Heart Remembers

There she lay with her eyes shut and the big vermilion dot in between her eyebrows covering a pleasant frown she wore. She was dressed in her red wedding Benarsi saree, the only remnant of her marriage. She remained in the casket that would carry her to the cremation ground. The house felt so different. Maybe because today there was no smell of fish fry in the house. Incense sticks and flowers had enveloped the room. You couldn’t hear Ma’am’s foot tapping. All you could hear were the faint murmurs of the visitors.

I still remember entering this room twenty-five years ago, when I came to meet Sir with my dad. The four folded lines had not left his forehead ever since he saw my report card.

“She is very weak in English. She failed the mid-term exams. The teacher suggested Mitali gets some extra attention outside school and she recommended you for English coaching. Do you think you can help us?” My dad had always been the best at everything.I felt that he had personalized my failure as his own — a bad reflection on the gene pool.

Sir looked at the twelve-year-old me and gave me a broad smile.

“Tell me, Mitali, what do you enjoy the most? ”

“Swimming!” I said promptly.

“And why is that?” Asked Sir

“I stood first in school.” Swimming was my only accomplishment but nobody had taken notice of that.

“This will then be easy,” Sir told my dad.

“How?” asked my perplexed father who always thought any non academic activity was a colossal waste of time.

“A winner in any field needs to have killer instinct. She has it in swimming. We need to find it in academics for her,” said Sir as he rolled a filter of tobacco.

I don’t know how he was so sure but it worked. I never stopped coming to this house. It was not for English. It was for faith — the faith he had shown in the twelve-year-old me.

Everybody now gathered around the casket. The priest turned to me and signaled me to get Sir.

I went inside to look for him. He was standing near the window looking at the pots of roses lining the garden. The bedroom looked different now. The double bed was replaced by two single beds. I put my hand on his shoulder, unsure of how he would react.

He looked at me and with a lot of enthusiasm asked “May I go down and play with Whiskey now? You told me if I sit here quietly you would let me play. See, I have not moved. Please may I go and play now?”

“Yes, of course! But before that you need to say goodbye to someone.”

It was pointless to remind him that Whiskey had passed away ten years ago, two nights after their son.

He followed me, holding my hand, into the living room, where everybody was waiting for him.

He looked at Ma’am’s body with folded prayer hands.

“Where is the Queen going?” he asked me. I looked away and allowed the tear to roll down before I looked at him and responded “To the Kingdom”.

Whenever Ma’am would get upset he would call her Queen; more as ‘queen of my heart’ but now, all he remembered was that she was the Queen.

I took him inside while others proceeded to the crematory with Ma’am’s body.

He sat on his bed.

“When will the Queen come back? I want to recite one of my poems to her.”

“Why don’t you recite it to me?”

“She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, on,

The difference to me”

For a few seconds, I felt paralyzed. The man who had forgotten his own name, and didn’t realize he had lost his partner of 45 years, remembers a Wordsworth poem as his own! Life does have a sick sense of humor.

I looked down at my knuckles. Sir would hit them when I’d forget my lines while reciting in his English class as a kid.

“It improves your retention capacity,” he would say.

Ironically, it is only poetry he remembered now.

“Today, when I was sleeping, he tried to strangle me. He kept yelling and asking me who I was and what I am doing on his bed,” Ma’am sobbed as she narrated this to me six months back. This was Ma’am’s awakening to the fact that her partner had succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

“His memory is deteriorating every day. He remembers things in spurts. You know he still loves you,” I tried to console Ma’am.

“But how can he forget me? I don’t live in his memory. I am supposed to live in his heart. How can the heart forget?”

No matter what the doctors said, I knew she didn’t die of a heart attack. She died from heart break.

The maid came in with Ma’am’s photo. “Didi, where do you want me to hang this?” she asked

“Hang it above the showcase in the living room next to …”

“Give that to me. That’s mine!” Sir interrupted, snatching the picture from the maid’s hand.

He hugged the picture and stared out of the window.

The heart will keep trying its best, I guess.