Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.
There is one call that every expat family dreads. And mine received it in early June. It was a fine morning in Spain, where I live, when the phone rang. From one moment to the next, the words - “she’s gone” - cut me adrift. My muma, the children’s nani, had been our roots, our memory, our history. Suddenly, we found our dazed selves wandering through the airport, trying to make it back to Delhi in time for her cremation.
It's difficult for me to imagine what the next few days must have felt like for my 11- and 14-year-old boys. They had never been to India in June’s heat. They had never had any exposure to the religious trappings of Hindu mourning with their surreal mix of the sublime and sordid: The bribe-seeking functionaries and hangers-on at the crematorium, the push of the corpse into the electric oven, the overwhelming generosity of family, friends, and even strangers in the event of a death. The magical appearance of food. Long lost cousins holding you in an embrace that won’t let you fall. The poojas. The fragrance of the flowers and agarbatti. The huge nani-shaped absence hanging over it all.
On the evening after the memorial service, when at last my nuclear family found itself alone at home, I took Nico, my younger son, onto my lap. I realized that for the last few days I hadn’t been focused on my role as his mother, possibly for the first time since he’d been born. It was my daughter-self that had been primary, while I put my own mother to rest. I’d barely been aware of what the boys had been up to.
Nico snuggled into the crook of my neck and said, “This house smells of India. It’s a nani-smell.” I was undone into the flood of tears that had become my constant companion. And how true my child’s words were. As I took out my mother’s sarees – chiffons, kanjivarams, ordinary cottons - from the almari, the very sound of the creaky opening of which conjured childhood for me, I found myself wanting to inhale them. Her scent was all that was left to me. The scent of India.
There were some people who asked about the propriety of bringing children to the crematorium. Who suggested that it would be better to leave them in air-conditioned comfort at home with Netflix to soothe their frazzled nerves rather than expose them to the trauma of a funeral.
But I was adamant that they be present for every moment of the proceedings. If I had chosen to leave the children behind in Spain, or even at home in Delhi, the “death” of their nani would have been akin to a video game. Lacking in corporeality, in weight and substance. Already, their lives are divorced from the Indian quotidian. I would not have their nani’s passing be one among the innumerable fleeting events that happens elsewhere that they are but peripherally aware of. I wanted them to feel its reality in their bones.
Learning to grieve well is as important a life-lesson as learning to find happiness. None of us is permanently shiny happy people, regardless of what social media feeds work hard to convince us of. To be human is to be sad, to weep, and nurse broken hearts. I would not have my children believe otherwise. They need to make friends with these emotions, so that they also discover the passageways through them. The journey to the other side of grief takes work and we rarely make it unscarred. But it is because of these wounds that we develop empathy and discover resilience – two qualities I would like my children to be described by above most others.
Someone asked me if I was crying in front of my kids. Personally, I believe it would be a failure as a parent were I not to. We are at our most authentic when we are vulnerable. Faking a lack of sadness so as not to make our children sad is to rob them of the ability to accept and process an inescapable part of their humanity.
And children are too wise to be fooled in any case. A few nights ago, I was crying softly in bed when Nico got in next to me and held me in his still-tiny arms. “You know what, Muma?” he said in a scientifically minded voice. “When a star dies, it becomes a red giant and then a nebula and then a white dwarf. And then some white dwarves have a helium flash, and they are born as stars again.”
The words hung between us. My future astrophysicist is sensitive enough not to belabour a point. But we will all be looking up at the night skies.
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