Burning My Mother
I swept her remains into the grass, and still didn’t believe she was truly gone.
The trains never end. I see them go by from my bedroom window. Freight trains of varying lengths. I hadn’t given enough consideration to the noise when I rented in suburban Chicago a place directly behind the train tracks. On some level, I must have liked the idea of living in a house charged by the feeling that time was slipping away—the hours of my life marked by the passing of each train, gone forever. But of course, the reality is different. The trains are loud; they arrive too often. When I’m sleeping, they aren’t just behind the building; they snap closer and closer, they ride through the walls, they crash into my chest.
And inevitably I wake up thinking of my dead mother. I miss her terribly, and slap my childhood awake. I grew up in India, in Khammam, a town full of unhappy memories. We lived in a small apartment four and half hours from all the good hospitals in the state. My mother was often ill, and my parents and I frequently boarded trains to the city seeking treatment. I loved the trains. They allowed me the illusion of speed; I felt like a racehorse—soon, any moment now, our family would break into a gallop, and we’d suddenly find ourselves healthy and debt free.
Years later, I sought to make that happen by moving to the United States. I took a high-interest loan and got a master’s degree in computer science so I could get a job. I’d pay our bills, I’d sort out my mother’s health, and then I’d go after things like world hunger and climate change. Like many immigrants, I swapped home for the ability to send money home. I lost what felt like my entire self.
Evenings after work, I’d stand on the banks of Lake Michigan and wish I could drown in those waters. I couldn’t leave America, I had loans to pay, and so I began writing stories—to stave off despair, to keep my country next to me.
Often gloomy and homesick, I’d call my mother, and she’d regale me with stories about what I did as a child. Remember the day you fell down from the terrace and broke nothing, not a single scar on your body? Remember the summer you bit into the first mango of the season and let out a delightful squeal? Remember when you got lost in the train station? I’d hang up the phone, restored. It was as if my mother had endless memories of me—but the truth was that I had left home, and all she had were these little flashes of time in which I appeared.
One day, a man called me, sobbing. A stranger from a strange number. He didn’t say anything, and his howling moved farther away, until a family friend came onto the line and gave me the news. Only then did I understand that the stranger had been my father, and that my mother was dead.
She was only 55. Despite her health issues, I had never believed she was in any immediate danger of dying. She’d called me just the day before, and I hadn’t bothered picking up.
A while back, I’d quit my job to get an M.F.A. in creative writing. My parents encouraged me to do so, though it meant I couldn’t send money home anymore. My mother began working as a physician assistant in a local hospital. The job broke her physically: She wasn’t given a chair to sit on, and she had been working 12-hour shifts for almost 30 days without a break when her heart collapsed. When I hung up the phone, I was convinced that I had killed her.
I sat in front of my computer and searched for flights. The cheapest one for that night was about $4,000. I refreshed the page, entering different airport codes to see if I could bring the price down. My eyes kept watering. It was as if I was driving through a torrential downpour, holding the wheel firm, trying to see the road. Eventually, my M.F.A. program offered me some money from a fund for student emergencies, and I got the next flight home.
Twenty-four hours of looking at the clock. At immigration, a friendly officer suggested that I say hello to my mother on his behalf. I walked past reuniting families, jostling drivers, honking cars, and I had the keen sense that my country was gone too—it had stopped being mine the minute it failed to keep my mother alive. I reached my hometown and found that I had a sudden hatred for its streets.
The closer I got to our apartment, the more I began to suspect that my mother’s death was all a misunderstanding, that she wasn’t really dead, that she would wake up when I arrived. I negotiated with God, an entity I’d never bothered with, and offered up parts of my life in exchange for time with my mother: If I gave up writing, would he let her come back for five minutes?
Outside the apartment was a crowd. People I hadn’t seen in years, relatives, acquaintances, strangers. I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone. My father sat in a plastic chair, forlorn. Someone pushed me in front of a long rectangular box. Sleeping in the glass ice box, my mother. I touched her cold hand. I whispered hello.
Flowers, a motley arrangement of marigolds and gerberas, lay on her chest. The lid of the box had been kept ajar so that people could grasp her hand as they wept, and moisture from the warming glass lined her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes were half-open, unfocused.
