Listening to the Heartbeat of a Transformer: Making Sense of Loss
By Saurabh Sharma
life writing | 12 min read | TW: death
I lost my father in a car accident when I was fifteen. On June 1, 2008, around one in the afternoon. A twelve-wheeler truck crumbled the Hyundai i20 my father was driving like a piece of paper on a national highway connecting Aligarh to Sikandra Rao and Etah district of Uttar Pradesh.
I was at my cousins’ in Aligarh, not far away from the accident site.
The car remained pressed to the ground late into the night. I didn’t know what had transpired, as I was brought to Delhi with the information that my father had met with an accident and been hospitalized. Of course, none of my relatives had any vocabulary to communicate what had happened, and that what I had lost can and will never be recovered.
The next day, when I saw my mother wailing, howling, beating her chest, her hair undone, eyes swelling, I couldn’t make sense of the scene. Someone whom I had seen fifteen days ago when I was leaving to spend summer vacation at my cousins’ had aged suddenly. She was only thirty-six.
When my brother was rubbing his hand on my thigh, consoling me, he kept on saying this, as if his record had stuck: “I will take care of everything.”
He was all of seventeen. He could hardly save his notebooks from getting soiled with the achar oil that would leak from his lunchbox in his schoolbag, and he will take care of everything? I don’t recall if I communicated this exact thought across, but I remember asking him, “What?”
A Hindu household observes thirteen days of mourning. When they were over, everyone left: people from our native village and distant relatives.
It was now that we started to feel the absence of someone. It was now that the time for bereavement really started. And no one was ready for managing the emotions of a young, newly-widowed wife, her three children in their teenage and short-tempered in-laws.
How we grieve?
I came to books at the age of 19, and irreversibly. Before that I had no idea whether loss or grief could have its own vocabulary; whether books can serve as a medium to deal with loss.
With the help of books, I rekindled my relationship with my father. He was no longer in this dimension, but his absence was uncannily real, so much so that he appeared more alive and pertinent than when he was in flesh and blood.
In one of the books that I came across, Bill Hayes’ Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me, I learnt that “going through grief is not a uniquely human experience.”
Each living being responds to the event of loss differently, I reckoned. In the same book, Hayes writes that a Rhesus monkey holds their dead baby in their mouth for several days. Pottos, observed biologist Ursula Moser Cowgill, set aside food for the dead community member.
I wondered whether nonhuman animals grieve like us. But then it occurred to me whether this word “grief” needs to be contextualized for them. Are we sure that these words describe their bereavement, too?
Many scientists now believe that it’s better to avoid the generalization that goes into describing how animals grieve. Some even say that we shouldn’t attach the notions of “grieving” or “mourning” to death-related behaviors in nonhuman animals.
In the hospital, upon seeing the doctor, who was attending to her husband, novelist and screenplay writer, John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion asks: “He’s dead, isn’t he?” The doctor fidgets, and seeing this, the social worker accompanying him blurts: “It’s okay. She’s a pretty cool customer.”
Didion documents this incident in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, and wonders “what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?”
I wondered whether Pottos’ not leaving food aside for the dead would mean that they are not grieving. I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. Does that mean I loved him a little less than others? Was my throwing the newspaper in which the crushed car’s photograph was printed into his pyre rude?
What would be the response if Didion were to make loud noises and wail inconsolably? Calling her uncool would be inappropriate, uncultured then. What distinguishes these two acts? Why does one beget a response different from the other?
Because grief is performance
The death of someone like your father brings you to a crossroad with others. You begin an ungainly exercise of performing grief. As Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi writes eloquently in his memoir Loss, “Grief is not a record of what has been lost but of who has been loved.”
And when you grieve, perform, the spectators gauge how much you loved whom you have lost by the way you grieve. Were my mother’s loud wails just for hundreds of people accumulated at my father’s funeral or was she genuinely grieving like that?
When I was in the train from Aligarh to Delhi on June 2, 2008, a day after my father’s death, I was unusually quiet. Neither of my cousins talked to me nor did I talk to them. My aunt was probably looking for an answer and kept looking outside the window. It was like a ritual: She’d look at her palm, run her index finger over the fortune lines, look outside, look at me, and look away. She repeated it often. I pretended not to notice.
I was sitting opposite her. In a train full of people, who travel intercity for better employment opportunities and pay, it was unusual for someone to lend me their window seat. But I got one.
I began looking outside the window, too. The earth was spinning, the fast-moving train was its axis. I could see people getting ready for everyday toiling with much enthusiasm, there was no sign of reluctance in their bodies. Or if there was, from a distance, I didn’t see it.
I came back to where I was sitting, and the man who offered me the seat smiled and flung his shirt back from its shoulder-blades, tilting his body toward the window for a relief from the heat of June.
When I reached Shahdara railway station, it was as if each individual constituting this sea of people around me found me suspicious of something. I lowered my head and veered outside the station premises.
I was carrying a bag, and with fast-paced footsteps entered the narrow street a hundred meters to the left of Durga Mandir, took a right. I had reached home.
When it was constructed my father had the house nameplate read “Gaurav Sharma” and “Saurabh Sharma,” and not “Rajesh Sharma.” When people inquired him about this unusual thing, he simply smiled and said: “Their time has come.”
Did he see it coming?
Premonition of a tragedy
In the month of March, the same year, upon my father’s request, my uncle sent a Pandit. We children were asked to present before him the most precious thing that we possessed. The catch was that he will not return them to us. We couldn’t make a compromise by presenting our second- or third-favorite because in our most-precious thing lied our future.
I gave him a previous edition mathematics textbook — I was yet to discover books outside curriculum. He had a great look at it, said three things. One of them being: “You’ll face something this year that you won’t forget your whole life.”
