Condolences

There were eleven people at the funeral, and he was the only one who did not know whose it was.

The cemetery behind the old church in Secunderabad was mostly mud that morning. The rain had stopped an hour before the service, but the trees were still letting go of it, one heavy drop at a time, onto umbrellas nobody had bothered to close. The pastor read quickly. The gravediggers stood a little apart, smoking behind their hands, waiting for the words to finish so the real work could begin.

He stood at the back, under a jamun tree, in a grey shirt that was too warm for the weather. When the pastor said “our sister Esther”, he lowered his head with everyone else. When the hymn started, he moved his lips without sound.

She noticed him during the second verse. She was standing at the head of the grave in a white cotton sari with a thin grey border, and she was the only one who did not sing. She looked at the coffin, then at the gravediggers, then over all their heads at him, and then she looked at the coffin again as if he had been a crow on a branch.

When it was over, and the pastor had shaken her hand with both of his, and the two aunties from church had held her face and cried into her shoulder and gone to find an auto, she walked down the path between the graves and stopped beside him under the jamun tree.

“You’re standing in the only dry place,” she said. “Do you mind sharing it?”

“Please.”

She stood next to him and watched the gravediggers. They had begun. The first shovelfuls fell on the lid with a sound she did not seem to hear.

“I’m Rebecca,” she said. “Becky. That was my mother.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” She glanced at him sideways. “You didn’t know her.”

He was quiet for a second too long. “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“I didn’t think so. Mummy knew four people in this city, and I know all four. Two of them just went to find an auto.” She almost smiled. “So you’re either a very lost man, or you go to strangers’ funerals.”

“I was passing,” he said. “I saw the hearse turn in. I don’t know. I’ve been to too few of my own people’s funerals. I thought someone should stand at the back of this one.”

It was not a good answer, and they both knew it. She let it go.

“Then you should at least know who you came for,” she said. “Would you like to?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“I want to tell someone.” She pulled the end of her sari over her shoulder. “Everyone else here already knows her. They know the version they want.”

---

Esther Thomas had been a nurse at the railway hospital for thirty-one years. She had delivered more babies in Lallaguda than anyone could count, and she had never once been late for a shift.

“Not once,” Becky said. “Not when Daddy left. Not the day I was born — she went into labour on duty, finished the delivery she was doing, and then walked down the corridor to have me. She told that story at every Christmas lunch. Every single one.”

“She sounds strong.”

“She was terrifying.” Becky said it fondly. “She ironed my school ribbons. She checked my homework with a red pen she brought home from the hospital. When I got eighty-eight in maths she asked me where the other twelve marks went, like I’d dropped them on the bus.” She shook her head. “And then she’d make payasam on Sunday and put the cashews only in my bowl. All of them. She’d say she didn’t like cashews. She loved cashews.”

He smiled, and she saw it, and seemed pleased.

“What happened to her?” he asked.

The gravediggers paused to wipe their faces. One of them looked over at Becky, the way workmen look at the family to make sure they are doing it right, and she nodded at him to carry on.

“Motor neurone disease,” she said. “Do you know it?”

“A little.”

“Nobody knows it a little. You either don’t know it, or you know all of it.” She folded her arms. “It started with her right hand. She dropped a steel tumbler at breakfast, two years ago, and we both laughed. Then she couldn’t do the hooks on her blouse. Then the stairs. She diagnosed herself before the neurologist did. She came home from the appointment and sat at the dining table and said, ‘Becky, I’m going to tell you everything that’s going to happen, in order, and then we’re not going to talk about it again.’”

“Did she?”

“She told me everything, in order. And then she was right about all of it, in order. She was always a good nurse.”

A bird flew out of the jamun tree. A few drops fell on his shoulder. He did not brush them off.

“The last six months she couldn’t move anything except her eyes,” Becky said. “She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t swallow properly. She had a feeding tube. We had a board with letters on it, and I’d point at the rows and she’d blink, and we’d spell things out. You’d think that would be awful. It was awful. But it was also the most we ever talked, my whole life. She spelled out jokes. Long ones. She’d take ten minutes to spell out a joke about the pastor, and then laugh with her eyes, and I’d laugh because she was laughing, and the joke was usually terrible.”

“What did she spell out the most?”

Becky considered this seriously.

“TEA,” she said. “She couldn’t drink it anymore. But she liked me to make it in the evening and sit with her while I drank it. She liked the smell. She’d spell out TEA, and then SIT. Every evening. Tea, sit.”

---

The grave was half full now. The sound of the earth had changed from a hollow knock to something soft.

“You took care of her yourself,” he said. “For two years.”

“Who else? There was a home nurse for the mornings, so I could keep my job. I work at a bank. I’d come home at six, the nurse would leave, and it was the two of us.” She was quiet for a moment. “People think nursing someone is about the big things. The tube, the medicines, turning her every two hours so she wouldn’t get sores. It’s not. It’s the small things. It’s knowing she likes the fan on two, not three. It’s knowing she wants her hair oiled on Saturdays even though she can’t feel it anymore. It’s insulin at nine.”

