Tears, One Week Later

Kailash M V, India

"It's just that I am not sure if my father deserves a funeral, " Haarish said, as the train came to a halt. 

It was the day after our second semester had ended. He had received a call from his mother at about three in the morning. 

He woke me up in the dark and told me, 

"My father is dead. I am catching the next train back home." 

It took my mind a few minutes to register what he had just revealed. 

"Your father is dead?!" 

"Yeah," he replied, as he haphazardly stuffed his laptop into his bag. 

"How?What happened?" 

"I don't know…I didn't feel like asking my mother that over call." 

"I'm sorry." 

In a sleep-deprived haze, I watched him stride around the apartment, throwing whatever he felt was necessary into his bag, stopping occasionally to think if he had left out anything important. 

I told him I wanted to join him. 

"You don't have to." 

"I want to." 

"I wouldn't, if I had a choice." 

"I'll come. It's no problem." 

"Alright, pack your things quickly then. The train leaves at four." 

I looked outside the window. The sun showed no signs of its arrival. The air was cold and still. I pushed myself off the bed and hurriedly began packing whatever my mind deemed necessary. 

Since we had to run through the platform to catch the train, by the time we took our seats, both of us were desperately gasping for air. 

"Can't believe my father did this every day, " Haarish said, heaving. 

"What do you mean?"

"He went for a jog every day." 

"At four in the morning?" 

"Yeah. Every single day." 

* 

"What's a funeral?" He continued. 

"It's an act of respect and remembrance. I don't think he deserves either of those." 

The sky had, by then, smoothly and sneakily, covered itself in a pleasant blue shroud; the heaviness of the night was now illusive. 

"It's not just that. Hindus conduct funerals to ensure the soul escapes the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It's called Moksha," I said. 

"Interesting," he said, ruffling his hair. 

"I didn't know you believed in all that." 

"I don't. I am just telling you what my mom told me long ago." 

Haarish groaned. There was a commotion in the compartment as new passengers pushed themselves in through the narrow entry. The train jerked before it began moving again. 

"It's a funeral, " I added after a few minutes, to break the quietness that had settled between us. "Just attend it…..For your mom's sake." 

"Yeah, yeah, " he said as he laid down and made himself comfortable on his berth. He crossed his arms under his head, extended his legs, and rested it on my thighs. 

"My father passed away. You don't mind, do you?" 

On any other day, I would have shoved his legs off, but as he had said, his dad had just passed away. 

He stared at me and smiled maliciously. 

"Just your lucky day. Enjoy it, " I deadpanned. 

He chuckled. 

Haarish and I had, by then, known each other for about a decade. He was the new transfer student from Dubai, with an extraordinary fluency in English, when he first stepped into our sixth-grade classroom.

He was not the most friendly character in school but he became popular very soon because he was inherently funny and managed to give the most unexpected and unhinged answers, with a very inexpressive countenance, whenever someone questioned him about anything serious. 

Once, when Ms. Angel, our science teacher, asked him why he had not done his homework, he replied, with no hint of hesitation, 

"My father died yesterday." 

She apologized immediately. It took her, however, less than a day to see through his lie. The next time I saw him he had a sling under his right arm. 

"I fell while cycling," he said. 

It did not take us long to become friends. We spent a lot of our schooling days standing outside classrooms as punishment. 

Looking back at it, the first-ever conversation I remember having with him was when we were both being punished for drawing an adult-sized penis on the blackboard. 

Since both my parents were working, my house was our relaxing spot, where we sometimes bunked classes to watch films on my father's DVD player. 

I have always known his father had been physically abusive towards him and his mother. It was not something that either of us specially acknowledged. 

I knew I was the only one of our friends he talked to about his family and even though he never asked me to keep our discussions regarding them to ourselves, I never discussed it with anyone else, not even my parents. 

Some days he would show me a wound on his forearm or his back and tell me his father had come home furious and had taken it out on him and his mother. Some days he would seek my help to find ways to hide one or two of his wounds. I never wondered or asked him why he wanted to hide them. 

It did not occur to me until we both graduated high school that the better thing to do would have been to help him reach out to an adult rather than help him hide the scars. 

As notorious as he was, Haarish was good at academics. He topped most of his classes, throughout middle school, even though he barely paid any attention in class. 

He did not care for academics himself, but when his marks came down a couple of digits, he would start sweating profusely and his hands would start shivering. 

I tried my best to calm him down, but I knew whatever I did would not matter because, when school was over, he would have to deal with his father all by himself. 

*

Haarish closed his eyes and tried to catch up with his sleep while I stared outside the window. 

The train was moving on top of a bridge now, and below us was an incandescent lake from whose blue surface bobs of sunlight shimmered. 