To my father he advised not to leave his current job at least for next two months. My father got into an argument with his employer and left the job that very day.
A month later after the Panditji episode, a friend of mine lost his father. Papa came home, broke the news, and jokingly asked my mother, “What are you going to do if I die?”
In June we lost him.
Years later, recalling it, I sat my mother down and asked her whereabouts of that Pandit. We failed to locate him.
Can someone’s predictions be so precise? Are our actions premonitions of what lies ahead? Are people who will be dead in the days to come able to foresee their death? Do they say such things to prep us up?
In his last days, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s father had his back toward “all the growing things.” Was it a premonition of his decline, too?
Siddharth’s mother Padmini lost her first son Utpal and couldn’t see why her son would be taken away from her too soon. He was about to turn four. Recounting this unbearable loss she tells him about a sadhu that was hell-bent on meeting her. When she finally succumbed to his plea, he told her that her mother wanted to spend more time with Parul — his sister — and took the form of Utpal to find her closure.
“The fiction we tell ourselves must be more refined — more compelling — than the fiction we make up for others,” writes Siddharth. However, he rubbishes the sadhu’s explanation.
But didn’t it help twist a tap inside her mother, who remained inconsolable before learning this ‘story’, devoid of logic and evidence? Siddharth does acknowledge this and writes, “My mother’s acceptance of Utpal’s demise revealed the powerful link between language and resolution, of how we darn tiny pieces of fiction into the larger fabric of our lives, to keep it all together.”
Am I doing language because it’s where my closure lies?
Where were you, my pigeon?
An array of red carpets was spread on the road to my home. In India, this is sign of either a funeral or celebration. No one told me what had happened the afternoon of my father’s accident: he had died on the spot, along with three of his friends in the car.
Entering the street leading to my home, seeing those carpets. I looked at my cousin, he wanted to hide somewhere, but continued walking. I didn’t speak a word and he did the same. I vaguely remember some hands were drawn toward me in grief. India never deals with things in silence. It was an audiovisual thing, I knew what had happened, so why were the people yelling: Ye kya hogaya?
I stopped at the black dome. My home. It had my name on the nameplate, too. But it seemed strange to me, with so many people. I threw my bag in one of the rooms and began searching my mother. She was upstairs. The valley of her breast, which I never ever remember seeing uncovered, was out there for men to ogle at. She was a mess. While screeching, she continued saying: “Kabutar … kabutar … mere kabutar, kahan chala gaya tha tu?”
It was cryptic for me.
She never called me pigeon. Never. Ever. Dog maybe. Sometimes, skinny, blackie, malnourished. But never a pigeon. What was wrong with her? Why was she saying this?
Pigeon. Pigeon. O my pigeon. Where were you, my pigeon?
Finding me clueless, and, because I was of course a child at that time, some uncles pulled me out of her grip and sat me in a different room and gave me water. It was then when my brother said he will handle everything. Without replying to my counterquestion, he left the room.
I don’t remember crying at all. But my eyes wouldn’t remain dry forever.
In eleven months, my grandfather died. The series of deaths in my family that started with the death of my maternal grandmother in March 2007 finally ended on 11 August 2009 when my grandfather died.
My grandmother. My uncle. My father. My grandfather.
Nani. Mausa. Papa. Baba.
They all were gone, never to return. My mother says that my Nani was lucky to have averted the deaths of her sons-in-law, but my grandfather wasn’t: “It is not easy to see the dead body of your own son.”
Is it easy for a child to shoulder their father’s corpse? I thought to ask her.
Gradually, I grew distant from my family: spent more time on mathematics, physics and arts than realizing that the real job is to fill those gaps that were widening by the day.
I was avoiding it: performing loss.
Not crying, keeping a transistor by my side, and doing Algebra or representing a body in motion on X-Y axes. Not knowing that avoiding any confrontation, especially when it comes to losing a loved one, is inviting a tragedy.
One day, I went to the terrace and started crying. The noiseless cry became louder, then louder, and soon, I was screaming. Tears flowing down my cheeks and collecting on my jawline and hanging there for a brief period like drops from a loose tap. Listening to it, my mother came rushing to me. Held me. And, somehow, brought me downstairs, sat me on the bed and hugged me, and said: “Chup. Bas.”
Quiet now. Enough.
Years later, as an electrical engineering student, sitting in an Internal Practical Examination, a professor asked me if I knew why a transformer makes a humming sound. I had no answer.
She wrote a complex equation that balanced energy on the left-hand side to the right one. I knew that. Then she wrote the expression of magnetic energy, and circling it said: “It’s this energy that’s converted in the form of sound and you hear a humming noise when you pass by it. That’s the thing with energy, it needs a way out.”
Why write about loss?
It’s what life does, it teaches you to bend and recoil in the event of unexplainable scenarios such as losing someone. I contextualized the lifelong lesson that my professor unknowingly provided me: I had to find a way out.
Loss is unbearable, but so is living. It’s an everyday negotiation. I had to negotiate with “my things.” My college counselor, with whom I was discussing my ‘newfound’ attraction toward men, seconded that and we both found a way. Writing was key.
Acceptance of my father’s loss took time. After twelve years, I am not sure if I am fully reconciled with it. Writing about such a deeply personal thing can be therapeutic. Maybe there’s closure in it. Or maybe that’s how artists make sense of loss. It is to, in the words of Siddharth, “erase some part of pain.”
Justifying why he wrote the memoir of loss of his father, mother, and a dog, he writes that this act of writing grief is a “process of thinking about the writing, about raising the difficult questions and enduring impossible answers” that relies on courage, and it’s that courage that pushes us to progress in life.
Whenever I pass by any transformer now, I try to listen to its heartbeat.
