I believe that each day of the week has pretty much a taste, flavor, texture, color or even sound of its own that makes up one's routine.
Mine goes something like this:
A beautiful obituary was dedicated to Madhvi in Mauritius Times last Saturday: http://www.mauritiustimes.com/mt/tribute-madhvi-narain/
Madhvi is my neighbor and I cannot resort to the use of past tense as I refer to her. Too soon, too weird.
Her father, whom we affectionately called Chacha Nund, was my father's very close friend and those two acolytes came to settle with their respective families in Quatre-Bornes in the mid-sixties. The Narain house faces my window room and every night a light that spread its comforting luminescence over her back porch and part of my garden used to be kept on. This week, after being done with all evening rituals that follow a funeral, this same light has been switched off marking the official status of the house as an empty one. I can't recall the number of years it had been on and for but now that the atmosphere has turned drastically gloomy, it kind of numbs my heart. At night time before drawing the curtains, I take a few seconds just so to stare at a house which a few weeks ago we would still call a home. And not just any, one filled with warmth, life, music and laughter. This home is now four walls.
My mum, my siblings and myself spent endless Saturday evenings watching Dev Anand movies at chacha Nund's and these happy images suddenly rush to my mind. I remember four weddings taking place on our two compounds and the joy we felt decorating our two gardens or the indescribable pride and happiness we felt when Aruna was proclaimed laureate and how we rushed over to congratulate her, I remember the ongoing exchange of recipes and LPs between our homes and the bond that united our two families. The 00s saw the sad demises of chachi Rani and dad followed by chacha Nund's long illness before he too left us a few years ago. And now, Madhvi...
My heart is filled with that unpleasant feeling called sorrow which I have knowingly chosen to wrap myself into because sometimes pain is the only familiar affliction that seems to make sense. And I think I need it, I need to nudge myself to dive into melancholia as a reminder of how vulnerable and humane I am. It is a fact that in the last stages of her life Madhvi was trapped into an unbearable suffering which she is now delivered from, a thought which we take comfort in. I don't know if things could have been different or should have been different for her. We choose to remember departed ones as happy souls but how far is that true? Who can truly know if people were really happy or not?
My true sorrow tonight lies in the reality that though I try to pretend the contrary, sometimes I am not always ready to let go of souvenirs of happy yesterdays and it is hard for me to accept that they are just chapters of an intangible memorabilia that I don't need to cling to. Watching this house next to mine trapped into darkness is as if a little light inside of me just went out as well.
