Mourning Appai
The last time I spoke to my grandmother was via Whatsapp on Mother’s Day.
She was in her home in Kashmir, lying back against a pillow, arms resting on her chest as though in prayer.
She leaned toward the phone and asked: “When are you coming?” Her eyes were moist. She pointed at me, and warned me not to take my mother to America again. “I feel I will die soon,” she said, staring at the screen. “You also stay back. Coronavirus is really bad there.”
I nodded.
A week later Appai died of natural causes. She was 80. Quarantined in Delhi, we were unable to attend her funeral.
*
March 23. Evening. My younger sister and I have just come back from the store. We are forced to set grocery bags on not only the kitchen counters, but the white-marble floor and the balcony as well. The store was jam-packed and sold-out of rice and wheat flour. At the register, the cashier offers to have two 20-pound burlap bags of each sent to us. It will take more than a week.
Appai calls as Mother starts disinfecting groceries. I answer the phone. She is surprised when she tells me that the daughter-in-law she lives with is also sanitizing groceries. “This is everywhere now,” I tell her. The gravity of the pandemic has yet to dawn on her, even though this tedious chore has already become the new normal.
After the call, as I change out of clothes that I fear might be infected, I hear Nuraiz, my nephew, begin to cry. He wants a face mask like the one that my sister wore to the store. He brings his little fingers up to his mother’s face around the area where the mask had been wrapped tightly around her nose and mouth. She shows him an empty trash can, pretending that she had tossed it. “Gone,” she says, flipping her hand in an upward direction.
Around 8pm, Prime Minister Modi announces a 21-day lockdown in the country — 1.2 billion people in forced retreat.
Mother comes rushing into the living room, a balled disinfectant wipe in one hand. “Will these groceries get us through the lockdown?” she asks. We don’t know then that this uncertainty will also become the new normal.
Modi announces the lockdown, but hasn’t laid out any specific framework for transition. It’s after 8:30 pm and we have until before the lockdown takes effect to get some more essentials on hand. People are rampaging through stores, and we’re lucky to have gone when we did. No one answers when I try to order-in for dinner.
Despite the chaos of the lockdown, my sister is able to maintain focus on Nuraiz. He is two. How will he fare in Delhi’s heat? Just then the phone rings. This time Nuraiz dashes across the living room and grabs the phone from the table. He taps the answer button with his tiny, feverish fingers. It’s Appai again. In her loud voice, muffled syllables escape past Nuraiz’s ears to reach ours.
I take the phone from him and put Appai on speaker. She is narrating the images on her TV screen. A female migrant worker, 26 weeks pregnant, walking barefoot on gravel.
“Please God, help the workers. Their wives and children. They are dying hungry, please God,” she says.
*
The rich have somehow managed to get richer, while the middle class competes for government subsidies. Indians living in the slums, even if infected, can’t come close to affording the 4500 INR (about $50 USD) needed to pay for the test. The “real number” of cases therefore goes undocumented.
For migrant workers, COVID is only one of many immediate threats. Modi’s poorly-planned lockdown has tightened supply chains and threatened their jobs. And because these workers don’t qualify for government subsidies, thousands of rural laid-off migrant workers can’t afford the groceries we’re forced to disinfect.
To make matters worse: over two months of lockdown have passed and still the Modi government hasn’t organized trains or buses to get the workers home. They live in ramshackle villages, mostly disconnected from the rest of the country. Barefoot in 120-degree Fahrenheit weather, these workers have been forced to walk hundreds of miles home.
*
Poorly planned transportation laws have also affected my family. After Appai’s hemoglobin levels began dropping the day before her death, my mother and her younger brother, Uncle Kitu, had to obtain permission to travel from Delhi to Kashmir to see her, along one long and flat stretch of the Himalayas. They got permission too late and, while driving through the night, Appai died.
When my mom called the next day, she described the traffic near the Banihal tunnel. What was normally a 5-hour drive had taken her 8 hours. Police on this narrow one-lane mountain road were trying to manage the even heavier traffic flowing in the opposite direction.
Many migrant workers, especially from Bihar, take up jobs in Kashmir.
“Are these the workers who are trying to get back home?” I asked.
Mother doesn’t think so, but her mind is elsewhere.
Upon my request, my uncle Tariq, Appai’s oldest son, sent me a video of her. It is less than a minute long. Her head is neatly wrapped in a print blue cotton veil. She is lying on her back. Someone slips an arm under her head, lifts her, then slowly places her down. It isn’t clear whether the hand straightened her scarf or pillow. Her face is silent amid wails in the background.
