Death in the time of COVID

Illustration/Uday Mohite

A stoicism has entered us all, even those who have not lost someone to the virus. The pandemic numbers sit heavy, like weights, in the daily news. On social media, the photographs of loved ones lost, the stories of their lives, are a recurring note, grown constant in these times.

Last week an older cousin of mine passed on. Getting her to an emergency room had been difficult under current Covid-19 rules, which makes one wonder about rules, about the chances of survival, about the inevitability of death.

In normal times, death makes families converge, from near and far. There are enough people, someone who weeps, someone who hugs, someone who make tea and arrangements. This time older relatives were told to stay home for safety and relatives in other cities told to be sensible and avoid traveling. Now, those who must carry out rituals - of which families like mine, with our multiple migrations and inter-marriages already have a poor grasp - must also carry out arrangements. They struggle to multi-task, attending to the dead and to the living at once.

As with much else, here too, the pandemic throws into relief things that have been changing for a long time. With each successive generation, our sense of family has altered. As more of us than ever follow our fortunes to other cities and countries, the sight of a condolence message on a WhatsApp group feels strange but also an accurate reflection of how our relationships are more symbolic and virtual than they are embodied and entangled.

Once, when older relatives described someone as "he is very practical", it was a criticism meaning the person did not feel bound by the sentimental and emotional expectations of families. Today we accept this practicality with more equanimity. "It doesn't matter if you can't meet when you're in town. I know your work is so demanding." "It's all right if you forgot my birthday, what's the big deal. You haven't forgotten me na!" we say. We scold elders who feel bad about such things, for being old-fashioned and expecting too much.

These new practicalities bring a necessary freedom from the oppressive expectations of families, sometimes even chosen ones. But they bring a certain alone-ness too, which we are struggling to resolve.

Yet, unexpectedly, confronting death without the usual collective engagement and its ritual distractions, for all its starkness, also creates a space to contemplate the life of the departed. I found myself dwelling less on our feelings, those of us left behind, and dwelling far more on my cousin's life, as a person, not only family - the battles she had fought as a single woman in her time, the tree branch she had painted to make into a bangle-holder, her dominating nature, her habit of stuffing my hands with fruits whenever I visited, as if I were a child, withering judgements about my choices, her love of rum and nice clothes, her sharp tongue and throaty laugh, the way put her hair up with pins, proud of her own appearance as she waited for the 214 bus to work; to consider how someone wrests a life from the
jaws of the world, before they leave it, feet first, as the ritual, apparently, dictates.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com