What’s Once Loved can Never be Lost
What’s Once Loved can Never be Lost
Orange Jasmine, Genetic Memories, and Casket of Past Lives
Namaste Readers,
I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being so patient with me. Your subscriptions and kind comments have been my rock, helping me stay afloat through my personal storms.
This essay might feel a bit disjointed and all over the place because I feel incoherent and scattered in both my body and brain. I have edited it for clarity and flow, but if some parts of my layered thoughts seem messy, I want you to know that I intended to present myself as I am, embracing the chaos as much as I love perfection. Strength is not always the absence of vulnerability.
“To live with courage, purpose, and connection—to be the person whom we long to be—we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.”
- Brené Brown
I feel in my heart an ancient stirring of grief, of profound losses and collective pain. I feel the oblong body of bereavement encircling the planet as it eclipses our values. Hot, corrosive suffering is slowly trickling down the spine of collective humanity. With each raging war and each bomb dropped on infants and children, our sense of belonging becomes as toxic as our plastic-filled oceans. My God, the tragedy—the tragedy of it all and how it strips me of all my preconceptions about life! I am disillusioned by this ancient, collective grief.
Awakening to this world is a strange experience for me right now. It has been years since I last prayed. It's not that I don’t believe in prayers, but my hands refuse to beg and my legs refuse to kneel. My body rebels against the conductor of such horrifying cosmic orchestrations. My human body is sacred; it defies God. My body is a museum of contradictions and trauma, to which beauty hangs like half-broken sequins on silk. The untrimmed eyebrows speak to the tear stains on my glasses, the unwaxed thighs carry the weight of the twirling dark mess of grief that I am piggybacking. Everything is growing recklessly within my body— in all directions, all at once, like tentacles of time. Pain has transfixed me, motionless in my axis of sorrow. I am waiting for a gargantuan force to set me in motion again. I am yet to find it.
My entire life has collapsed and condensed into those few moments of my father’s death. I clearly see the door standing between the moments when he was there and when he was not. Now, I am on the other side, occasionally reaching out to turn the knob, only to find unchanged shadows of the past. I peek at the person I once was and realize I am not her anymore. It wasn't a choice but rather the violent transgressions of reality that were handed to me too suddenly.
Tears come without regard for social situations; I find myself crying during morning team calls or while peacefully watching the rain seep through the window. Though I always feel his presence, the reality of his physical absence hits harder in the morning hours, as I transition daily between the realms of dream and reality.
The death of a loved one is a massive paradigm shift, propelling you into a world where everything familiar is rearranged in an almost unrecognizable manner. The world demands that you adjust immediately. This is what makes loss so devastating: it is not only the loss of a person but also the loss of the familiarity of life as it used to be.
It is not all grim, though; some days, really funny things happen. Like when the burning in my stomach, which feels like grief, turns out to be just heat. Simple remedies like drinking lots of water, lemonade, and buttermilk help. Sometimes, I am bawling over some thought when I see my cat bantering with a bulbul perched on the bamboo supporting our laundry line, both their tails twitching as they voice their opinions. With a quivering voice, I ask them to be respectful to each other, and a smile creeps up on my lips.
The other day, my mother and I watched a program about shearing pashmina wool. We fiercely debated what is right versus what is necessary for survival when life depends on livestock. Later, she pointed at the screen and smiled like a child at the sight of cotton-like snow covering the pines. We were watching a travelogue of Kanchenjunga—a stark contrast to the sticky and humid heat we endure in the Eastern Ghats. At least the killer heat wave has passed for now.
When your father dies, you suddenly become the small girl you once were, lost in a world that seems vast without him. It feels like being teleported into an alternate realm where your childhood seems like another lifetime. Inside this cage of mortality, you are both mystified and disillusioned. You sway disproportionately between peace and pessimism, which swell and crash in waves. You let it wash over you—why miss the chance to feel something, anything? Let grief deal its cards; patiently wait your turn.
I write short sentences now. Is that strange? This is how my mind works at this moment, a surprising revelation to me. Poetry comes easily, an unintended gift of grief. I feel like I have ceased to exist for a little while, whatever that ‘I’ means. Is it strange that I don’t care for a while where my body rests? I sit in an armchair and seamlessly dissolve into the silver-grey shimmer of my mother’s hair as I watch her comb through her fine strands. Or into the smell of the new batch of mango pickle she prepared for my husband, using my father’s recipe because he loves it.
I think about the labor of love that goes into making things, the expert hands that measure and balance spices without a scale, the hand that cradled a dying husband with the same grace and tenderness. The pickle jar needs to be kept out in the sun in the morning and brought back inside every evening. This process needs to be repeated until the mango pieces softens. My father used to do this chore until the last batch of pickle. The pickle needs the sun to absorb the oil and soften in its spicy mustard oil brine. The mangoes need scalp-sweating levels of heat to yield when pressed between the forefinger and thumb—only then are they ready to eat. You cannot eat raw pickle; it heats up the gut. Grief does that too.
Grief is not always a soft place to rest. At times, I feel subjugated by its relentless grip. It isolates me, makes me angry, and fills me with despair. The pain feels like every strand of hair on my body is being plucked one at a time, hardening my mind with each passage. What I was feeling moments ago turns into an empty space where there is no emotion, just stoic silence. I become silence.
Grief does what it does to you. It feels like a blasting torch, burning away your hopes. It tries to degenerate your mind and wreck your body with unfathomable anxiety. Waves of existential despair keep crashing into you. It does what it does. And when it’s done, you slowly start rummaging through the carnage. Eventually, you find a blueprint for a new way of being that was always hidden beneath those solid walls of character. Now that grief has wrecked those walls, you are finally free to be who you were meant to be. Grief does what it does. It makes you who you are.
