She wanted to call him and ask him to push aside the lock of hair that had fallen on his forehead. She didn’t and this image of him stayed with her, her hands reached into the emptiness to brush aside the lock. 

His embalmed body was flown to Chennai from Frankfurt and she had flown from Singapore to Chennai on receiving the news. She had packed her clothes into a suitcase hastily. His bathrobe lay on bed and the faint smell of aftershave that he dabbed just before leaving remained in his bathroom. She closed her flat that still had his presence and flew with friends to Chennai on receiving the news of his death. 

She had looked at the world through his eyes. That was the first time she was travelling without him or her grown up daughter who was then studying in Chennai. Her husband had joked many times of having two children, one who has grown up and the other who will never grow up. 

She gazed into the empty darkness through the window of her flight. She looked keenly into the space and wondered if this was the emptiness that everyone disappears into after they die. Was her husband somewhere here? It was hard for her to develop this thought. 

She had seen him off at the elevator and had rushed to the balcony to see the car drive out of the apartment building. She lay on the bed that carried the warmth of his body, lazed around desultorily picking from the floor the things that he had strewn around as he hastily got dressed to take the early morning flight. 

She did not clean the apartment and spent the day biting into the left- over of previous night’s dinner. She micro waved the dosa and soaked it into cold coconut chutney and ate it. She sprawled on the large sofa in her housecoat and drained down mugs and mugs of filter coffee. She looked at the Singapore evening sky spill red wine laced with mauve at the edges, behind the high-rises. 

This was how she spent the time when her husband travelled. She did not call on friends, stayed up the whole day without cooking, boringly ran through magazines, surfed TV channels. She spoke to her daughter at 20.30 Singapore time. She did not bother to calculate the time zone of the cities her husband visited, he always called and spoke several times during his travels. She just waited, all activity called off when he was not near her.    

He had called soon after a meeting and said that that he was boarding the flight in a couple of hours and that he would reach Singapore in the early hours of Wednesday. It was still early evening, she had enough time to have an unhurried bath. She soaked herself for half an hour in the bath and rubbed her wet hair gently after she draped herself in her husband’s bath robe. She took time to choose her dress for the evening.  She wore a block printed Salwar Kameez that she picked up during one of her visits to Chennai; she sprayed perfume liberally and called her driver on the cell to get the car to the lobby. She drove to China Town which was a twenty minute drive from her flat. She went to the Indian store and bought a large bunch of Rajnigandha. The flowers weighed the stalks down and made it droop gently. Pollen settled on her fair skin with a few drops of water that the florist had sprinkled to stand the flowers fresh. She paid for the flowers and left the store.  On reaching home she put the flowers in the ceramic jar, she then opened the fridge to take stock of the vegetables to cook for the next day. She retired to bed leaving the light on in the sitting room. She stayed awake for long as the sounds of the night diminished, she followed a trail of light left on the wall by the headlight of a car turning around the corner of the road.  She plunged into deep sleep and was startled when the doorbell rang. She sat bolt upright and took a few seconds to orient herself. The time piece near her bed showed half past six. She cursed herself for oversleeping. It must be her husband, she went to open the door surprised at her husband for not calling her from the airport, which he normally did.

When she opened the door she found Anand and Ravi with their wives. So early in the morning, she wondered. No one generally called impromptu like this. Anand and Ravi were her husband’s colleagues. She invited them in and asked to be excused to rush in and brush her teeth. They did not reply, she went in thinking that their presence was odd at so early an hour. At the back of her mind she kept expecting a call from her husband.

She went to the kitchen to put milk on the stove to boil. She went to the sitting room. Anand’s wife came and sat next to her and held her hand. She found this strange. She sensed some misgiving, it filled the air around her, and she shivered a little at the oddness of the situation. She wanted to blot these people out of her existence and call her husband on the mobile. It was strange he did not call.

A hollow pain gripped her stomach, she looked searchingly at the four sitting around her. For a moment a strange thought ran though her brain. What had her husband to do with these four people who have barged into her house? She could not hold a single thought as she was getting restless. The thought that it was past her husband’s arrival time back home rattled her. She needed to be alone to figure out what delayed her husband. She needed to talk to him. 

