dont know, I never will.
There are things in our life, objects that remain memories. We don’t have pictures that our eyes can see, but stark images in our mind, stored forever. Like the blue metal folding chairs in my house, which I don’t know how many times I must have opened and folded. The gas stove that my father bought, many many years ago, that didn’t need a lighter, the knob had ignition built in, This one I don’t have to imagine, because my father still used it until his last day. It was waiting for him in the kitchen when I went to clear out the house earlier this year. There are so many objects that we use everyday, but they slip away with time.
If there was only thing I could do in my life, that would be to travel, to every nook and corner of the world. I believe there is so much to see, so much to experience. So this time, the suitcases are out, getting filled slowly, as we jet set to the UK, checking off a place that has been on the boys and my bucket list for many many years now. The excitement, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne making their way to the surface. The suitcase is not significant looking. A dark teal colored companion I bought earlier this year to accompany me on my journey of the world. Let’s see how many places she and I will see together.
I had started earning money, still living with my friends, but I could afford a phone. Before this one of my friend had a phone, she kept my track of text messages and phone charges. We paid her for using the phone. Everyone was working hard, so I would have probably done the same, if I had a phone and let me roommates use it. On one of my visits home, I told my father, I needed to buy a phone. He took me to Burma Bazaar. We went to the basement floor and asked for mobile phone. They showed us a few models, including the Nokia 3310. It was over my budget. So I settled on a blue BPL mobile. All it could do was send/receive text messages and phone calls. This is the same place he took me like 3 years before that to buy me a Walkman – a personal audio cassette player. BPL was a trusted brand then, and Burma Bazaar was like a black market, I guess.
It was a beautiful phone, it looked different from the Nokia models. I used it to call and text my boyfriend extensively. We fought, we loved, we missed each other. The phone was a welcome relief in that long distance relationship. I used that phone till I left India in 2004. Back then, you used something till you couldn’t use it. If it broke, you tried to fix it first before replacing it. It worked till I left India. Moving to CA, my company gave me an LG flip phone. Man, that was a grand upgrade. Flipping the phone open to take a call and talk, it was classy. Flip phones changed, but remained flipped till I left US in 2012. I wasn’t given a blackberry at work, because I don’t qualify for one.
2012, in India is when I got my first smartphone. Samsung galaxy note 5, I guess. As the batteries died on me, I moved to a newer model of Samsung. I remember the Apple users poking fun at me, like using a Samsung phone made a second class citizen. In 2019, I switched to the iPhone. Today, I hold a 14Pro as I write this post.
As phones evolved my connections to people evolved. The number of people on my contact list increased. Back then there was only one group of friends, they were called “Friends”. Today as the storage capacity has increased there are groups of friends. Friends I will call anytime, friends from work, friends from the past, social media friends, favorites.. Yet one thing remains, those 5 or 10 people whom you laboriously loaded on the phone Address book back then, are somehow the same people on your favorites list today. The “go-to” people. A couple may have been added along the way, but by far the list remains the same. Some dropped along the way.
I was walking around the T-mobile store earlier today and saw a flip phone. I opened it and thought, wow! I’ve come a long way.
I got back from India about three weeks ago. I was there for twelve days. I traveled to five cities. I met so many people. People from as young as eight months to people in their eighties. These are people with whom my paths have crossed at some point in my life. People I have not seen in twenty two years, twenty years, eight years, six years. I smiled, I laughed, I cried, most importantly I felt loved, every moment I was there. These are my people, they have all played a part in where I am today.
It is common knowledge that when an Indian born living outside India, goes back to where they reside, depression sets in for a few weeks. I had heard of this, but this is the first time I experienced it. I went into depression, the real stuff, where I don’t have an appetite, I am sad, but not really sure why, I don’t have the drive to do anything. All I want to do is lay somewhere and look at something mindlessly. I tried to wake up from this slumber, but I just couldn’t shake it off. During this time Grey’s Anatomy came to my rescue. 18 seasons on Netflix, that’s what you call a treat. I was glued. Three days of winter storm, at the end of it, by lower back started hurting, because I was on the couch for hours, escaping my depression.