“She was diabetic too?”

“For twenty years. Type two. She used to do her own injections, quick as anything, standing at the fridge. At the end I did them.” Becky looked at her own hands. “Every night at nine. Eight units. I could do it in the dark.”

He did not say anything. He looked at the grave.

“She spelled out a lot of things in those last weeks,” Becky said. “Some of them I’m not going to tell you. Some of them I didn’t want to read. I’d stop pointing at the board and she’d keep blinking, at nothing, at the ceiling, at me, until I picked it up again. She had always finished what she started.”

“What did she want?”

Becky turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time. Her eyes were dry and very clear.

“You know what she wanted,” she said. “You’re the one who asked.”

---

Neither of them moved.

Behind them, on the road, an auto horn sounded twice, impatient. One of the aunties had found an auto and was waiting for someone. The gravediggers kept working. Down by the gate, a man in a brown jacket was leaning against a white jeep with no markings, reading something on his phone.

“How long have you known?” he asked quietly.

“Since the hymn.” Becky nodded at his feet. “Your shoes. Everyone else is wearing chappals in this rain, and you’ve got black lace-ups with the toes polished and the sides covered in red mud. There’s only one compound near here with red mud like that — Chilkalguda police station. They’ve been digging up the parking for a month. I walked past it on Thursday when I went to sign the papers.” She paused. “And you looked at your watch when the hearse came in. Nobody who has come to grieve looks at their watch when the hearse comes in. You were checking when we arrived.”

“You’d have made a good nurse.”

“She wanted me to be one. I fainted at my first injection. I was nine.” Becky almost laughed. “Who are you?”

“Sub-Inspector Arun Mathew.”

“Chilkalguda?”

“Chilkalguda.”

She nodded slowly, as if a sum had come out right.

“The post-mortem,” she said.

“The hospital asked for one. A routine thing — she’d been stable, and then she wasn’t. The doctor was a young one. He was very thorough.” He hesitated. “Her blood sugar was almost nothing. And there were two injection marks on her stomach from the same night. An hour apart. The home nurse says she does the morning dose only. You do the night dose.”

“Eight units at nine,” Becky said.

“And at ten?”

The earth fell, and fell.

“At ten I made tea,” she said. “She spelled out TEA. Then SIT. So I sat. I drank it and I held her hand, because that she could feel, a little, in the last fingers. And then she spelled out the other thing again. The thing she’d been spelling for three weeks. And I said no, again. And she kept blinking. She blinked for forty minutes. Do you know how long forty minutes is, when someone is blinking at you?”

He did not answer.

“She was a nurse for thirty-one years,” Becky said. “She told me the dose herself. Letter by letter. She’d worked it out. She’d probably worked it out the day she came home from the neurologist and sat me down at the dining table.” Her voice did not shake. “She spelled out GOOD GIRL. She hadn’t called me that since I was ten. And then THANK YOU. And then she closed her eyes and kept them closed, so I wouldn’t have to watch her watching me.”

---

The gravediggers had finished. They patted the mound with the backs of their shovels, the way you smooth a bedsheet, and one of them set the small wooden cross at its head and looked over at Becky again, waiting.

“I have to give them something,” she said. “It’s customary.”

“Go,” Arun said.

She walked down the path. He watched her take a folded envelope from the small cloth bag on her shoulder and give it to the older gravedigger, and touch the younger one’s arm, and say something that made both of them lower their heads. Then she bent, took a handful of the wet red earth from the edge of the mound, and stood holding it, looking at the cross. After a while she opened her hand and let it fall.

When she came back, her palm was still stained.

“I’m not going to run,” she said. “In case the man by the jeep is wondering. Tell him he can put his phone away.”

“He’s not wondering.”

“Will it go to court?”

“Yes.”

“Will they let me say what she spelled?”

“You’ll be able to say it.”

“Good.” She wiped her hand on the end of her sari, slowly, one finger at a time, the way her mother had probably taught her to. “Someone should say it. She worked very hard on it.”

He looked at her. “Why did you tell me? You knew who I was from the second verse. You could have walked straight to the auto.”

Becky considered the question as seriously as she had considered what her mother spelled out the most.

“Because you stood at the back,” she said. “Everyone else stood at the front so they could be seen crying. You stood at the back, in the only dry place, and you lowered your head when the pastor said her name. You didn’t have to. Nobody was watching you except me.” She shrugged a little. “I thought, he’ll write it all down anyway. I wanted the first person who wrote it down to hear it from me. Not from the board.”

The auto horn sounded again on the road. Down by the gate, the man in the brown jacket had put his phone in his pocket and opened the back door of the jeep.

“Do you need to put the handcuffs?” she asked. “The aunties are still at the gate.”

“No,” Arun said. “Walk with me.”

They walked down the path between the graves, side by side, not touching, like two people who had come to the same funeral and were leaving at the same time. At the gate the aunties called out to her, and she lifted one stained hand and waved, and told them not to wait, she had a ride.

Behind them the jamun tree let go of the last of the rain, one heavy drop at a time, onto the fresh red earth.