thresholds & the windows of time
imagining life without loved ones
Dear friends,
When I was in high school, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She went through a year of surgery and radiation before she recovered. I can’t remember what she looked like or how she felt. I can’t remember what kind of cancer it was. In fact, I can’t remember a single thing about that year besides the gag-inducing taste of the wheatgrass my dad churned every morning in hopes of making her stronger. My journals, which have detailed my life since I was ten, are blank on the matter.
My grandmother’s death, a few years prior, lies under a similar mental haze. I had a vague awareness that Nani was ill, plugged into a boxy dialysis machine with wires and plastic bags thousands of miles away. My dad handed me the phone on the August morning that she died, my mother’s tired voice on the other line. All I said was no. I pushed the phone away and went out with my best friend to swim.
In the intervening decade, I’ve moved away from home, my parents have grown older, and Nanu, my only surviving grandparent, has turned 88. It has become harder to compartmentalize my grief at the thought of them aging, faltering, or even dying. I feels like watershed moments are looming, some finite amount of time away. How should I reckon with that?
I started this letter last fall, after spending a month with Nanu in India as he recovered from surgery. Fear, love, and impermanence remain on my mind. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
from the heart,
Mishti
When I was three, my parents placed me on a toy plane ride in a local mall and waved goodbye. See you in India! they said. They laughed until they realized I was crying, and soon my mother was crying too.
My childhood panic quickly faded into a mental model where my family was untouchable. The next decade brought situations that only felt mortally threatening in retrospect. My mother survived several health scares, including her cancer. My father walked out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and stood on the steps of Trinity Church, expecting to die. Still, the theme of those years was abundance: a new house on the water, success in school, parents and a sister I adored.
We spent every other summer with my grandparents in Lucknow. I played for weeks in the humid lawn, getting drenched in rainstorms, befriending stray dogs, and taking road trips with my cousins. I loved being there, but I was always ready to leave. We would land on the Newark tarmac just as the August heat was starting to cool off the gravel. I’d notice things that I never realized I missed: sidewalks, neat cornrows of traffic, dewy lawns, blue skies, fall colors.
My last childhood visit to Lucknow, the summer before sixth grade, was the first time I remember realizing, on the plane, that I might never see my grandparents again. The thought faded as the school year jolted into action with multiple choice tests, science experiments, and book fairs. I lost touch with my grandparents besides on birthdays and holidays. I started to shy away from phone calls, with the fear that my Hindi carried an American accent.
One summer passed, then two, and Nani passed away.
My grandmother had developed pulmonary hypertension the year before she died. She never admitted the scope of her illness to my mom, who only realized something was wrong when Nani fell asleep in the middle of a phone call. Mamma rushed back to India, leaving us to finish the school year with my dad. Our summer vacation started and she extended her trip a week—then another, then another still.
Nani’s hugs had always been vast and enveloping, soft arms around sheaths of starched sari fabric. That summer, her body quickly shed weight. The doctors ordered her to eat eggs; she, a lifelong vegetarian who considered them vile, flatly refused. She preferred rasgullas, paneer balls soaked in syrup that doubled as both protein and dessert.
Whenever my mom prepared to fly to Delhi to begin her journey home, my grandmother’s condition would suddenly deteriorate.
“You can’t do that,” my grandfather chided Nani once. “She has her own children to look after.”
The day after my mother finally boarded her flight, Nani died. She closed her eyes next to my grandfather in the backseat of the car to the hospital. She was sixty-eight years old.
It took me almost a decade to return to Lucknow. Nanu had declared that he wouldn’t leave India again. My memories of Nani, by then, had faded behind a veil of fog. I didn’t want the same to happen with him.
On the flight to Lucknow, I imagined luxurious hours of conversation with Nanu. When I arrived, I found him absorbed in a strict routine that left little time for discussion.
Every day since Nani died, Nanu rose at 4:45am, traversed his hazy blue-lit hallway, and opened the wooden bathroom door that one had to hurl their body against to seal shut. In the kitchen, he pressed his fingers down on a steel stick, like a gun, and lit a flame to warm several glasses of warm nimbu pani. He wrapped a black scarf around his head like an egg and laid on the daybed to exercise. By the time I woke up to the muezzin’s calls to prayer, his pranayama and laughter exercises boomed in the hallway.