I have been mourning Papa ever since his diagnosis, even when he was alive. I saw him dissipating fast. But he did not dissipate into thin air; he remains in his actions—in the pomegranate plant that he nurtured to health after it suffered an infestation and in the orange jasmine plant that he brought home one fine day from some secret place that we don’t know of and will never know anymore. His actions have borne flowers and fruits, literally. The pomegranate plant bears fruit growing bigger each day, and with the first wave of monsoon, the jasmine shrub has yielded clusters of sweet-smelling star-shaped flowers.
I feel his presence in his nurturing of the plants, in the tilling of the soil, in the movement of the pots to specific positions. The peculiarities of his gardening habits are evident, and the results are the absolute proof of his presence. He was a passionate and flawless gardener. I miss him still, in his human form, but when yesterday I saw the honey bee busily hovering over the flowers collecting nectar for its hive, I could sense his continuation into the formless. My beloved father is now the wild honey that drips through bee wax, sticks on tree barks, and nourishes several critters.
Almost every morning, just before I wake up, I slip through the crevice of lucid dreams. The mornings are particularly hard because in these dreams, I see Papa as he used to be. The last time, I was picking pear-shaped fruits from our potted plants and handing them to both my parents. I can still see the delighted smiles on their faces. I was telling him that there was a spot in the bigger garden for the plant, but then everything blended into the morning light, and I realized it was a dream. As I sat up in bed, I felt a strange hollow in my stomach—the sudden terror of realization hit me hard that I can never again talk to Papa or hold his hand.
This broken dream triggered a specific memory from my childhood. We were traveling to the hill station of Shimla and had to change trains at the New Delhi railway station. After what seemed like hours of waiting, when the train finally arrived, there was a frantic rush to board. I was separated from my family in the chaos and, in an attempt to reunite with my father, I kept searching for his distinct haircut. After a couple of minutes, I thought I had found him and ran forward to hold his hand, only to be quickly rejected by a man who had my father's haircut but was obviously not him. The terror I felt then was worse than a nightmare. I stood rooted to the spot, tears blinding me as I cried for Papa. By sheer grace, my sister spotted me from our reserved seat by the window. I felt Papa’s swift yet gentle hands grab my back and pull me up as we climbed the train together. Who will pull me up now that I have lost one of the strongest pillars of my life, one of my most ardent supporters?
I have my father’s hands, feet, eyes, nose, and mouth. I embody him in my stride and mannerisms too. My father and I shared a special bond from the earliest days of my life. As far back as I can remember, I was invariably attached to him. One specific anecdote of our bond is quite popular in my family. It was my father’s youngest sister’s wedding day during a sweltering Indian summer. Overwhelmed with responsibilities, my father was busy with work. I was a socially anxious toddler, and seeing so many people for the first time must have pushed all my emergency buttons. I decided to bawl my eyes out and refused to be consoled by anyone but my father. I was only quiet when he picked me up. I wouldn't even let him hand me over to my mother. I clung to him ("like a baby monkey," as he lovingly recalled) all evening long and refused to smile at anyone until I fell asleep. He carried me with love, grace, and poise as he attended to all his brotherly duties on his sister’s wedding day.
Maybe daughters are weightless like feathers, or maybe fatherly love can imitate Herculean strength. I trusted my father more than anyone. I knew intuitively that he loved me unconditionally. I felt safe with him, as if no harm could befall me when he was around.
My experience of loss is confounding in the most inexplicable ways—like I am aware that Papa is gone, but I feel his presence more than ever, as if he bid adieu to the physical realm to come live with me in my psyche. I hear him cracking jokes or making snide remarks about everything I say, do, or observe. I almost hear his voice commenting on every small thing my mother does that used to annoy or endear him.
This makes me wonder, through whose eyes do I see this world? Is it really mine, or those of the ancestors who lived before me—who loved and lost, were rooted by awe, and riveted by grief just as I am?
The grief feels intimate, certain, and familiar, as if I have already loved for a million years and lost all the same, as if there is already a roadmap in place to navigate out of this hell, and even if it hurts terribly, my body knows how to move and be in order to feel better. I wonder if this is because I carry the genetic memory of my ancestors who knew how to absorb loss and carry on. If this is because my father lost his father really young, and my mother lost hers when she was about my age. If I feel so because both my grandmothers lost their homeland and the comfort of their fathers' protection when they were only teenagers. They were married around 13 or 14 years of age to strange men and fled their homeland torn by war. I cannot fathom the gravity of their grief—of lost familiarity, innocence, and identity—of losing fathers to the circumstances of life.
Yet, in our shared grief, I feel closest to them. From the depths of my subconscious, they speak to me, when I am dreaming, when I am lost in the lanes of memories, when I am engulfed by my grief—I hear their whispers, I feel their phantom palms on my shoulders, along my spine, holding my back. The same dream recurs sometimes. In some instances, Papa looks fit, incandescent, and happy even, the way I haven’t seen him in a long time, the way I always wanted him to be. When I hand him the fruit from our plant, I feel a haloed mist engulfing us, whispering, "What’s once loved can never be lost," and I wake up knowing the truth.
The writing and reading of poetry feels all that is meant for times like these. Reading this reminds me that we all face this tumult in our lives, many more than once, and I wish we could all hold one another through it. Grief is indeed not a soft place. 🧡
Thank you for the gift of letting us see you, Swarna, and for sharing your precious Dad (& Mum) with us.