Walking My Way through Grief

By Monisha Raman

Vidya Vivek - GIBBOUS (2021), Charcoal, 16” x 11”
Image description: The charcoal portrait of a woman is partly realistic and partly abstract. The left side of the portrait is highly realistic. The woman gazes downwards to the left, and wears a dot on her forehead. On the right side of the portrait, the woman’s face and hair are fragmented into charcoal marks and abstract geometric shapes rising upwards. 

It was in 2009 that I experienced overpowering grief after the death of a loved one. It was a completely unprecedented loss; after all, the person was very young and healthy, and she had earnest dreams. The mishap caught all of my family off-guard and for the first time, I felt the ruthless blow of deception. Nothing could pacify the storm in my mind, not even books that often comforted me during the several lows of my life. Every time I tried to read, the words seemed like a distorted maze.

A few months after the loss, on a sunny evening, I took the long way home after running an errand because my regular route was crowded. At that point, I did everything in my control to avoid people; I did not wish to exchange pleasantries and engage in small talk.

Lined with neem trees and tamarind, the avenue was tranquil and, despite the early summer humidity, a mildly cool breeze, probably from the sea, soothed me at intervals. A distant call of the koel was the only sound audible. As I walked, I thought about the people inhabiting the houses on the newish streets. I lived in a suburb that was just beginning to grow. Like me, almost all the residents were from different parts of the country. They had come to the city, full of hope.

Lost in the moment, I walked on the quiet streets with an occasional mom-and-pop store, which soon led to a park. In the park, I encountered a child wailing. In the late afternoon stillness, his shrill cry echoed and the woman with him, who looked frantic, tried to pacify him and make conversation over his screech. After a quick chat with the woman, the boy’s caregiver, I understood that a dead butterfly was the reason for his outburst. He had befriended the insect only minutes ago. In his excitement to trap the flying insect between his palms, he had squished it lifeless. There were two adults by him, laughing at the spectacle. I wondered how long the child would hold onto his loss. I watched them as the child’s caregiver wiped his tears and hugged him close.

I was thirteen when I lost my favourite uncle. I was taken from myboarding school to my grandmother’s house, which echoed with shrill wails, a sound that induces fear in me even now. I was nineteen when I lost my granddad, the one person I was most attached to and whose presence I felt the safest in. I was able to sail through those losses without destroying myself. Though an adult now, I felt the weight of this most recent loss as unendurable. Every little effort I made to overcome it went down the drain.The image of the child wailing for the butterfly stayed with me for a while.

Unmindful of the sweat trickling down my temples and back, I walked further to reach lanes with houses that had guava and sapodilla trees. There were several sparrows pecking on unripe fruits and crows watching from their high branches. Thoughts of life and death began to throng my mind. How often do I think about other creatures who are grieving around us? Do they have a better understanding of the eternal life-death cycle, the one we are all a part of? How do crows, cows, birds and animals we see and hear everyday, deal with the loss of their loved ones? I recollected an image from a wildlife documentary I had watched as an adolescent—a buffalo calf was pulled into the depths of a lake by a crocodile and the mother cow helplessly watched and mooed loudly from the bank. The calf’s call of distress and the mother’s response from the bank is etched deeply in my memory. When I first watched the documentary, this scene on the screen evoked pity, but on that walk, the sudden flash of that recollection set my gut burning.

Lost in the memory of a mother’s wail, I walked unheedful of the direction. I passed a church as the setting sun splashed some bewitching colours on the sky. I did not pay much attention to the sunset. I walked further to reach another park where a group of old men were probably regaling one another with conversations about a bygone time. Their loud laughter echoed across the street. I walked further, paying no heed to the twitch in my calf muscle. There was a voice within, prodding me to keep moving.

Vidya Vivek - CANOPY - ENCHANTED FOREST (2020), Ink and wash, Acrylic highlights, 11” x 16”
Image description: An abstract painting features ink blots in dark-blue, gray, black, and yellow. The ink blots resemble a thick foliage; vertical, black brushstrokes among them resemble tree branches. 

I come from a long line of people who tirelessly walked, navigated steep slopes, treaded rugged peaks, and wandered through valleys and meadows for a living. For my ancestors, who belong to an indigenous community in south India, walking was more than just a mode of transport. It was a means to bond intimately with the land and its wealth. My late grandmother told me that the generations before her did not have the privilege of isolating themselves to mourn for a loved one. As people belonging to an agrarian and pastoral community, they could not afford to stay away from the fields for a prolonged period. They would lose the harvest. Moreover, not many survived the adverse mountain climate, and deaths of the young were common.

Several oral epic poems in my community speak about death, especially the premature ones, and grief. I cannot forget these lines from the Baduga poem, “The Ghost Who Asked for Milk.”