Somewhere early that day, in a small city in India, a man had died. 

The lake reeked of life and serenity. 

"Beautiful view, isn't it?" 

"Couldn't sleep?" 

"Yeah. I am very sleepy though. I think the train is too jerky today." 

There was silence again. 

Haarish scrolled through his phone while I continued to stare outside the window. "I can't believe he is dead, " Haarish said suddenly. 

"It's just odd. I saw him a week ago. He seemed alright. Now he's dead. One of the dead. Do you know who all are one amongst the Dead? Kurt Cobain, MLK, and Osama Bin Laden. It's just…unbelievable." 

"You are in shock. It's normal." 

"It's not that I miss him. I don't think I am going to either. Like, imagine if that mole on your right cheek disappeared one day. You won't regret its disappearance, but you are so used to seeing it in the mirror every day that your face just looks odd without it." 

"Did you really have to use one of my insecurities to make your point?" 

He laughed before he went back to staring at his phone. 

* 

"Do you think some part of you, deep down, likes him, or at least doesn't mind him?" I remember asking him once, about a year before his father's death, when we had both been drunk and chummy in our dorm room. 

"I don't think so. How does someone love a man like that? It's hard not to ignore him either. He's always there…..even when he's not there," he replied, lighting up a cigarette. 

"Like an annoying ghost. A phantom parasite with a thick mustache. 

But, I need to tell you, he did get emotional the day I left for college. Visibly." "Emotional?"

"Yeah, his eyes teared up a bit. I think." 

"You are joking right?" 

"No, no. I think I really did see him tear up. Maybe I imagined it, I don't know. 

You know, I don't think he regrets the way he treats me or Amma. He always says, 'The real world is much worse. I'm protecting you both from it' or 'I'm spending all of my life trying to make sure you have a good future.' 

In a way, I think he did believe in everything he said or did. He did spend a lot of money on tutors, books, and stationery. 

That was always the problem. He is always worried about my future or my mother's. He never cares about how we feel in the moment when we are actually with him." 

For the rest of the journey, we mostly kept to ourselves, occasionally directing each other's attention to something interesting outside the window. 

* 

"This is eerie even to think about, " I whispered, staring at his father's corpse. It was a few feet ahead of us, at the center of the house's hallway, trapped inside the crowd of mourning members. 

"With the new spectacles and shroud he's wearing, he resembles Gandhi." "What? No. Are you crazy?" he whispered back. 

"The mustache too. The resemblance is terrifying." 

"I don't see it. You need to get your vision checked." 

An old woman with short, gray hair called out for Haarish from the corner of the hall and walked towards us with a cane. 

"Your father was a great man," she said, with tears in his eyes. She lifted her hands and held his face between them. 

"Study well, okay? Be a good man like your father. Without him, our family would not have survived. Do not feel bad that your father has died. He will always be with you. Always. He will never leave you and your mother alone. He will be keeping an eye on you both from above. Always. " 

Haarish nodded awkwardly. 

After the woman walked away, I asked him who she was. 

"A distant aunt. I haven't seen her since I was a kid."

"She is…very dramatic." 

"Yeah." 

"Your dad seems to have helped her family a lot." 

"Appears so." 

We looked for Haarish's mother amongst the crowd that surrounded the corpse. She sat close to his father's legs, dressed in a dark green saree, weeping quietly. 

She looked much older than I had last seen her. A lot more gray and fine hair strands covered the top of her head and her face was now carved with intricate layers and lines of wrinkles and crevices. 

When Haarish's mother saw us, her face shined, for an instant, with recognition and tenderness. We sat beside her. 

"When did you both reach?" his mother asked us, after a few minutes, sniffing. "Just now," Haarish replied. 

I nodded my head in agreement. 

We continued to sit silently, staring at the corpse through the transparent freezer.. "Did you meet your uncle?" she asked. 

"No. Where is he?" Haarish asked. 

"He is on the veranda. Go talk to him. He was looking for you." 

Haarish nodded, and we both sneaked onto the veranda where his uncle was busy talking to a group of laborers. 

After talking to a few more relatives, most of whom seemed to have extremely positive opinions about Haarish's father, he dragged me to the garden. 

I then realized that it was the first time I had been inside his house. Even when I had to pick him up on my bicycle, he would sneak out through the rear gate and wait for me by the end of the street. 

The garden was large, with plants and flowers of different types sprouting out of the soil. At one end of it stood the two-story villa, painted in bubble-gum pink. 

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"You have a pack in your bag, right?" 

"Yeah. I think so." 

Haarish sighed in relief. 

"I didn't know you had so many close relatives," I said. 

"I didn't either. I hardly know most of them." 