The routine continued with precision. There was chai and the newspaper, breakfast, an arrangement of pills. The geyser was flipped on fifteen minutes before his shower. After bathing was an immovable hour of morning prayers. We sat in the lawn with a steel bowl of sliced guavas, ate a fresh lunch, and circled the block, avoiding the chatty neighbor who read the paper in his driveway.
Nanu’s routine was my clock: if we were watching cricket, it was the early afternoon. If he was napping, it was around 3pm. At 4:30, we drank another round of chai and I lit a few sticks of incense for aarti. During gaps in the schedule, I used my iPhone recorder like a dreamcatcher, grabbing the stories I could.
The pillars of my grandfather’s day were two phone calls: at lunch, from my uncle in London, and at dinner, from my mom and sometimes me. He always wore his headphones in advance. If no one called, he slipped them quietly back into their case and carried on.
“Nanu is the busiest person in the family,” my uncle told me during one of those calls. “If you want to talk to him, you need to take advantage of a few slim windows.”
Nanu smiled when I relayed the joke over chai the next morning.
“I’ve kept myself busy every day for the past thirteen years,” he said in Hindi. “If I stopped, depression would set in.” His eyes grew soft for a moment.
“If you have time, you start wondering. What if something happens to me? Who will be around?” The air purifier whirred; my spoon clinked against my tea mug.
He broke the tension with an abrupt wave and laughed.
“That is why you need to trust God.”
Last summer, Nanu started to fall. “It was nothing,” he said. “My foot just rolled over.”
The first two times, we believed him. The third fall happened in September, a few hours before dawn. On his way back from the bathroom, he faltered, collapsed onto the cool stone floor, and broke his back. He waited in quiet pain on the ground until his cook found him, hours later, and called my mother. Nanu was rushed to the hospital for a slew of cardiac tests. My mom flew out immediately, and I booked a flight to replace her a fortnight later.
I checked WhatsApp for updates every day before my flight. Nanu, who’d always been tall and elegant, was swollen and unrecognizable in the hospital pictures.
I started to wake up from nightmares with a racing heart and acid in my throat. My anxiety cascaded: things that had seemed normal or even exciting, like my unemployment or my relationship, felt oppressive. I imagined a chain of terrible ultimatums: Nanu dying, my parents dying, being forced into a job I hated, my freedom choking under a ticking clock to pregnancy.
Life as I knew it felt like it was ending. I got the worst breakouts of my life, with raw red bumps spidering down my jawline and neck. I avoided social contact and walked every day to the kayak dock and cried, in full view of construction crews who were polite enough to ignore me.
The only thing that soothed me, those days, was slipping back into timelessness. I went on long walks and swam laps in the local pool, taking long breaths as I felt my body cut through the lukewarm water over and over again.
After over thirty-six hours of cabs, trains, and canceled flights, I arrived in a delirium in Lucknow in early October, to a pile of steaming rotis. Everyone in the house lived in a cycle of food and rest around Nanu’s daybed, oscillating between the orange haze of the morning and the cold glow of the white tubelight.
The day before she flew out, my mother invited a numerologist home at my aunt’s recommendation. I pleaded with her to cancel the appointment as she pulled our astrological charts out of tightly packed sheafs. “This is just for fun,” she told me with a laugh. “You don’t have to come.”
The numerologist was a skinny dark man in glasses and a blue button down shirt, who’d quit a middling engineering job to follow his psychic father’s footsteps. He scrutinized each of our charts, humming to himself as he scribbled on paper. Even my dad, who’d dialed in from New Jersey, listened with unusual deference.
I found myself asking more and more questions, to my own disgust. How healthy would my parents be? When would they die? Who would I marry? What career would I have? To my resentment, he waved away my career questions and emphasized my duty to have kids, who he deemed would be a boy and a girl. He told us about who was going through a rough astrological time, who should wear emeralds or sapphires and when. I grew increasingly uncomfortable but remained glued to my seat, questions stuttering out of my mouth.
