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We reach the ICU in time to see one of Babu's
doctors coming out of his room. As he walks past us, dad reaches over
to stop him and introduce himself. Then, his eyes fill with tears
again.

‘Doctor, this man is very important to us,'
he begins. ‘Please, spare no expense in looking after him. You
have no idea what he means…'

The doctor's lips tighten. ‘Please,
sir,' he says curtly. ‘Pull yourself together. We have no
time for such sentimental theatrics in here. I am too busy and have
many other patients to worry about. You people bring your relatives
here after it's too late and expect us to pull a miracle.'
Then, he turns on his heel and walks away, leaving us standing
open-mouthed. A ward boy who has heard the whole exchange tsk-tsks in
sympathy and disapproval. ‘Badmaash doctor,' he says to
us in low, confidential tones. ‘No heart in this man. Treating
everybody badly. You don't worry, saar. He got bad manner but
he's a top-class doctor. Your patient will be A-OK.'

But dad is not appeased. I see the blood rising
from his neck to his face and his eyes have a murderous look in them
I have never seen before. ‘I should kill him,' he
mutters. ‘If I was half a man I would just go get a knife and
kill the bastard.' But even as he talks, the anger leaves his
eyes and is replaced by a kind of bewildered hurt.

We walk back into the waiting room defeated. The
doctor's rudeness has shattered the last bit of hope that I was
still feeling. Babu is not going to make it, I know that now. All the
king's horses and all the king's men will not be able to
put Babu together again.

Slowly, the hours pass. Most of the families of
the other patients have left, so that as the hours crawl toward dawn,
it is only my family that waits in that large waiting room.

But we may as well be stranded on the moon, given
how isolated from the rest of the world we already feel. We walk
around in a daze, we talk in fragmented whispers. From the picture
windows we can see the distant streets but even Bombay is quiet and
subdued and unrecognizable at this late hour.

From this height, we are closer to the sky than to
the forlorn city streets. I keep waiting for the sun to rise, trying
to trick myself in to believing that if Babu survives another day,
lives to see another dawn, he will make it. That he will turn a
corner.

So this is what it means to keep a death watch, I
think. I think of Babu lying all alone in a strange room, covered in
a confetti of tubes and hoses, and for the first time I don't
feel pity for him. After all, all of us gathered here are surely as
alone as he is, lonely planets orbiting around each other in our own
fog of confusion and pain and regrets.

Regrets. I am choking on my own. So many moments
to trip over, to feel guilty about. A few weeks before he went into
the hospital he had asked me to join the family for a Hindi movie.

And I had said no. Such contempt in my voice.
Because by now, I hated the song-and-dance, formulaic, masala Hindi
movies. The pretensions of being an intellectual so strong now and
what easier way to shorthand that change to the family than by
expressing contempt for the commercial movies that they so loved? The
cracks in the facade, the faultlines already appearing now—I
only want to see small, low-budget movies by Shyam Benegal and
Satyajit Ray, I'd said to him and Babu had looked at me with
confusion and hurt. Roshan had piped in, the contempt in her voice
matching mine: ‘Yah, you want to see films where the camera
focuses for fifteen minutes on a fly sitting on a chappati. So
booooring, those movies. I go to movies to be entertained, not to be
put to sleep.' I shut up then, the gap between the two of us
too enormous to bridge, the gap between where I come from and where

I want to go, too immense to fathom. But the hurt
look in Babu's eyes as the rest of them left for the movie had
taken away all the pleasure at having said no.

The truth is, he was beginning to embarrass me.
All the things about him that had thrilled me as a child—the
loud laugh that always ended in a coughing fit, the casual dropping
of four-letter words in his conversations, the abandon with which he
farted—now made my toes curl with embarrassment.

When Pervez, the slim, delicate-looking man who
used to come to the house to tutor me in math and science, would
express amazement at the liberal sprinkling of four-letter words in
Babu's conversations, I would not hear the obvious delight and
affection in Pervez's voice. Instead, I would fume inwardly at
Babu's lack of sophistication and manners. What I had once seen
as lack of pretension, now appeared to be crudity.

And he knew it too. Could see the distance in my
eyes. Was too hurt to mention it directly because after all, what
could he say? That he didn't feel my love as strongly as he
once did?