This morning when I woke up, I decided that I will not watch another episode, until I empty out the suitcase I brought back from India. It has been lying in my living room, open, with undergarments, unused sanitary pads exposed. I simply did not bother. I walked by that suitcase everyday, many times a day, yet it was like this thing, that if I went close to, would burst some bubble and I would gasp for air. Today, as I was talking to my mental health clock (she keeps me in check, almost everyday), I picked up some hangars from my closet and started pulling out the dresses one by one. Each one had a memory. I remembered when I wore them, with whom I was, the happiness I felt. It was draining. I found the photographs, that I had taken out of an album I found in my father’s house. The ones that didn’t have any meaning, my friend held on to those, the rest I found, today. I got that old plastic bag with the heap of one, two rupee notes, that I found in my father’s steel almirah, of forty something years. That almirah is like a person who lived with us, since when I remember. I finally ransacked his secret compartment while looking for property documents. He never let us open that compartment, because his valuables were stored there, lenses, cameras, his salary. I found so many old lens filters and gave them away to his friend. A very long time ago, when he came back from one of his official trips, he’d brought me a purple glitter pencil, where you remove the used lead and push it back at the top of the pencil, so a new lead emerges out at the writing tip. He never gave it to me. I found that pencil and took it. I found old coins, 1 paise, 2 paise, 3 paise, collector’s stuff…
As I took them out one by one from the suitcase, I found the kolhapuri sandals, that my friend and I bought on Commercial street, bargaining, a skill neither she nor I like or know anything about. We went into those shops, looking for oxidized jewelry, I found those as well. One by one, they all came out. Lying around the suitcase in hangars, piles, organized by where they will go, in my closet. At the bottom was a red Tommy Hilfiger pouch I received as a gift eighteen years ago. When my kiddo was one, when life was simple, when everything was happy. I opened the pouch and found those old coins, the oxidized jewelry, the fancy stuff I took from here, but never wore, and among them scattered were the little red seeds I had packed in a tissue.
My besties and I went to a resort for a day. A day where it was just three of us in some tiny corner of the world, talking about everything and anything. As we walked on the grounds of that resort, we saw a little red seed on the ground. I got excited. My friend looked up and said it was a tree of the little red seeds. She and I picked the seeds, one by one, like little children. She gave me a handful which I tuck away in my pocket.
It wasn’t the clothes that I was pulling out of that suitcase, it was the memories. The friend and her family who opened her house and her arms to me, my father’s friends from even before I was born, who made me feel that he lives on in our thoughts, the eight month infant, who looked at me with her big round eyes, like she knew me from another life, the aunt, who couldn’t say a word, but in the end, took my hand and kissed it, my little buddy whom I taught ‘see you later alligator, in a while crocodile’, my friend who tears up every time she seems me or lets me go an epitome of what affection is, the family, the love, the happiness, the warmth. I was pulling out each one of this from the suitcase.
As I always say, depression is real, depression is hard. There is no way around it, but through it. As my therapist says, one foot in front of the other, baby steps. The light will seep in through the crevices. It always has, it always will.
My father passed on Sep 3rd. The same day my US Passport was issued. It has been tradition that my life progresses when he visits me in the US. The first time he came, I bought my first house and got my green card. The second time he came, I bought my second home, a dream home. The third time he was here, I got my citizenship, and got divorced. The last page was getting my passport and that happened right before he passed. Thinking back, it is strange that my passport was issued on a Saturday.
3 Saturdays later I sit here on my couch watching an SPB concert on YouTube. My younger kiddo is playing on his PC upstairs. A Saturday I have longed for this entire year. There is nowhere I have to be, there is nothing I have to get done today. Even if I do nothing today, its okay. I don’t like roller coasters, I am shit scared, yet this year has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. A job change, my elder son graduation high school, researched and visited colleges for him, got divorced, cared for my younger son through his wisdom teeth extraction, sold my house, moved to another house, convinced my dad to come to the US for the third time, vacationed with my boys at Mexico, got COVID, appeared for my citizenship interview, saw off my son to college in another state, nursed my father during his last two weeks of life, held his hand as he passed, cremated him. And I am here on the other side, strong enough to tell the story.
The week my father fell ill and the week after his passing were the worst. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would google ‘signs of death’ for my father. But I read each one of them and recollected what my aunts or uncles or mom had mentioned when others in the family passed. It all started on Aug 27th when he started throwing up only to discover on Aug 28th that the endoleak from his aneurysm repair had caused an aneurysm rupture. Almost lost him on Aug 27th and Aug 29th but I guess he was not ready. He woke up like nothing had happened. Nursing him for the one week before he finally passed on Sep 3rd is what I consider as one of my biggest blessings. The last few days of a parent is the absolute last ask they have of their children. There is nothing after that. Absolutely nothing.