I don’t know why I asked for the video. Maybe it’s because I don’t believe she’s gone. Maybe I want to be sure that she’s died.
But in spite of the proof, this video seems abstract. I had not seen the body in person. When my family washed the body, I wasn’t there to sprinkle her face with water, touch her grey hair worn loose above the ears.
*
One evening, as I’m watching Nuraiz to give my sister a much-needed break, an Indian news channel shows 20 migrant laborers standing barefoot on cardboard shreds. They are waiting impatiently to pile into a truck usually designated for transporting goods plus a maximum of six passengers. This image of humans as cargo reminds me of the paintings of a slave ship I’d seen at an African American museum in Memphis years ago. The laborers’ luggage causes the beat-up three-wheeler Tempo to buckle.
Children’s backpacks hang from the Tempo’s roof rack and rails. I think of Nuraiz running through our apartment, his blue backpack slung over his shoulder, playing the school-kid. I try blinking his image away. My sister beside me leans forward to get a better view of the TV screen. The same fear swells in her eyes. “Oh no, these backpacks,” she says, and wipes her tears.
Before leaving, one worker, in a dust-filled white shirt and a handkerchief wrapped around his face stands impatiently by the access door while child laborers are crammed into any available spaces, shifting to make room for him. A TV reporter asks a worker where he’s going to sit. He points at one man who is making room by folding his leg up and back into his stomach. “We have no food or shelter,” he tells the reporter. “Coronavirus or hunger, we are going to die anyway.”
A few hours later, the same overcrowded Tempo swerves off the road to avoid a car. One worker dies, and nineteen others are injured.
*
When I got word of Appai’s passing, I climbed up the staircase window of the apartment building and stood staring down at an ungated alley under construction. After five weeks of wearing a face mask, the virus was no longer my primary concern.
I remembered how, in the year after my father died, Appai sacrificed her well-being, and abandoned the comfort of Kashmir’s pleasant summer to be with me in the 120F weather in Delhi. In our kitchen with no AC, she made my favorite foods: fried okra and tomatoes, chicken, mutton, and fish. And now, amidst the many months of lockdown and erratic online grocery services, Appai called me every day and asked if Mother and I had enough supplies on hand.
Now that she has died, all my family, relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances, regret that they weren’t able to gather in large numbers for the traditional four-day mourning period. A tent had been pitched in my uncle’s front yard, but mourners (Mother tells me) came in twos, and left when another pair showed up. This doesn’t do my Appai justice.
I can’t help but remember how years ago, in Delhi, Appai wanted me to eat before leaving for school. How her tiny feet left sweat traces on the wood floor. How she remained attentive to the slightest clunk of a bolt, the ding of the door.
*
During this pandemic, I’ve learned that the world doesn’t stop spinning for personal tragedy. I think of Appai, but also of the others who’ve been affected, thousands of whom will never be counted. With no public transportation, migrant workers are dying from hunger and exhaustion, from walking hundreds of miles to their villages.
After two months of displacement, starvation, and homelessness, they were finally allowed to go home in late May. TV images showed them lined up for the train tickets at various locations. Cops stood on guard, but the workers pushed one another, violating social distancing rules, hoping to make the lines faster. Jobless, without savings or other resources, workers will continue dying from hunger and despair. But at least they will be able to do so surrounded by their families.
*
June 24th was the 40th day of mourning. In Islam, that’s traditionally when a family celebrates the life of the deceased by inviting friends, neighbors, and relatives. A grand meal is followed by a prayer ceremony led by the Iman and his disciples.
Due to COVID, only a fraction of us were there for Appai. I was not among them. I must cling to Appai’s Mother’s Day call, which ended with her singing a Hindi song in a voice tinged with theatricality — ‘tum jio hazaroun saal ye meri hai aarzoo’.
May you live a thousand years, I’m sending my blessings.
Huma Sheikh was born and raised in the war-torn territory of Kashmir. She then came to the United States, where she received multiple degrees in Asia-Pacific Leadership, Creative Writing, English Literature, and Journalism and Communication Studies. She has taught writing and literature classes at Florida State University, University of South Dakota, Texas A&M University, and Long Island University (Brooklyn). Sheikh's currently pursuing her PhD at Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Consequence Magazine, Arrowsmith Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, Commonline Journal, East West Center, Gravel, Cargo Literary Journal, The New Writers Series Anthology, Poetry from Texas, Downtown Brooklyn, and others.