Ghosts of Winter’s Past

Reveries on Passage of Time and a Mercurial World

Friends, I want you to meet my old guardian, the ancient wood apple tree, once again. This time, she is laden with her abundant produce. Soon, the fruits will ripen and make fine spring drinks for us and our neighbors. My heart fills with gratitude whenever I meet her.

Namaste Friends,

The subcontinent is awakening from its short winter nap, and spring is on the cusp of bloom. Winter, like a visiting guest, is ready to leave this place in a vapid spur, and I am caught up in a melancholic daze at its withdrawal. I spent the whole winter skinny-dipping in nostalgia and worried anticipation. It was more difficult than in years prior because my mother was unwell and mostly alone—at an age when she deserved none of it.

I have been so worried and split between caregiving and working that I hardly noticed as winter passed by. And now, as it stands at the door, waving back at me, I cannot help but cry at the passage of time. It is this irrevocable loss of the limited treasure of time that awakens the most earnest shifts in my perceptions. It renders futile the projects that promise peace.

There are no perfect states of being that can be achieved to justify all the time we have spent grinding in order to reach them. And now, I am lamenting all the could-have-beens and should-have-beens of the winter gone by, knowing pitifully well that this is the way it is supposed to be—and that any demand for perfection from the past is futile.

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When it arrives, the cold speaks loudly in these warmer horizons. In the quiet tandem of elevated hearing, it assumes the voices of jackals and foxes yelping through the inner plains of the Eastern Ghats. Descending fog shrouds the mornings in a gossamer veil. These vast Gangetic plains were lulled into slumber after a long, humid, and frantic summer’s activity.

Even though a decade has slipped by since my (maternal) grandmother passed away, this winter feels particularly ripe with her absence. Her starch- and indigo-washed cotton sarees, stacked neatly in the inner racks of her heavy-doored, colonial-style almirah made of aged shegun (teak), resembled a bunch of light-bodied clouds waiting to be blown away by frantic winds. Beneath the rack of sarees was a carved metal box, inside which she hid away her stash of nassi (snuff).

Her day-long toils in the kitchen and multiple baths could never take away the perfume of moist tobacco that lingered around her. My mother says that, to her, that smell is the smell of childhood—the smell of carefree days of protected innocence, the smell of her mother.

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I felt a desperate sense of abandonment this winter—a strange yet prevailing feeling of being left alone in a corner with a promised but failed return. Is it the nature of parental loss that is making me feel this way? I know not.

I often wonder what will become of my identity and its varied tentacles, sparsely spread in memories interwoven through space-time, if I lose my mother too. My contemplation on the state of orphanhood has brought me closer to the enmeshed nature of birth and death, pervading life’s many manifestations.

Is parenthood, too, a state of becoming responsible for someone far beyond one’s capacity to keep promises? A promise of light at the end of the tunnel, a promise of always and forever, a promise of meeting beyond death, a promise of an eternal wait for what was once lost in this physical reality.

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On my thirty-third birthday, I sat down with my father’s music cassette collection—partly to relive his taste in music and partly to introduce my husband to it. My initial intention was to look for a recording of his voice, where he cajoled my toddler sister to recite a Bengali nursery poem. He had intended to record it but ultimately gave up, half in defeat and half in exhaustion, because she kept asking for her toy instead of reciting.

I shortlisted a couple of cassette tapes as potential candidates for this hunt, but my husband and I eventually got distracted by his Ghulam Ali live recording tapes. Myriad arrays of ghazals, semi-classical pieces, and playback tracks from the golden era of the subcontinent’s music industry lay stacked in my father’s favorite section of the TV unit. I ran my fingers along the sharp edges of the plastic covers of my father’s stacked treasures, all arranged in order of release dates and favorites.

I glanced through them, careful not to shuffle them—fully aware that my father hated it when the order of his things was disturbed. My guilt was directed at the clumsiness of my hands, knowing that we can never touch anything without altering it, and yet still wanting to touch what has been swept away by time.

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I was looking for my father’s voice because that was the first thing he lost to the cancer ravaging his respiratory system. He had a beautiful voice in his youth—a fine singer and entertainer in the hospitality sector, where he began his career before eventually moving on to the more “practical” profession of sales and liaisoning.

I was searching for it because I missed it. I wanted to hear him laugh, sing, and curse in his usual husky baritone, without the trace of disease heaving through his chest, his voice cracked and hoarse. My head wrung with the memory of his normal voice, and yet it felt like a dream—distant and locked away in a place I know exists but to which I am denied any further passage.

I spent my birthday ruminating on all the lost opportunities—of the times my father was offered a singing contract in Bombay and refused, of the time he had to leave his comfort zone to work in industrial setups to sustain a family life, of all the possibilities that could have led him to an alternate life, an alternate reality—one where he might have been happier, might have quit smoking, might have still been alive. After all, life is not only the sum of our yesterdays and tomorrows but also all the permutations of possibilities that could have been but will never be.

