Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Letting Go

 

 

Thank you. In the spring of 1947, about six months before India would be split on the northern front into India and Pakistan, and on the eastern front into Bangladesh and West Bengal, my grandmother, who was a single mother, moved five of her boys from her village in Barishal, southern part of Bangladesh, to a safe haven in Calcutta. 

 

Now, I use that word move very casually, as if it's something you could do very easily. You could get up and catch a train or catch a bus or maybe even a ferry. But this was literally the most deliberate, the most calculated, and the most seminal moment in her history and in the history of our family. Had she waited six months, she would have faced an incredible political conflagration. Rapes, pillages, occupations of homes, but she did move. She came to Calcutta as an immigrant and not as a refugee. And that distinction was critical for her. 

 

She came to a home which she then could live in, as opposed to the camp which others came six months after her. She came with the full suitcase. Had she waited six months, she would have come with an empty suitcase into an over packed city. Why did she come? What made her move six months before? In fact, what gave her the confidence to move? Well, decades later, she would tell this story which became a myth in our family, and that is about six months before, around the time she lived, as many Hindus did in Bangladesh, in a relatively traditional home. 

 

The architecture was traditional, and in fact, the home was divided up into three living quarters. There was an outermost quarter, where Muslims were allowed to step, move, talk. There was an intermediary quarter, where the accountants would sit. And they were allowed to perform business between Hindus and Muslims. And then, there was the threshold to the innermost quarter. It was impossible for any Muslim to step into that innermost quarter. 

 

My grandmother said and maintained that about six weeks before she moved, she had watched-- Perhaps it was a vision, maybe it was real. She had watched a Muslim man cross all the way from the outermost quarter and put his leg or his hand into the innermost threshold. And this for her, whether was it a dream, was it a vision? But this for her was a seminal experience. It was a signal of something to come. It was an occupation, even if it was an occupation of that crossing of a threshold. 

 

She went to consult her friends, her relatives who lived all around her, and they said, “That's all nonsense. You're dreaming. Why don't you stay?” Things have always been tense, between Muslims and Hindus, but there's been a stable tension here. But she wouldn't listen to them. She, in fact, lifted up, packed her bags, suitcases, and moved with her five young children. 

 

This experience was a peculiar experience for her, because rather than making her believe, it actually made her disbelieve. And by disbelieve, I mean, she began to fully disbelieve that anyone in the world could be correct, except for herself. [audience laughter] And this process hardened her. It was as if something had broken and then reset itself like a bone or a piece of steel. And that process of annealing had, in fact, hardened her enormously. 

 

People talk about the very loving Indian grandmother. She was the opposite of the loving Indian grandmother. [audience chuckles] In 1964, before I was born, she moved with my father which was then going to become our home in Delhi. She set up her own living quarters there with a threshold. You could only cross that threshold if you had bathed. She became incredibly austere. She would clean her floor every day, and she had only four items of clothing, and she replaced them. She would wash one to wear one. One of her measures of incredible austerity, was that she began to essentially eat the same meal every day. She would have boiled lentils and rice for lunch, and boiled lentils and rice for dinner, the same meal over and over again. 

 

I have a couple of memories of her from my childhood. One memory is that recently while I was thinking about this story, I looked through photographs. There are many photographs of me with her, and yet not in one photograph is she actually touching me. She had become peculiarly aversive touch. And the other memory that I had, was that at one point of time, I'd made a picture of a tiger, if I remember correctly, and brought it to her, as grandchildren often do for appreciation. She looked at me and she looked at the picture, and I said, “Did you like it?” And she gave the very famous Bengali nod, [audience laughter] which means yes, but it can also mean it's horrible. [audience laughter] We've all heard about the tiger mom. She was the mom of the tiger mom. [audience laughter] She was the tiger grandmom. 

 

Well, there are many disadvantages in life to having the same meal of lentils and boiled rice every day. But there's one advantage, and that is you live for a very long time. [audience laughter] And indeed, she did. She lived for a very long time. And then, something bizarre and astonishing began to happen to her, and that is that she began to have a very acute sense of her dying, of actively dying. I remember this, because one morning, she was about 80 years old, my father was about to leave on a tour to another city. As he was coming down the stairs, she called him and she said, “Don't go, I think I'm going.” My father looked at her quizzically, and she said, “I think I'm coming to an end.”

 

My father wondered about what was going on with her. He had learned by this time that usually when she made declarative statements, she was usually right. And so, he stayed back. When I came back from school, I also heard the same story, I went to her room and I said, “Grandma, what's happening? Is there something I can do for you? Can I bring you something?” And she said, “Yes, I want some sweets.” And I thought, not only is this woman losing her body, she's losing her mind. I said, “Sweets?” And she said, “Yes, I want-- There's a particular Bengali sweet which is a luxury made of milk. And she said, “I want sweets.”