That he had always loved me as faithfully as he
had loved his own daughter, Roshan? Remind me of those childhood
years when I would sit by myself and try and decide once and for all,
who I loved more, Babu or daddy? Remind me that he had held me in his
arms the day that I was born before my father even made it to the
hospital? Remind me of that wonderful day when I was seven and
cuddling with him one evening when he said to me, unexpectedly, ‘You
are my first darling of the morning.' I turned that phrase over
in my mouth like toffee, toyed with it with my tongue. ‘What
does that mean?'

I finally asked, not wanting to ask, afraid that
the explanation may be more prosaic than the tingling feeling the
words con-jured up for me. He shrugged, laughing. ‘Nothing.
Just what it says. I just made it up. You decide what it means.'
I wore the words like a silver medal the rest of the day.

Two memories from the week before he went into the
hospital: Joan Baez'
Come from the Shadows
was playing on
the stereo in the living room. I was lying on my stomach on Freny's
bed and hanging from my waist, my hands dangling toward the floor.
‘And we'll raze, raze the prisons to the ground,'
Baez sang and I pondered the seeming contradiction: how do you raise
something to the ground, I wondered? Must be poetic licence, I
finally decided. To my left, Babu and Freny were leaning on the
railing of the balcony, talking to each other in soft, low voices.
They were relaxed and leaning into each other, a stark contrast to
the stiff, cautious way in which my parents carried themselves around
each other. I was suddenly filled with an insane happiness. So that
when Babu asked me a little later if I want to go with them to
see
Witness for the Prosecution
, I immediately said yes. On
the way to the theatre, Babu talked about what a classic the movie
was, how brilliant Charles Laughton was in the main role. And Tyrone
Power, he breathed, the admiration for the actor he must've
felt as a young man still coming through. At his side, Freny smiled.

Soon, they were talking about the other Hollywood
movie-stars they grew up with. Cary Grant. James Stewart. Ethel
Merman. Humphrey Bogart. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The
names tumbled off their silver tongues, like beads of mercury. I sat
in the backseat with Roshan, warm and drowsy from this replay of
their youth.

And now, a week later, this man whose eyes had lit
up with pleasure when I told him how much I had loved
Witness
forthe Prosecution
, who had bought us chicken rolls and potato
chips during intermission, who had taken us out to dinner after the
movie, was lying in an isolated hospital bed, dying? dead?

I must've dozed off because the noise of the
elevator doors opening makes my eyes fly open and I'm just in
time to see Shankar the elevator operator step out of his steel cage
and go toward where Mani aunty is sitting. She looks up at him
silently, questioningly and he simply shakes his head from
side-to-side, once. But his meaning is awfully clear.

Shankar is the angel of death, the messenger of
doom. He has come to bring us bad news from the ICU two floors above
us.

Babu is dead.

Mehroo, noticing the silent exchange between Mani
and the elevator boy, jumps up from her chair. ‘What?…Is
he…?' she asks Shankar and he nods, averting his eyes,
gazing at his feet.

Sobbing hard, Mehroo heads over to Freny. The
sound of sobbing fills the room. My dad is standing by himself at one
of the windows, his shoulders shaking. His older brother is dead. He
is now the only surviving male in the family.

And just then, there is a flash of dazzling light
flooding the room. It is the sun, red and angry as a chilli pepper.
And it is immense, a red cannonball in the sky. Despite the immense
grief that I feel, I am distracted and mesmerized by the close beauty
of the sun, as seen from this height. People who live in skyscrapers
must know the sun so much more intimately than the rest of us, I
think.

But today, the rising of the sun, the dawning of a
new day, feels like an insult, rather than a thing of hope. Or
rather, it feels like a burden, this new day, because it is the first
day that Babu will not be alive to share with us. This is the first
day of a new life that we will all have to get used to but right now,
living, the simple act of putting one foot in front of another, seems
impossible. I feel like those astronauts walking in space, clumsy,
heavy, everything in slow motion.

I look at the sun until my eyes smart from its red
sparks.

The long night of waiting is over and so is
praying to the moon.

A new morning of horror has replaced the waiting
and I now change allegiances and pray to the sun. But instead of
wrestling for Babu's life, I now pray for death.

A long sleep. Oblivion. Because to be awake is to
be stabbed a million times a second with the pinprick realization of
Babu's death and how it will change our lives forever. ‘Please
God,'

I pray. ‘Just give us all an injection,
something that will just let us sleep for forty-eight hours, past the
point of having to deal with this. Because none of us is ready.'
For an absurd moment, I flirt with the fantasy of rushing up to the
nurse's station and stealing some drugs that will spare us this
long, horrific day that is dawning.

