Three weeks after Thatha's funeral, Nandu still had not entered the room.
It was the last room at the end of the hall in Baa's house — a small
room with a window that faced the neem tree, where Thatha used to sit
every morning reading the newspaper and drinking chai so sweet it made
your teeth ache. His steel tumbler was still on the windowsill. His
reading glasses, the ones with the taped left arm, sat folded on a
stack of old Panchatantra books he had been meaning to sort.
Nandu would walk to the end of the hall, stand at the door, and stop.
Every time. His feet would not cross the threshold. The room smelled
like Thatha — that mixture of sandalwood soap and old cotton and the
faint sweetness of supari — and the smell was worse than anything,
because it made his brain believe for one terrible second that Thatha
was still inside, just around the corner, about to look up and say
"Ah, Nandu-boy, come, come."
One evening Baa found him standing there, rigid as a post, his fists
clenched at his sides.
She did not tell him to go in. She leaned against the wall beside him,
her Gond-paint-stained fingers resting on her knees.
"You talk like a very grown-up boy these days," she said quietly.
"Yesterday you told your mother that grief is natural and we must
accept it. Where did you read that?"
"School," Nandu muttered. "The counselor said it."
"Hm. Nice words. But your feet don't believe them, do they?"
Nandu said nothing.
Baa looked down the hall, toward the room. "You know who you sound
like? A man who knows all the right answers but cannot move his legs.
Wise words up here" — she tapped his forehead gently — "and a storm
in here." She tapped his chest.
"The ones worth crying for," Baa said, "are the ones who never truly
lived. Who never sat by a window and read to their grandson. Who never
burned their fingers making jalebis on Diwali. Your Thatha lived,
Nandu. Every last drop. So what exactly are you grieving — his life,
or the hole it left in yours?"
Nandu's chin trembled. "The hole," he whispered.
"Good," Baa said. "Now we are being honest. That is where wisdom
starts — not in the words you say, but in the thing you cannot say
until someone makes you."
She took his hand. Together, they walked into the room.