 

So, in deference to all of this, I got on my bicycle, rode off, and I brought back a pack of these Bengali sweets, like candy. She ate five of them, and she said she had never had five sweets in the last 20 years. She felt very sated. And then, she literally, in the most astonishing manner that got on her bed and began to prepare to die. And over the next 24 hours, we watched her slowly decline in front of our eyes in full astonishment. A priest was brought in, and her breathing slowed and slowed more, and then there was that uncomfortable moment that many of us don't know which is the moment in which there's a kind of gurgling, gasping sound. It's called air hunger in medicine. And then, the air hunger subsided, and she was no more. 

 

The next morning, we got ready for her funeral. Now, I had been to a funeral. I'd seen an Indian funeral. I'd seen them before, but I'd seen them distantly. I remember a moment when I was seven or eight years old, I went with my father to Benaras, the city where many Indians will cremate, burn their dead. I was seven or eight years old, it had rained the night before. And the ghat, which is the stone step that leads out onto the river is wet. It was slippery. And then, I was on a boat, and the boat was on the Ganges. 

 

I rode out onto the boat with the boatman, and then all of a sudden, the boat turned a bend, and we were at the burning ghats, the ghats where actually the dead are burnt. It was an astonishing sight, a sight that takes your breath away, because all along you're on this river and all along there are these stone steps and their bodies burning, like lanterns lit along the river. There are men and women performing the rites of the dead, carrying them, moving them down into the water, bathing the dead, bringing them back and putting them on the funeral pyres and then setting them alight. And occasionally, a priest would come and shovel the still burning embers into the water. 

 

In Plato, there's a moment in which the soldier Leontius says he cannot look upon the corpses. But as a child of seven, how can you not look? And so, I had to look. My curiosity was literally morbid. As I was watching, I saw one of these men who had previously been carrying a body, he was holding out his arms, but he was just carrying air. And then, just like that, the boat rounded a bend and we were back in the city of Benares. Someone was throwing birdseed at pigeons, there were children playing, and the normalcy of life returned just as quickly. 

 

Well, this was what we did with my grandmother to some extent as well. We brought her over. She was now placed in a white sari. My father and I, mostly my father, we carried her into the water, we bathed her, and then we lifted her out of the water, and we moved her into the wooden pyre, and my father lit the fire. All of us, we watched until all that was left was the little umbilicus that's the last part of the body to burn, and then everything else had become ash, and gone up into smoke. 

 

Decades later, I became an oncologist. I saw cancer patients. I still see cancer patients. I went to the funeral of a woman who had died of breast cancer. This was in Boston. It was in a church very near Boston. While I was driving that I was thinking about this woman's death-- This woman had actually died in the hospital. She'd been admitted because she had been short of breath, but she had been admitted alone. She had come from an acute care center, been admitted directly to the hospital. Her relatives, her family, had been unable to get to the hospital in time. And in fact, she had died overnight. And intern had pronounced her dead. 

 

By the time the children had come to the hospital, she'd been fully dressed up again, as it were. I went to the funeral. As I walked towards the coffin, I noticed something unusual. I looked down and her lips-- Someone had put lipstick on this body. There was a weird chill that went through my body, it was as if the entire process had become sanitized, had become ethereal and sanitized. 

 

And so, I went back the next morning and I talked to my residents, my interns, and I said, I asked them, “How many of them had actually lifted a body. What does a weight feel like?” It is a peculiar thing. I don't know how many of you have. It's a peculiar thing, because it is as if gravity has become changed. The word gravity, which has to do with the word grave, all of a sudden, they collide with each other. Even when you're lifting a sleeping child, the muscles cooperate with you. It is only when you lift the dead when you realize that it is a failure of the muscles, the muscles go away. What about that moment, that air hunger that I talked about? How many of you have experienced that air hunger or have seen it? 

 

Or, of course, the thing that's written so often in literature, the idea of the light going out in someone's eyes. How many of us have seen the light go out in someone's eyes? It seemed to me then that we're actually, actively forgetting how to die. We're actively forgetting what the act of death looks like, what it seems like, what it feels like, what it weighs like. It seems to me sometimes that we've become a culture that is forgetting the rituals that are associated with death. It seems sometimes that we're like that man who's on the riverbank and we're holding up our arms, but there's no counterweight to bear. It seems as if sometimes that we're just holding up air. Thank you.