Anand cleared his throat and started speaking to her gently, “I received a call late last night form Henrik.”  Henrik was her husband’s counterpart operating in Frankfurt. “Your husband felt uneasy just as he was boarding his flight. The airport authorities had given immediate medical help and moved him to a hospital. They called Henrik as that was the last person he had spoken to before taking ill.” 

She listened to this as she would to a story, this as yet had nothing to do with her husband, and she was expecting his call anytime now. 

“The doctors say Srini had a massive heart attack, they ….” 

She silenced Anand mid way, “What?”

“Srini was very serious by the time they reached him to the hospital. The doctors did their best…”

A whip of cold air lashed her face, she woke up to the grammatical subtext. The subtext acted as a spoiler to the story, it let the story run ahead. At the same moment, the import of Anand’s unsaid text hit her, the line dividing Anand’s words and her life merged. She gasped and she wanted to ask Anand to stop. Words didn’t flow out. 

Anand said, “You have to be brave, Prema. Srini is no more.”

Prema made a rasping sound that was close to a laugh, the words that Anand said hung in the air, and it made no sense to her. She just stared for a few moments at these intruders who were messing her perfect morning. She felt the mess could be cleared, just make a few changes, go back a few minutes and have her husband call from the airport.

Prema cradled into herself, pulled her leg very close to her chest and sank her head on her knees. She experienced an agonising urge to have Srini hold her. A frightening darkness engulfed. Something snapped in her, a wave of terror tore through her. The muscles around her mouth contorted and the howl that rose from her stomach choked at the throat. She coughed it up loudly and ended up wailing as saliva spilled from the sides of her mouth. 

Anand and his wife comforted her, rocked with her as she cried. After a few minutes Anand said, “We have contacted Srini’s brothers in Chennai. They will tell your daughter about Srini. They want you to come over to Chennai. Henrick is flying Srini’s body to Chennai.”

Prema winced at the logistics of planning that men were capable of carrying out even when the gravest of catastrophe hits them.

Anand said “You have to speak to your daughter.” Prema shook her head. “Is there any one else in Chennai whom you think can comfort your daughter till we reach there?”

Prema suggested the names of her cousins and gave their phone numbers that she knew by heart. She recollected suddenly that one of her cousin’s numbers has changed, racked her brain where she had noted it down and fetched the number for Anand. 

Anand’s wife brought tea for everyone; the smell of boiled milk filled the house. The rays of the morning sun fell on the burgundy coloured Kashmiri carpet. Anand spoke to her cousins, she now got used to listening to “Srini is no more” that Anand repeated with every call he made. She sank her head on the sofa and closed her eyes. 

Anand then got busy booking air tickets to Chennai. A few more friends joined, the driver had come and taken the key for the car, and a few neighbours came and sat near Prema.  She heard the ring of puja bells –  Mukerjee’s morning arthi, thought Prema. She saw the young couple who lived at the flat opposite to hers return back after their early morning dash to the grocers down the street. Broccoli and lettuce spilled out of the large brown paper bag that the young wife carried. They were as always so self absorbed that they did not notice the crowd gathered at Prema’s flat.   

Prema noticed that nothing around her has changed; Mukerjees continue their puja uninterrupted; the gardener would have opened the sprinkler on the lawn. The routine that she noticed around her comforted her a little. She wished that people would not crowd around her, the crowd made her home appear like an alien space.

She went to the bedroom and lied down. She drew the Sholapur blanket over her.Her mind worked out what she did the previous day when her husband lay dying in the hospital. She recollected the call she received from Srini the previous evening and recreated the last minutes of her husband’s life from the events that Anand narrated. She always knew every move of her husband; now he seemed to have tricked her. She thought that her husband had excluded her from his final decision. By dying he had killed her as well, he had pulled her into deep darkness. She stared at the ceiling and stayed in a state of shock.

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This post is for someone I know, she lost her husband recently in tragic circumstances