Dadi

Today morning, I came across this picture of my dadi—my grandmother—from May 2017. Back then, I was going through a phase where I clicked black and white photos of nearly everything and anything. I am not quite sure when I clicked this one, but it must have been a Sunday. Usually, Sundays meant we headed over to Sonipat, a small city in Haryana, which is my father’s hometown and my grandparents’ place of residence. Somehow, I had completely forgotten about this picture. When I stumbled upon it today, I was especially struck by how healthy and happy my grandmother looked—a stark contrast to the frail, weak frame that she took with her to her deathbed in the September of 2018.

For as long as I had known her, she had struggled to walk. Despite this, she had a steely resolve, and so she would clutch my hand or shoulder as tightly as she could, put a great chunk of her body weight on me, and then hobble on to the best of her ability. She was always wary of using walking-sticks—I guess they made her feel old. She fought against them for a long, long time, but eventually, when she realised that walking-sticks made her life easy, she befriended them reluctantly. Wheelchairs were a different ball-game altogether. Even though she eventually resigned to walking-sticks, wheelchairs made her feel a lot more than old—they made her feel disabled—and so she fought twice as hard against them.

Some five years ago or so, my grandparents went to the USA. They went to travel, explore, and meet my grandmother’s sister. At all the airports that they stopped in, they were offered a wheelchair, which both of them took (even my grandfather, who does not face any walking disability to date) simply because walking long distances had started to become really tiresome for them. That was perhaps the first time that my grandmother willingly took the wheelchair and thoroughly enjoyed the convenience and ease that it provided. A few years later, I accompanied my grandparents for some local sightseeing in Delhi, and we were delighted to know that she was okay with keeping a wheelchair handy. I pushed her wheelchair all around the Birla temple—she enjoyed how relaxed her body felt without having to overexert itself. Meanwhile, I enjoyed not being pulled down by someone else’s body weight and realised how stressed being her walking-stick usually made me feel. We had a lovely time that day.

My grandmother fell a lot. She could not balance herself very well, and so she would often stumble or slip. It made her feel really conscious—she had always been very particular about how people perceived her. Sometime in 2017, she slipped in the bathroom and injured her leg muscles. Things started deteriorating thereafter. She spent nearly all her time on her wheelchair—her former adversary had turned into a comforting friend. She started to lie down a lot. A physiotherapist often visited and helped her regain muscle strength. By the time my cousin got married in November 2017, my grandmother had started to become a shadow of her former self.

She began to get hospitalised frequently in the second half of 2018. We would often shuttled between Delhi and Sonipat, paying her visits and humouring her as she lay on her bed. She slept a lot, was often disoriented and started to seem really frail. During the festival of Raksha Bandhan in 2018, her brother came to visit her from their hometown Ladwa, another small city in Haryana. They celebrated in the hospital—grandma was weak, dazed, and possibly sedated. Her nephew burst out crying as soon as he saw her. While my mother held her hand and supported her as she leaned from her bed to tie the rakhi on her brother’s wrist, I took a picture.

My grandmother and I shared a relationship that had gradually grown and evolved over the course of twenty years. I wasn’t very close to her as a child—even though nobody said it out loud, it somehow always seemed like she preferred my brother and cousin more. However, as I grew older, she started to find a companion in me—we would always share the room when she came over, I would braid her hair, she would stitch clothes for my dolls, and I would humour her with my silly talks. I don’t think she ever yelled at me—I don’t have any memories of her snapping at me. This one time when I was fourteen or so, my cousin and I had a fight and he yelled so much that I felt quite shook and teary. I remember the warm, wordless, understanding embrace of my grandmother shortly after our fight—she said nothing, and yet she said a lot.

During her last days, she often called for me. My aunt would call from the hospital, saying that grandma wanted to speak to me. Sometimes she confused the nurses for me and would call out my name. I remember holding her hand a lot during her those days. I tried to visit her as much as I could. One evening in September, my mother told me that she was visiting grandma, and so I decided to join in. We were sitting beside her in the hospital when she expressed her desire to go see the sky. After we moved her to the wheelchair, the nurses took her out for a stroll. By the time grandma returned, her bed had been redone with fresh sheets. She had only been gone for some ten minutes or less, but she was already exhausted by the time she came back. We moved her back to the bed, and her eyes were already closing. “I have bothered all of you enough, haven’t I?” she asked before she slipped into her sleep. “No grandma, of course not,” I told her. It was the last thing I ever heard her speak—she passed away the same night.

I don’t think anybody had been expecting her to recover or go back to her former self, but I don’t think anybody was expecting her to die either. She died in her sleep, surrounded by people she had loved and devoted her life to. She was the first person from my childhood to have died. When we went to Sonipat the next morning, I rushed to look for my grandfather. He sat in the middle of the living room, staring. As soon as he saw me, he burst out crying. We wept and held each other for a long time.