The habit of grief can be as insidious as the habit of love. When I was a young girl, I met a young man. We fell in love, we married, we had children, we fought, we stuck together, and now he was dead and I was grieving in an internal way that was leaving me sick, nauseous, raw and corroded. None of this showed on the outside. I looked normal and composed, like anybody you would meet anywhere, yet I inhabited an endless tunnel of night, and I was travelling it alone.
I sensed that there was something cloying, something fetid, in my mourning. In my stubborn refusal to look at sunsets, sunflowers, soap operas or seductive men, there was in fact fear, not grief, fear that my love for him, the only bulwark of my life, might also collapse in the ceaseless flow of the present. My two daughters belonged to the present, they tethered me to Now with a vague, anxious sense of duty and commitment. The three of us shared a disconnectedness. Like three helium balloons bobbing disconsolately against a low ceiling, tangled rather than tied together by our floating strings.
In the vacations, their first without their father, I took them for a holiday to Nepal. Two days into our four-day-three-night holiday package, we went on a mountain flight on a doubtful-looking plane, an hour’s excursion between the spectacular snow peaks. “The highest mountains in the world”, as the enthusiastic in-flight brochure called them, quite correctly. It was for my daughters that I had chosen to fly there. I didn’t even want to look out, my eyes hurt from the glow and the burden of unshed tears, and the white spread of the Himalayan ranges seemed to reflect the cold expanse of pain within me. The jumbled-up lot of tourists around us – the ever-curious Gujaratis and the earnest Japanese and the honeymooning couples with dark rings under their eyes – were crowding around the window seats and clicking away with cameras. We had forgotten our own camera at the hotel and, midway through the flight, we gave up trying to match the glistening snow peaks with the names and pictures, the altitudes, longitudes and latitudes printed in the brochure. Always, after a while, everything begins to look the same.
The Himalayas are young mountains, they are still growing, they are exuberant, brash, unhumbled by erosion and the eventual victory of time. Eight of the world’s highest mountains stood before us. The eternal snows glittered and glimmered in the sun, they did not belong to this world. “Does a mountain know its name, Mama?” my younger daughter asked. This was the sort of question my husband would have found original and I found exhausting. “Mama, how does a mountain know it is a mountain?” she asked again, changing the inflection of the question somewhat.
“It doesn’t, darling, it doesn’t know its name – people give these names to them,” I said, concealing my weariness with a patient smile.
“Then I’ll name them myself,” she said, in the sort of bright child’s voice I found tiring. The sacred peaks of Gauri Shankar, the ultimate union of Shiva and Shakti, flesh and spirit – this, my daughter decided to call “Hammer and Pail”. Melungtse was a chocolate cake, and Ama, a crooked tooth. My other daughter had joined in the game now. They liked these mountains. The huge massif that forms the Annapoorna range also pleased them. To them, Annapoorna I, II and IV sounded like a WASP American family.
Of course, Everest was a disappointment, institutions always are. The name Everest was a little boring, but the Tibetan name, Chomolungma, charmed them. The Nepalese call it Sagarmatha, the buttermilk churn, in deference to Hindu mythology. There was indeed an ocean here once, and these mountains must have churned their way up, triumphantly proclaiming their mastery over the land and the waters. They had carried fish and shells up into the skies with them. Fossils, eternal and eternally dead.
“Sagarmatha is a perfect name for a mountain, Mama!” my younger daughter exclaimed. “And it even looks like the wooden thingy we have in the kitchen.” My other daughter declared that she would perhaps name her daughter Sagarmatha, when and if she had a daughter. Then they were both distracted by the great beauty of Kanchenjunga which, to be honest, is the most appropriate name possible for that golden peak. Makulu had something playful about it, “like a monkey,” and we landed in Kathmandu quite unable to fault the locals in their faculty for naming mountain peaks.
That night, alone in my bed in the untidy hotel room, surrounded by the scattered clothes and strewn socks of my daughters, I stayed awake late into the night, listening with a nameless fear to the steady breaths of their healthy young bodies. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamt of a mountain, surrounded by fog and clouds and mist, a lonely mountain, a mountain without a name. I awoke with a start to the safe sounds of my daughters’ steady breathing. I was both sad and exhilarated and for some reason I was reminded of the time of the power cuts when we all used to sleep on our terrace in Delhi, the four of us, my husband, my daughters and I. Our house was on the outskirts of the city, near the airport, and at night the sky would be vivid with stars, broken by the broad beams of the aeroplane lights as they readied for landing.
When the electricity failed – which was often – we would troop out on to the terrace, skin damp with mosquito mosquito clouds that hovered above us. We would gaze up at the constellations spread across the darkening sky, the heady fragrance of chameli and frangipani and raat ki raani leavening the night. My husband knew the textbook names of all the constellations – Orion, the Great Bear, the Pleiades. I knew their Indian names. For Hindus, the Great Bear is the Saptarishi, the seven sacred sages from whom the brahmins were descended. And there was the Dhruv Tara, the Pole Star, a constant in a changing world.
My daughters, with their untutored minds, saw things differently. For them, Orion was a crooked bed frame, a skewered celestial version of the squat wooden charpai on which we slept, out in the open. The Pleiades were “the pincushion” and as for the Great Bear, Ursa Major – my younger daughter insisted on calling it “the Question Mark”. I thought then, in the way mothers do, that she was brilliant, and destined for great things, for Ursa Major did indeed look more like a question mark than a bear, great or small.
Of course, the constellations looked different when they were named: time and space and motion and the distortions of perception – all these things ensure the mismatch between names and things. The past inhabits the future just as the future looms over the past. Names are not just labels or conveniences, they carry with them the magical conviction of the power of naming, allied to the power of knowing. Mountains, constellations, emotions – they have an existence all their own, we only seek to appropriate them with words.
It was dawn in Kathmandu, the first flush of morning light could be seen through the window of the hotel room. I fell asleep again, and once again I dreamt of that mountain, which kept vigil over a bank of clouds, a lonely mountain, a mountain without a name. Perhaps I went on to dream of other things, I don’t remember, but when I awoke it was with a sense of clarity and purpose. The sun was streaming in through the window, and my daughters were still asleep, their blankets tossed away, their strong young limbs tangled. In the clear light of day, I knew what I had not known the night before. I knew the name of the mountain of which I had dreamt. Naming things makes them tidy, manageable, complete.
The name of the mountain was grief.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Habit of Love’ in Life on Mars: Collected Stories, Namita Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.