"They all seem to love your father." 

"I know. It's weird." 

"There's a storeroom on the other side of the garden, " he said, pointing to a small shed. "That's where I smoke when I come home to a house full of guests or a furious father." 

The storeroom was stuffed with gardening tools, earthen pots, bags of fertilizers, and other agrarian instruments that looked like they had not been touched in years. A line of cobwebs covered the wall corners, and the only source of ventilation was a small circular hole on the right wall through which a tunnel of sunlight entered. We smoked in silence, watching the smoke rise and escape through the narrow opening. 

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to a strange etching on the cement wall beside my left foot. 

"Oh, that's a dead lizard. I remember seeing it the last time I came here, which was like half a year ago. The gardener probably crushed it accidentally when he threw his tools down here." 

"Oh." 

There was silence again. 

"Isn't it strange?" he asked. 

"What is?" I asked. 

"We are looking at a lizard that has been dead for months here, and neither of us feels anything. But, when a human dies, everyone makes a big fuss about it." 

"True." 

"Don't you think it's weird that my mother is sitting there weeping? Did she forget all the years of torture? How can she love that man? Don't you think she is, deep down, at least a tiny bit relieved he is gone?I don’t understand." 

"Maybe, " I said. "But, I can say this for sure: What I saw there, that's not an act. It's real. As hard as it is for you and me to believe, it's real."

* 

The rest of the morning and afternoon rushed past me in a dizzying blur. I spent most of my time on the terrace, scrolling through my phone, verifying my identity to curious family members, and watching their kids play. Haarish stayed with his mother for the most part, talking to his relatives and partaking in rituals. 

We managed to sneak into the storeroom once more that afternoon. His shirt was drenched in sweat and ashes from the ritual by then, and his brown eyes were already shaded with drowsiness. 

"Just a few more hours," I said. 

He nodded absent-mindedly. 

* 

It was when we were inside the crematorium that evening, during the final proceedings, that Haarish told me that he had punched his father's corpse on the way to the crematorium. 

"I knew I wouldn't ever get the chance to do it. I have fantasized about it all my life. Obviously, in my fantasies and dreams, he was alive. But, this is fine too. " 

"You are joking, right?" I asked, chuckling nervously. 

"No, dead serious." 

"Wow….I don't know what to say. 

I know you try to prove to me, and to yourself, that you don't believe in anything every chance you get, but this is a new low even for you. 

Wait. 

Is this why you told your uncle you wanted to be left alone with the corpse in the mortician's van?" 

"Yeah." 

"He probably thought you were sitting there holding his cold hands and weeping." "Yeah……Was what I did illegal?" 

"I don't know. Necrophilia is illegal." 

"Necrophilia?! How are they even comparable?" 

"I don't know. Why are we even discussing this like it's a normal subject for conversation? I am wondering what punishment awaits in hell for people like you and me.

How did it feel when you did it?" 

"His face was cold and hard. It hurt a bit, to be honest," he replied, jiggling his right hand. "But he didn't feel anything. He's dead." 

"Of course." 

We both watched as the final procedures unfolded in front of us. 

Orders were screamed at one another, mantras were recited, and prayers were prayed. "You were right. He does look a bit like Gandhi today. I can see it now." 

"I told you." 

"It makes no sense." 

The sound of sorrow increased in amplitude when the door to the flames of death was slid open, and the corpse was offered for its ravenous consumption. 

"Are you alright?" I asked. 

He didn't reply. He watched the fire burn his father's corpse for a few seconds before the mortician closed the doors. 

* 

We remained together in his room for most of the next few days, but we rarely conversed. He spent most of his time staring outside the window or scrolling through his phone while I tried to catch up on missed college assignments. 

Some nights, I woke up to the smell of tobacco and would see him standing beside the window. A luminescent, incandescent circle would dazzle from his lips, and his silhouette would be crisped by the moonlight that hovered over his head. I remember thinking how unkempt and overgrown his curly hair was. 

He seemed to be alright until one late night, about a week later, when we were back in our dorm room, and I woke up to the sound of tears. 

I never figured out, even after all these years, if those were tears of relief, confusion, regret, sadness, love, fear, helplessness, or a mix of all of them in various proportions. 

It hardly mattered to me. 

All I could see and hear was him weeping and gently gasping for air. 

I gave him a bottle of water and I sat next to him.

I knew that all I had to do, and could do, at that moment, was to stay awake beside him as he tried to understand and navigate through the vague and dense mist of his thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Kailash is an electrical engineering undergraduate from India. Molded by a deep love for storytelling, he believes art has the potential to alter the course of an individual’s life. An obsessive thinker, he spends a lot of time worrying and writing.