أعاتبُ طيفهُ إن لم يزرني
لعل الطيف أوعى للعتابِ
“I chide his specter if he doesn’t visit me;
perhaps the specter is more receptive to my chiding.”
— Huda al-Zahrani
I.
My grandfather died and I know someday I will cry.
I see him in my dreams—I’ve seen him thrice till now.
In my last dream, I started itching, then felt him place his cool palm on my belly where it itched. There was a hollow in the mattress where his body had settled by my feet. Beds always do that. They let you feel the gravity of a loved one’s presence. How he was there, I had no idea, but I knew he wasn’t supposed to be. So, I tried to raise my head to see him, but I found my body paralyzed. Somehow, I managed to move my arm and tugged on my hair to lift my head, but all I could make out were the sides of his wrinkled face and his goatee.
I awoke in tears from my dream, crying to my sister about what I saw, but it turned out I was still dreaming. In this dream layer, I knew he had died. I sobbed and made that face people do when their grief coils up around their hearts, but the tears lag behind. Then, I actually blinked awake, dry-eyed, not a tear trickled, still sensing his calming hand on my belly and the ghost of my grief.
II.
I see the face of my grandfather in every lanky old man I see, clad in a grey scarf. He visits me like a ṭayf doing ṭawaaf, a shadow of a ghost that comes in dreams.
I had such disdain for him once, poisoned and confused by spiteful, unhealed words thrown around between people who had their messy histories entangled, histories several folds longer than all the years of my life. Yarns that weren’t mine to untangle wrapped around a young heart that needn’t carry the hate and hurt it overheard. My grandfather could be my own, as I knew him to be, how he was with me. I wish they were more careful of what they said around a child, lest he hear only of hurt and lose his love and respect for the man who carried him on his shoulders.
I called him “Baji,” and he called me “Indian Man.”
Baji was invisible to me until he breathed or shifted; he was silent as a black cat prowling through the darkness of the night. Only the old floorboards betrayed him when his knees landed with the softest of thuds for sujood. That, and his smoker’s cough that followed him like the miasma of his biris.
I would tell him to linger in his prayers, to sink a little deeper into his sujoods, but he always skimmed the surface and kept to his quick sujoods and quick rukoos. I critiqued his namaaz, and he critiqued mine. My tank top offended him. His rushed motions bewildered me. He wondered how a hafiz could pray dressed like I did, and I wondered how anyone could call those fleeting bows a complete prayer. I stated my case that what needed covering was covered, and he never argued his case; I only found out he was never in the wrong well after he had prayed all he was destined to pray.
He was nimble, and his healing hands were softer than riverbank clay, always the perfect degree of cool when he cupped my reddened face. His bizarre remedies, I could never fathom the reasoning for. There was his blue bottle of “milk of magnesia” which I distrusted, but he swore by. He would dab it on my rashes, with a gentleness that made resistance futile. And once, despite all my protests, he pressed the ashes of his biris into my weeping wounds. Perhaps they wept then, so I wouldn’t have to weep now.
He would stay awake for hours, patting me—“pohwaring,” in slow, steady strokes—until I fell asleep. Though he was the oldest, he could outlast anyone, fighting off his own exhaustion just to keep his hand on my back. Eventually, his strokes would falter, the rhythm loosening as he dozed off beside me, only to jolt awake and begin again, resuming the pohwaring. Eventually, I would whisper, “Bas chay, away tamay hooy jawo—that’s enough, now you go to sleep.”
Now he’s gone to sleep.
He sleeps now.
Finally, he sleeps.
His place is empty, but I can still feel him, his bones frail as he sat on the edge of my bed like a patient cat, always ready to scratch an itch for me. And whenever I scratched too hard, he would chide me, “Nhai—no,” and pohwar me gently with the veiny back of his hand, the skin stretched paper-thin with age.
For years, he would walk me to school and back, holding my hand until I no longer needed him to. Then, I biked to school, then, I bussed to school. By the time I reached post-secondary, I longed to take his hand again to show him the university his Indian Man now went to, to place his palm on the railing of the world he had helped me reach. But I never did get to take him. Life outpaced us. Death outpaced us.
I don’t know how many grades he got to attend growing up, but he was a scholar in his own right, his nose always buried in something—zikr books I questioned the origins of, home-remedy recipes I raised my eyebrow to, and Gujarati newspapers I couldn’t read, but picked up for him every Saturday from Iqbal Halal Foods. Later, when he had a phone, he would scroll too hard on the screen for samachaar—Indian news—on YouTube and would always ask me to show him how to unlock the passcode again. Sometimes I tired of it, but wouldn’t it be nice to do that again now.