Mamma’s departure left a quiet vacuum. Nanu and I spent hours together in silence. He could only speak for a few minutes before growing tired, waving me away and turning onto his side to close his eyes.
His routine had stretched thin and developed gaps. He woke up late, skipped his exercises, and rang for help walking to the bathroom. He couldn’t pray while standing, so I played him YouTube videos of the Sunderkand in bed instead. He could only read a few pages of fictional adaptations of the Ramayana at a time, limited by his weakening eyes and arms. We walked sometimes in the driveway, so slowly that I memorized each paint crack.
We still sat in the milky brown chairs every morning for chai and the paper. I could only handle two days of rape, murder, and assault stories in the news before switching to the Bollywood tabloid. I read it in Hindi phoneme by phoneme, once spending twenty triumphant minutes on a column about Priyanka Chopra deleting “Jonas” from her Instagram profile.
I didn’t try to get over my jetlag, reading by the glow of my Kindle late into the night, sometimes several books a day. I constrained myself to easy pop psychology, tapping through self-help soundbites and racking them up on Goodreads with monotonic compulsion. My face reddened with more rashes, and I visited Ayurvedic doctors and dingy herbalists for pills and tonics before I decided I didn’t care.
For the first time, in India, I felt a creeping sense of paranoia and mistrust. A doctor prescribed Nanu a slate of expensive illegitimate medicine that we threw into the trash. In the hospital, people queued with anxious tension, clamoring for chances to advance a few feet. A man in a five-person line stood close enough behind me that I felt his breath on my neck. I pored through Nanu’s medical records and learned everything I could about his heart condition, taking notes and cross-checking every doctor’s advice with a friend in medical school. Several of his medications had toxic long-term effects. “What’s long-term if someone is already 88?” someone asked me.
I helped Nanu with things I’d never been privy to: his taxes, his medical records, his bank account. I read through pages of passwords written carefully in tiny notebooks and waited after every click on his ancient computer. When I got into his bank account, my stomach dropped. His life savings were a finite number on a flickering screen.
My time in Lucknow, of course, contained many moments of joy as well. Nanu poked fun at my friendship with the sabziwala, who I visited every day to buy strange and new vegetables. I took a selfie video of us brushing our teeth and he burst out laughing. I flew kites with the housekeeper’s kids. My walks, constrained to a ten-minute radius of home, still unearthed new and beautiful alleyways. I celebrated my first Diwali in India in years, helping Nanu launch a lantern into the sky.
I struggled to stay present, however, especially as my departure approached. My friends and family reassured me that the best I could do was spend quality time with Nanu.
Be good. Write down all his stories, my mom texted me one day, meaning to be encouraging. Instead, I just cried.
That night, the founder of an app for recording family stories pitched me on his company and asked me how many voice notes I had.
“Over a hundred,” I told him.
“How many have you ever listened to after recording them?” he asked, and I didn’t answer.
My family has lost all knowledge about my ancestors older than my great-grandparents. My piles of recordings are a way to prevent that from happening again, perhaps even a shield against future regret. It’s a losing game: it feels inevitable that I’ll wish, after their deaths, to have one last glimpse at things lost in time.
It isn’t easy to say which is the “better” sister, the hard-hearted one (“far-hearted,” the Bushmen say) who separates herself from a community that would pull her down or the soft-hearted one who dreams of getting ahead but in fact distributes her wealth and stays in the group. There’s no simple moral because there’s no simple way to resolve the conflict. —Lewis Hyde, The Gift
The hardest departures are voluntary. When I was in Lucknow, I didn’t have a job. There was nothing forcing me to leave. Nanu even half-seriously offered me the apartment above his. I wasn’t sure whether to postpone my flight, or until when.
My family has a history of moving away from their parents. My grandfather, the son of a farmer, was among the first children in his village to attend college. He moved away from home to go to high school and never returned, becoming a beloved engineering professor at Allahabad University, known in its heyday as the Oxford of the east. My parents, in turn, left India for New York in 1996 on a temporary work assignment and ended up staying. My uncles live in London and Detroit.
These migrations lifted our family, first into the educated middle-class and then the international elite. With citizenship changes came many barriers: visa applications, travel health insurance, hours of cramped flights, small apartments without caretaking help. Each generation’s choices shrank their time with their parents to days that could be tallied on paper.