She was dead, I could see that. And yet, I had trouble believing it. I gazed at her eyes, waiting for her to respond. She seemed like she’d hang around for a bit, circle the air, and generally be available to me in ways God hadn’t made known to mankind. I was afraid. I knew I’d have to destroy that part of myself, my capacity for alternative reality, before I became the mentally ill person on the street corner talking to himself.
My parents and I were not religious people, but when the crowd decided that I, as my mother’s only child, should be the one to cremate her, I agreed immediately because I’d be responsible for setting fire to her body. By annihilating her, I’d establish the proof that I had murdered her, and also finally believe that she was dead, that she’d never come back. It’d be good for me.
I marched to the cemetery in a loincloth, barefoot, carrying a pot of burning embers. At the burial ground, I shooed dogs that came to lick my mother and drenched myself under a tap, as the priest ordered. Thrice, he made me shout amma in my mother’s ears, so that she’d know I was performing her last rites. Each time, I watched her body for a flicker, a movement. Not long after that, I set the fire.
Later, I’d collect her ashes in an urn, and take a dip, as the custom demanded, in the local river full of feces and mortal remains, and I’d get severely sick, and all of this was waiting for me, but as I watched the flames going through my mother, bones cracking in the heat, all I could think of was that now she wouldn’t have her body if she tried to come back. I needed to find her a new form.
The groundskeeper let the fire die out before my mother had fully turned to ash—maybe because kerosene was expensive, or because it was dengue season and there were other bodies waiting their turn, or because he deemed she’d burned enough. But there were half-burned shin bones, and skin flaps that still looked pink. I tried not to focus on the pink. Cleaning up the site for the next cremation, I drew her remains together with a broom. All that was left, I swept into the grass.
This shitty place, I raged under my breath, has chained me to it forever. I could never escape, because a part of my mother now lay in the earth. I’d always be drawn by the magical thinking that my mother continues to exist there in another life form, waiting for me to find her. A plant with a startling complexion, a bird that lands on my shoulder, a wind that caresses my hair, I’d settle for anything. Horseshit.
When my grandfather died a few years later, I relived my mother’s death. The same flight home, the same befuddled arrival, the same burial ground. My eyes kept seeking the grass as though my mother might spring out at any moment. As though she had been gone long enough and it was now time.
It has been more than three years since my mother died. More than 1,400 days since I heard her laughter. After the funeral, I took her phone back with me to the States. It was an old iPhone, originally mine, the first phone I had purchased after getting a job, and that I had later passed on to her. My mother had the phone for about two years, and she had figured out how to text. Scrolling through it, I saw that I hadn’t bothered to reply to her sometimes. She’d sent messages such as “I feel like talk to you nana” and “If possible give me ring.” Another note said, “Take care and be happy The things will come Automatically According to you All the best.” On my birthday, I reread the text she had sent me once: “Happy birthday to nana.” The message was accompanied by a cheese emoji, which she must have taken to be cake.
When I finished my thesis, six months after she died, I texted her a picture of the first page and felt like a fool. Once, I called myself from her phone and saw the word Mom light up. My jaw shook and shook, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I began to have nightmares about losing the phone. This lasted a while; then I tossed the phone in a drawer.
Friends suggest therapy, grief counseling. Buddhist texts talk about impermanence and acceptance, about not being too attached. Family tells me to move on: “That’s what your mother would want.” But who said I was looking for help?
Only in dreams do I come close to understanding what it is I want. In the best one, I’m in a Himalayan village that resembles my hometown. The village is pure light and dust, mountains far and near. I’m supposed to catch a bus to the city where I have a job, bills to pay. As I walk, the entire town tells me to hurry. Stop looking at the herd of goats passing by; stop dawdling over the bend in the curve, the voices shout. No time! I’m scanning the surroundings, but there’s nothing—no shops, no signs, no vehicles, only mountains and mountains. But I keep looking, because how can there be nothing? My mom’s here somewhere.
My mother was not the type to leave voicemails. Once, not realizing she was being recorded, she said to my father, a note of despair in her voice, “Ayyo, I missed him again.” It’s one of my favorite things in the world. Playing it on loop, I wonder if grief is love that went unseen. Love dwarfed by a different kind of love that existed all along.
Before her death, I’d seen myself as a shy, affectionate man. Now I know this to be false. Not affectionate enough, not loving enough.
Past midnight, a train arrives with force, and the building quivers. Leaning against the window, I watch it go. I wonder if this is how I will love her now, waving goodbye all my life.