He was a man of pockets, stuffed with his pink biri cigarette packs with cancer warnings he ignored, assorted BIC lighters, stacks of rubber-band-tied phone cards, and a decades-old address book that most likely predated me. He was a man without teeth, cheerfully popping out his pink dentures to make me laugh, soaking them in a cup of water every night—one must still take care of their plasticky, pearly whites, after all. He was a man of lighters and those cheap, single-use blue razors stacked in his drawer, alongside half-used and long-expired prescription drugs, bottles of Iodex and Tiger Balm. He was a man of topis and beanies, always worn slightly askew—maybe a fashion trend from the village, or maybe just one of his quirks like his ballerina-esque sleeping poses, or the way he sat cross-legged while eating, posed with his left hand on his knee and elbow out-turned, creating an arch with his lap.
He was a man with either messy gray hair or zero-size buzzcuts. I’d give him buzzcuts sometimes, my inexperienced hands wavering and slow with responsibility. I even nicked him once, and he didn’t even flinch. On any random evening, he’d shuffle over with his worn-out scissors and ask me to help with his nostril hairs that he could no longer manage, not even with the five times magnifying mirror. He could never grow a full beard, just sideburns and that proud goatee that I always tried to braid. He’d let me start, then pull away with a grunt of disapproval, not trusting me with the hard-earned hair on his chin.
How could he have died, when he’s still so vivid in my mind’s eye? The more I remember each of his small details, the more I long to cry. If I were to whisper into the night, “Maro haath khajwari dewo—would you scratch my hand for me?” I know with a certainty that aches that I would instantly feel his cool hands on mine, steady and present, as if no time had passed at all.
III.
Baji is gone. Alhamdulillah.
After wrapping him in a kafan, they stuffed his mouth with cotton. Why even do that? He barely spoke when he was alive. He wasn’t about to break into some grand soliloquy from the barzakh. His nostrils stared at me through the phone screen, and all I could think of were the times he’d bring me scissors and ask me to tackle those wiry nose hairs. That’s how old men are, with their big noses and elephant ears, wrinkly eyed and peculiar in their ways.
I keep retelling the story when two missionaries in a park asked for his name and he called himself Kofoke (ko-fo-kay). I can see him now, strolling, or leaning back on the black metal park bench across our street, breathing smoke into the fresh, tulip air through his nostrils like a small steam-engine train. Where he conjured Kofoke from, I’ll never know. Sometimes I wonder if he’d ever known of Kafka. Or Dante. Or Nietzsche. I never thought of him as an artist, but I see it now—the ballerina poses he slept in, the remedies he concocted for a weeping wound, and the strange alchemy of honey, turmeric, black pepper, date molasses, and God knows what else he drizzled onto his food. Nobody sat at the dastarkhan the way he did with his elbow up—sometimes I catch myself sitting that way now.
He did tasbeeh all the time, counting on his slender fingers in a rhythm I always loved watching. I’ll miss those cool hands that cupped my too-hot face, those hands that soothed me more deeply than any ice pack could. Hands softened by age, stiffened by death. I wish I could have held one of them in his final moments, pohwaring his as he always did mine.
I don’t know what I ever did to deserve it, but I—his Indian Man—was his favorite. I still feel sorry for squeezing his arms in anger as a child. Not once did he strike me. He would only threaten to tell my father when I became too unruly. But I’d threaten him back (a powerless threat, really), resorting to squeezing when my deathly stare didn’t suffice. I thought my will overpowered his, but he only held back because of his love for me. I’m told I stabbed him just below the eye with a pen when I was a toddler. Sometimes I look at the wrinkles on the bridge of his nose in photos and wonder which line was made by me. I wonder if I ever bit him too, those wild, thoughtless bites of small children. He spoiled me out of passion, and perhaps I began to rot.
I pray basil grows in his grave and he sleeps in a bed of ever-fragrant citrus. He never liked beds normal anyway, always piling too many pillows and unfolded cardboard boxes and bundled blankets under his cot mattress, which often sat crookedly atop the bed mattress itself. He was a skinny man with very bony bones, all pointy and angular, not a curve preserved in his old age.
How can someone be dead when they are so alive? They say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. Why is it then that when my grandfather died, it was his life—my life, our life together—that flashed before mine? Now whose hands will soothe me? Oh, but if the Prophet, peace be upon him, were to cup my face in his blessed hands in the realm of dreams, then, no itch or darkness or fire would ever again touch my face. Then, I would be ever-soothed, ever-raptured, enshrouded in mercy.
Baji is gone, and I wonder whether I will live long enough to love a grandchild the way he loved me, to be remembered by my hands the way I remember him by his. Only God knows. But until I see him again, I should do good with these hands. His hands have gone cold; mine have not.
Photo Courtesy of Mahmoodulhasan Bhaiyat