Thanks to my parents and grandparents, I don’t need to relocate to climb any ladders. I went to Princeton because it was a short train ride away from home. Since then, however, I’ve lived in many different places around the world, from New Zealand to Oahu to, most recently, San Francisco. I could choose to live near my parents every day for the rest of my life—or not.
“If you love a bird, set it free,” says my mom, with mustered cheerfulness.
The day I left, Nanu pressed a red tika onto my forehead and a wad of bills into my hand with a final reassurance. “If you don’t leave, you can’t come back,” he said, looking away.
In the last picture on my phone, Nanu is standing at the gate and waving, his hand blocking his face. I looked back until we turned the corner and I could no longer see him. An hour later, I watched my suitcase sink into the baggage carousel and felt like I was going to vomit. I called my mom at 3am, US time, and listened to her quiet reassurances as I waited for my plane.
I finally understand my parents’ heartbreaking behavior at airports. When they drop me off, they stretch their goodbyes as long as possible, into escalating embraces that culminate in a final tight huddle before security. They walk outside the ticker tape while I progress through the line, straining on their tiptoes to wave until I’ve completely vanished from view. I look back to catch a few final glimpses of a hand, a pant leg, a gleam of polished shoes.
My mother knows the feeling of loving someone to the point of fear. She prays for my sister and I whenever we’re away from home, often enlisting the gods’ watchful eyes through the small bulb that burns above our puja throughout the night. It once burned for thirteen days in a row, guarding my ascent between remote Nepali mountain passes. When I finally got back to a hotel with wifi and called Mamma, she sighed with relief. “I can finally give them a break,” she said.
I’ve started to understand her complicated love. Last spring, in flight to my sister’s graduation in Michigan, I texted my parents to ask how their drive from New Jersey was going. They didn’t respond, for thirty minutes, then an hour. To distract myself, I counted the crop irrigation circles outside the window. I sent a few single question marks. I listened to some music. I looked at my phone, and jammed it back into the seatrest. Accidents are a leading cause of death in the US. I pictured smoke on the highway, a shredded silver SUV, cops trying to call my phone and going straight to voicemail. I panicked that my negative thinking would cause something terrible to happen, when my phone finally buzzed.
“Now you know how we feel when we don’t get a response from you guys!” said my mom with a laughing emoji. “All well. We’re driving. We’d stopped for gas and food.”
I’ve never been sure how to end this essay. I don’t know what it takes to love without expectation. Nani was sixty-eight when she died. My parents are in their fifties. I draw back from the thought of them growing old and weak as if from a hot coal. The only thing I can imagine about life after their death is an abstract, total devastation.
Still, I don’t call Nanu or my parents every day; there are many times that I consider picking up the phone and set it down out of tiredness or distraction. Is that a mistake? Will I regret it? Time layers a strange weight over mundane decisions.
My parents face impermanence, somehow, with neither panic nor dissociation. They speak about their lost parents with grace, facing death softly as a moment to dip into the well of human experience.
The day I landed home, I took a slow walk with my sister under the last of autumn’s orange and yellow canopies. “Mamma thinks your problem is that you love people too much,” my sister told me.
I called Nanu and pointed my phone to show him the leaves, floating down like golden rain. Our lives hang in a balance so delicate and temporary: the only way out is through. I’m trying to focus, for now, on joy.
Thank you to everyone who read this piece with me, especially the people I was most scared to show it to: my parents. I appreciate my friends from my Amtrak writing retreat—Jason, Lyn, Jamie, Max, Ashley, Amanda, Ivan—and Alizeh and Ally for reading final drafts and helping push this through. And Kiley, Samvitha, Ally, and Ivan: I’ll always be grateful for the love you showed me last fall, on phone calls that you might not even remember.
Thank you for writing this piece! You write with so much heart. It’s inspiring. Your devotion and love are felt on every word, and prompted lots of good reflection.
Thank you for this beautiful story ❤️ what incredibly special times you’ve had with Nanu. I wish your family all so much joy and health! What a magical, beautiful universe you bring us to, I truly didn’t want your writing to come to an end 😊