I have had some really strong eye openers these past 3 weeks. After he passed, the funeral home tied him in a white sheet, transferred him onto a gurney, strapped him and covered him with a fitted blanket. They loaded him onto the back of a minivan and took him away. Everything one does in a lifetime ends in the back of a minivan. How much we emote, stress our asses off, hold grudges, push and pull in relationships, things we want to buy, positions we want to achieve, the egos we manifest, everything seemed so meaningless in that moment. I am a believer of the concept, where the soul lives on and the body is merely a cloth that the soul sheds when someone passes. I also believe in signs. Three days after he passed, I saw the brightest light, lighting up my garage as I opened the door in the morning to drop my son to school. I knew he was going. I have never seen that light before or after. The funeral home director placed the bag with his box of ashes in the front seat and fastened the seat belt around the bag. It appeared like he was sitting right there, I spoke him on the ride home. When I got home, there were 4 birds, I have never seen them before waiting on the trees around my driveway. Like they were there to welcome him home. That first night, deers from the neighborhood sat vigil next to the wall where I kept his ashes. So many signs he has shown me, strengthening my belief in the soul.
I have been perusing a lot these last two weeks after his passing, and I realized that two roles of my life that I had been playing for years, ended in a matter of months, that of a wife of 19 years and of a daughter for 43 years. I may be a wife again, but I will never have to be a daughter again. And that has been the strangest feeling. We get so used to the multiple roles we play, that of a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend, and we think these roles stay until the end. They do, but the realization that we stop being them is strange.
Suddenly I am not so sure what I should grieve for. My son leaving the nest or my father passing or my divorce. Walking into my son’s room and trying to organize his room is the most painful thing. I cannot bring myself to moving his clothes or looking for something in his closet. It is easier to hold my father’s phone or see his shoes outside the door or his glasses on the coffee table. Bringing a life to this world, giving that little human everything you have, taking every chance because there is no rule book and then letting them go is by far the most unfair transaction in this world. In the end parents are just bridges for the first 18 years of their life. When I left him in his dorm room briefly and walked out, I felt something leaving my body, maybe the umbilical cord? Weird.
Then seeing your parents pass and doing everything for their physical being, is just so unfair. And you go through that twice. It takes years to overcome (if you ever overcome) to push the sadness of one, that the other one goes and creates another layer of sadness that you have to push through one day at a time.
All said and done, I am not quite sure what I should grieve for or just let it be. As my therapist says put one foot in front of the other and take one day at a time.
We are taught, right from the day we have some understanding of our surroundings, that family is your parents and your siblings. Then you have an extended family which is your aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. For many years I believed this. Family to me was always father, mother, children. It was an etched-in-stone kind of definition.
The world as we know it as moved away from this definition. There are many women who choose to be single mothers, there are many men who choose to be single fathers. Then there is the gay community, where family is either father, father and children or mother, mother and children. Families now come in all shapes and sizes. Not every family fits into the age-old definition of father, mother and children.
I grew up in a middle class nuclear family. Aunts, Uncles, cousins, grandparents were people we interacted with during the summer vacation. My core was my father, mother, brother and paternal uncle who lived with us. This was my space in the universe. In this space, I was allowed to feel, I was allowed to talk, I was allowed to be me. If I said something out of disrespect, I was corrected. If I said something out of anger, I was given the space to calm down. If I did something wrong, I was told why it was wrong and I was given the opportunity to apologize. My family had a lot of friends and we called them family friends. These were people who lent a hand financially when my parents were struggling to pay my school fees or were short handed at the end of the month. They were there with us emotionally, by encouraging us to push a little higher and have some success in the print world. We participated whole heartedly in each others family events, marriages, death, birth, etc. I have seen more of my parents friends come to our house, have a meal of simple chapathi and curry or whatever was there, than my aunts and uncles.
My concept of family developed through these people. They were family to me, not just family friends, because they were there for us. They didn’t tell my parents that they were trying to do something impossible by trying to set up a print shop. They didn’t judge my parents and say why are you sending your children to the best and most expensive school when you know you cannot afford it. They didn’t comment on the clothes we wore, or the humble living quarters. They sat cross legged on the floor and ate what my mother served. Without asking they brought money and handed it over to my parents. I owe these people a lot and remember them fondly. Many of them have passed, but they were placed in our lives for a reason.
I am a movie buff. A few movies have left a lasting impact on me. One such movie is English Vinglish. After learning English, at the end of the movie, the protagonist defines what a family is, and those words have stuck with me. She says, ‘a family is not judgmental’. That’s precisely how I was raised. My family and everyone around my family, our support systems, never judged us. So that is my definition of a family. A group of people who do not judge you and with whom you can be you.
As I go through my divorce, I have been re-drafting my age-old family definition of father, mother, children. Now my family is mother and children. And that is okay, because for single moms, mom and children is family. My son recently asked me what is family. I told him from my experience this is what I have learnt – a group of people who don’t judge you and let you be you. He said, you took the words out of my mouth. I am glad, rather proud, that my child is not stuck to age old family definitions. That he understands, family is not judgmental.
indupatikkal 