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Memories are elusive maps of experiences—hidden and forgotten in cabinets of time far beyond our active recollection, yet capable of bringing back all the lost sensations into the present with a simple trigger of the right touch, sound, or smell. My father’s cassette collection revived memories I thought had been lost in my childhood.

It brought back flashes of a decades-old winter—the forbidden garden of roses in my friend’s yard, half-paddling my sister’s bike on Sunday mornings while Ghulam Ali’s ghazals fill the air, the crisp and necessary sunlight warming my freezing toes. The ambitious projects of creating manicured fingernails out of fallen rose petals and craft glue, with invested stakeholders—aka best friends. The smell of masala omelette and malt milk for brunch after morning study sessions. Picking wildflowers despite getting allergic hives from the touch of wild shrubs—to offer them as prayers to a god my parents taught me to worship, a god I was told — existed.

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Caregiving is a taxing act and also the prime demand of parenthood. I am learning more about it as I learn to parent my parent. With my mother heartbroken, lonely, and periodically ill, I am discovering more creative and positive ways to associate the role of caregiver with that of a gardener tending her garden—with firm yet loving hands.

I am often haunted by thoughts of abandonment. I let them run their course through my consciousness, allowing them to play out their imaginary implications. However, I treat them as they are—intrusive thoughts, mere visitors—neither to be engaged with nor entertained beyond a fleeting moment.

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Grief is a strange and lonely isle of being, where waves of complex emotions emerge and eventually subside. Sorrow is only its far and stretched beaches, but sorrow is not the only part of grief. It holds within it the pretty mangroves of love and healing, as well as the promising volcanic peaks of transformation, hidden within the landscape of soul-searching.

Unattended sorrow demands observation and patience; no action can cure its bleeding core as much as the simple act of holding it with compassion. With time, I am learning the art of grieving with grace and extending unconditional compassion to my mother, whose despair runs deeper than mine.

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In a world where AIs feign human persona and children are dehumanized by starving to death as war tactics—where politicians enjoy impunity even after slaughtering all human decency, and the natural world, which is perhaps the only tangible form of God, is desecrated like a dispensable object—I am coming to terms with my humanity, trying to find a place to rest my grief.

I am constantly asking what it means to live with an openness that invites healing and profound grace. What it means to remain soft in a world that seems torn between the polarities of extremism and violence, a world that has metabolized the million lessons we once learned through past stories of greed, war, and oppression.

Every day, we wake up to a world where billionaires and the ultra-rich are racing against death, spending their wealth to buy a luxury seat in the hall of immortality. They do this by plastering their faces across every nook and cranny of the digital universe, shoving themselves into spaces where no one needs their “expert” opinions—on the rights of marginalized people or ecological balance.

And some of us want to buy into their ideologies and sectarian belief systems. Some of us are so exhausted by the broken ways of the world that we seek to build a wall of delusion against all our fears. We want to throw ourselves against the doors of the hall of immortality the privileged have built, calling ourselves akin to them, forgetting that their doors are indefinitely closed to us.

And while the rest of us may fade into oblivion, the powerful will still claim indemnity for destroying the world. And we allow them. We allow them to get away with their hands stained, like a sinful showman waving to his confounded audience, smirking at the death of our collective intellect.

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The kinship we are struggling so hard to feel cannot be built through our parasocial connection to these online puppets of power. It can only be carefully constructed around the trust we build with each other and the reciprocity we cultivate with Mother Earth.

Our practice of gratitude is an act of rebellion against the ephemeral nature of time and its passing, a sign of love’s awakening in a world infested with blame and envy. A soft exhale of defiance against the ghosts of winter’s past, who threaten our poised stance of hope for the coming of spring.

Destroying what we believe in is a necessary part of growth. Constantly reinventing our perspectives shields us against apathy. It keeps us soft and human. It wields our collective growing marrow with that sacred four-letter word—Love—the only deathless thing in this mercurial world.

When we choose to borrow someone else’s worldview, only then do we find the correct scales to weigh our efforts to live in this world, to call it our home, and to share it with all forms of life. Our empathy is the parameter of our tolerance, a result of our practiced compassion. If we cannot empathize, then we cannot coexist.

Maybe, in these constant collisions of all our infinite existences, in the endless possible permutations of belief systems and choices, lies a simple answer of solidarity—a meeting place where peace prevails and invites into dialogue the necessity of understanding, belonging, and fierce compassion.

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Friends, I have been on a trip to the mystical state of Meghalaya, away from the commotion of mainland India, and it has been magical. I am planning to work on a series of essays from the region, touching on various themes, including but not limited to the Indigenous worldview and its loss due to colonialism, Ecotheology, the prevalent matriarchal structure of their society, personal epiphanies, and tons of pictures—from undiscovered treks to ancient forests, to Shillong sleeping in its chilly cradles of winter.

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