One day will be your last.

What use is it for you to experience joy?

What if you have thousands and thousands of everything?

There will be death for you one day.*

Death is everywhere in the oral literature of my community. Our poems and songs remind us of the ephemeral nature of life, love, and theemotions.

I soon reached a canal, and further ahead was the suburban train station. At the edge of the canal, I stopped and watched children play gilli, a common yesteryear game using sticks. As the player carefully flipped the palm-length sharpened stick on the ground and flung it high in the air with the long stick in his hand, all his teammates watching him from the corner cheered loudly. It was then, amidst the screeching of the children and the sound of water trickling through the canal, that, for the first time in months I felt a calmness descend on me. It was a kind of harmony that made me forget the resentment I carried towards the world apathetic to my sorrow.I recollected my grandparents’ stories of their losses—their siblings who died as children, my great-grandmother who succumbed to pneumonia, leaving my eight-year-old granddad and his brother to fend for themselves, and the sudden passing of my paternal grandmother in her 30s. I thought of the person I so deeply loved and lost, the promise of her tomorrow destroyed, her dreams taken away in just a flash. My fondest memories of her were of our evening walks, along winding roads through serene tea plantations, tracing the curve of the hills, sighting magpies, and listening to the babble of streams at a distance. The sound of flowing water dug up all those memories I had carefully locked away. Looking back now, I think that I had perhaps kept walking that day to keep her memory bubbling alive.

I recollected grandma explaining the meaning of a cremation prayer of my community. The prayer calls on the dead, both young and old, who were gone centuries ago and yesterday, those who have become clay and dust, to accompany the departed for whom the prayer was offered. People before me believed that the departed became dust, clay, and other molecules that gave shape to everything around us—a harmony of micro particles forming the macro. Does that mean the dead are omnipresent?

On that evening, the strange moment at dusk, between the darkness of the night and the illumination of the day, I recollected the memories of her smile without feeling resentful towards the world. It was as if the grief of my ancestors and their strength reached me through some cosmic rays filtering through the faint light.

I continued to take long walks after that day, through the calm arteries of busy streets, by littoral land bordering a placid lake, and along idle sea shores. My mind did not know what it was seeking, but like a child who had found a clue to a treasure I walked the length and breadth of the neighbourhood in search of something.

Soon I became addicted to those walks. This basic human function that synced the motion of my body to the reflections of my mind was like a dosage of a drug; it was my portal to a euphoric world, however short-lived the ecstasy. On those everyday walks, I saw seasons change, flowers fall on the pavements, caterpillars crushed on asphalt roads, and trees turn barren, some lying lifeless after the rains. I noticed the end of life in many forms, the pain and change that came with it. To quote Jean Jacques Rousseau, it was those walks that made me look closely for the first time at the details of the great pageant of nature. It was in those moments, when the vast history of the landscape intersected with my personal history, that I realised I was but a speck of dust on this earth, and my worries and loss weigh nothing.

Elbert Hubbard famously said that the cure for grief is motion. I felt the familiar flare again two years ago when my granddad’s ashes were scattered on a pond, the one by which I had spent many childhood afternoons with him. My walks have taught me that everything in nature dissipates. So again, I walked.

*Excerpted from Blue Mountains Revisited: Cultural Studies on the Nilgiri Hills, edited by Paul Hockings, Oxford University Press (1997).

Vidya Vivek - INDIGO FLOWERS (2020), Ink and wash, Acrylic highlights, 8” x 8”
Image description: The ink painting features blooming, indigo-colored flowers, with petals rendered in delicate, gold-colored brushstrokes. Surrounding the group of flowers are blue-and-gold, leaf-shaped patterns that fill up the entire painting. 

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Monisha Raman’s essays have been published by New Asian Writing, New School Food, Kitaab, Where the Leaves Fall, Impermanent Earth, The Curious Reader, Spacebar Magazine, The Punch Magazine, SustainabilityNext, Planted Journal, and Feminism in India. Her works of fiction have been published by Borderless Journal, Usawa Literary Review, Phenomenal Literature GJLL, Bengaluru Review, The Punch Magazine, Active Muse, Indian Ruminations, Asian Extracts, The Universe Journal, and Storizen Magazine. Her work was included in the anthology Narratives in Domestic Violence, by the International Human Rights Arts Festival. Her work can be found at https://linktr.ee/Monisharaman.

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Vidya Vivek was born in Ooty, India. She now resides in Dublin, Republic of Ireland since 2018. A qualified Civil Engineer with a Masters in Business Administration, she took to painting full-time after a brief stint in the Corporate world. She has been a practising artist since 2014. In 2020, she started The Dublin Desi Artists Collective - a platform to showcase works of Indian artists residing in Dublin and through it has been curating art events in collaboration with local artists.

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