Because I know sure as anything, that my role as
the baby of the family is about to end. Has ended. A freight train
has roared into our lives and has flattened everything in its path,
including my childhood.

It's growing up time. I will not cry. I will
not lend my voice to the sobbing in this room. I am no longer a
child. I have responsibilities, several broken people that I have to
put back together. All the king's horses…All the lonely
people where do they all come from?…No one was saved…But
I must. Save them all, these people that I love. Repent for all the
ugly thoughts I ever had about any of them. Fighting with the moon.

And losing. Empty-handed.

I am no longer a child. I will not cry.

W
HITE. THE FUNERAL IS ALL white. The women
in their white, cotton saris. The men in white daaglis. The white of
the sheet that is covering Babu's body as it rests on a simple
wooden platform on the ground. The white robes of the priests and the
white masks that cover their mouths as they sit mumbling their
prayers for the departed soul. The white of the sandwiches that some
thoughtful relative has brought for us to the Tower of Silence and
that lie untouched. The whites of Babu's eyes, eyes that have
been donated to another human being somewhere across this miserable
city where blindness is so common. The white of Babu's feet, so
cold and hard when I touched and kissed them one last time at the
hospital. The whiteness of fury, the pure rage that I feel at this
aborting of life, the obscene haste with which Babu's body is
removed from the hospital, the surreal absurdity of finding ourselves
in a funeral home, praying over Babu,
Babu
, who was so alive,
so vibrant, so attuned to the world. The whiteness of the world, this
blurry white world that grief creates, where everything loses colour
and taste and shape.

And then, colour. The flare of the fire that burns
in the small silver urn before which the priests sit cross-legged on
the floor.

The grey of the smoke that rises from the urn,
obscuring Babu's face at times. The brown fur of the dog that
is led into the funeral home and made to witness Babu's still
body. I tense up at that, my body turning into stone and Jesse,
sitting at my side notices immediately. ‘It's nothing to
be afraid of,' she says, taking my hand in hers. Her hand is a
warm nest, a welcome relief from the cold that has nestled in my
heart since the moment I touched Babu's feet at the hospital.
Jesse is still talking. ‘Just see the dog in anthropological
terms. It's just a ritual that's meant to act as a
diversion, something to take the mourners' minds off their
grief.' And it actually works, so that I can feel my body
relaxing as I think of the genius who invented this diversionary
ritual. I am so grateful for Jesse's analytical, rational
presence at this moment, that I could kiss her.

But then my body tenses again. It is time to say
goodbye to Babu forever. The skinny, hollow-eyed corpse-bearers stand
in their tattered, dirty clothes, ready to hoist the body and take it
to its final path to the big well with the circling vultures. For a
moment, the pallbearers themselves look like vultures to me and I
hate them for their greedy eagerness to get started and finished with
their task. But then I remember the stories of how these men drink in
order to be able to perform their unpleasant task, I think of how
their sunken, sad eyes must witness the unwitnessable—the sight
of the dark-winged birds descending like death into the huge well
into which the bodies are laid. I think of how their nostrils must be
filled with the smell of death, a smell that must cling to them at
all times, a smell so irrefutable that why bother showering or
shaving or wearing clothes other than the rags that they dress in? I
think of their dirty, wax-filled ears trying to block out the sounds
of tearing flesh and cracking bones and suddenly I am heaving,
heaving and then my heaves turn into choked sobs, my mouth opening
and closing soundlessly. Everybody is crying now, Mehroo with her
piteous cries of ‘Bhai, bhai', Freny with tears streaming
down her cheeks, stunned at becoming a widow at fifty-one, Mani aunty
bawling like a baby for the brother-in-law whom she loved like a
brother, my dad looking as dazed and lost as a boat out at sea, the
old men from the nearby apartment buildings shaking their heads at
the irony of their being alive while the man they called the prince
of the neighbourhood is dead, the old women remembering how he used
to flirt with them and make them laugh with his bawdy irreverence,
the destitute widows telling stories of how he would press a five-or
ten-rupee note in their hands whenever they saw him on the street and
how he treated everybody, from a king to a beggar, the same. And
everybody saying how he was too young to die, that this was not the
proper age to die and me being confused by that because at fifteen,
Babu's age of fifty-four seems old to me and besides, I wonder
what the proper age to die is? No age is the proper age to die, I say
to Jesse and she looks at me for a minute because she hears the
rawness in my voice and then she nods understandingly.