Holding onto failure

On grief, chasm, failure, and the small things that made a person's large presence

Before my father was let go, I was always leaving my failures behind. And I failed quite often. Growing up, I was failing my family at dinners by seating myself at the far end of the introversion spectrum. At school, I failed at being there for my brother. I failed at math, being nonchalant in a fling, getting a job I wanted so much that I created my own corner on the internet, a blog, for it. I failed at saving enough to finance my own wedding.

These failures looked alike. I drilled to the core of it, felt small and disposable in its company, muttered some soliloquy on self-love, and moved on. Failure was a temporary inconvenience, that’s all it was. And I used my cis, savarna privilege and the smallness of my failures to release myself from it. Wasn't that the point of failure? To forget about it and start over?

*

When my father was ten, his uncle left him alone in the car. He laughed out loud as he gave us a measure of his fright. Stretching out and then withholding all his five fingers a few times to demonstrate an open and shut of his heart, he said that this heart did a phak-phak. Terrified, alone, but insistent on doing something, he got out of the car and walked alone for twelve kms to get home.

When he was in a new place, he was always asking the names of streets and landmarks unknown to him, going on long walks, and taking shared autos. Ye cheez hi alag hai, he would say as he came back with local snacks and fruits. Deep-red fiery tomato chutney paired with bondas or vadas. Yellow-green guavas just like my mother likes. Tapioca chips, spicy mixtures, hot masala popcorn.

I realize three things now. 1) My father is skilled at the art of noticing 2) He does not fear walking alone 3) I need to know, but I cannot, how doing something despite the fear, and deep observance became a part of him when he was just ten.

*

The first time I came close to understanding grief was when I picked Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, which just happened to be one of the books from a long pile that we had bought but not read. This was an hour or so after I learnt on a call that my father only has 3 months to live.

Why did I react to this destroying news by seeking someone else’s experience of grief? I think I was looking to be less alone. I was desperate for advice. I think I was also bitterly looking for a story that held more suffering than what my father was enduring.

I have imagined my father in his 80’s, ailed by a toothache or a relapse of colorectal cancer, but emerging unscathed. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brother said, “I’m so sure daddy was nineties material.” I was convinced without a shred of doubt that my father was at the least, eighties material.

The book defined grief but did not prepare me for it. How could I be prepared for an inflammatory disease to turn into a life threatening, 3-months-is-all-your-father-has proclamation? How could I be prepared when the three months turned out to be three weeks?

How could I ever lose my father, the most alive person I know?

*

My father dealt with the failures of his children by understating them, while tending to the wounds from our fall, and helping us walk again.

He responded to my mediocre competitive entrance score that I was supposed to prepare for during a gap year with, “This is not bad, you can get into good schools with this”, and he researched for good schools by asking his customers, making phone calls, and reading the education supplement of The Hindu. When I didn’t make it to or was put on waitlists at schools of my choice, still at home while the academic year started, he helped me land a university I could go to, accompany me as I shopped for talc and lotion, held one end of a jute rope as we carried a pink single mattress to my hostel, and told me that I could get the top compensation package at the placement. I didn’t get the top package when I graduated but joining that school, that I walked into with self-doubt, opened doors in my career and life that I didn’t know existed.

*

I can now clearly see how my father’s affirmative sentences mirror the person he is. He often said “I am fit”. His festival greetings were incomplete without a “wish you high spirits”. When he lost 12 kilos and started weighing 50, he’d say, “My weight is right for my height.” When I assured him that biologicals would work when steroids did not, he said “Yes my darlings.” Even in the depths of his suffering, all he said was “I feel uneasy”.

My cousin described my father as a diamond. “A diamond never loses its shine.” My uncle remembered how he dedicated his life to uplifting his children. Many many remember his brisk walks and love for food.

Surely, someone who is the archetype of positive living, who rebuilt life at 44, 65, and 69 should get to live a few healthy years of retirement? Surely, someone who bought new bedsheets and curtains just weeks before from their equity profits should be allowed to take them off their covers? Surely, they should not be let go after being told they are healing, that they can finally eat anything, only to wake up the next day with howling pain? Surely, someone who is the reason for the free mind and agency of four of his children, should not have passed in oblivion?

While I know how meaningless loss could be, I keep questioning the chasm between how he lived and how he was made to leave.

*

We were called in the morning of September 22 to say our goodbyes. I admonished myself when nothing else came out except “I am sorry, I love you” as I stood next to him while he was sedated. He was 71. He was on a ventilator that he was put on after my sister and I saw him struggling to breathe, after hours of pain from sepsis and after being falsely comforted by doctors that a massive surgery he was operated on a few days before was successful.

What could be worse than losing a parent early? Losing them in the isolation ICU of a hospital they despised, overlooking the signs they gave over nine months as they slowly disappeared, watching as they were denied all they loved—puris, vadas, a proper cup of tea, kheer, a walk by themselves, seeing clearly in a backward glance that a small drift instead of following a single path would mean he is here. The ICU doctor told us that my father was the sickest patient in the ICU. He told us that multiple organs were failing. Yes, my father is diabetic but he has no other problems. Dialysis? But his kidneys are fine. Pneumonia? He has never had lung issues.

There should be words for loss like this. Yanked. Incongruous. Derelict.

*

In 1997, my father migrated from West Bengal to Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu to start a new business—his own textile shop. He quickly picked up Tamil and fell in love with Tamil meals. He often said, “No person can say that they have done something for me..”, underscoring his self-madeness and independence.

In 2024, a day before the surgery, my father told the surgeon, “My children are highly educated. I’m choosing you because of them.” By saying this, he was comforting himself that this is the right path despite this path at odds with what he believed.

I believe if my father took his own medical decisions, like all the other life decisions he has taken, like the decisions he took during his stage 2 cancer that he healed from, then he would be here. He would be relishing an early Bangalore monsoon and appreciating the new hydrangea plant in his mini terrace that he held dear. He would be understating one of my failures.

*

If there is something that I know about grief, then it’s that grief is not one feeling. The longing is both constant and comes dutifully at 4.30PM when I sit at my desk and see an old man of medium height appear, drift, and re-appear, walking steadfastly into and out of shards of the evening light, with high waist trousers, frameless spectacles, a front shirt pocket, a somewhat bald head with hair neatly pushed back.

There is fear, but it’s not the fear of what is to come that bothers me so much or the fear of memory’s wrath and caprices which I am trying to outmanoeuvre with a journal, an album called “Papa’s voice”, and an urgent download of our WhatsApp exchanges (50% travel related questions, 20% DMAT and equity advice, 20% food and restaurant recommendations). What wrecks me instead is the fear that it is starting to seem normal to be in my father’s absence.

The intensity of grief was constant at first. It was a portal I could easily walk into to feel closer to my father. I found disbelief, fear, longing, failure, immense luck that I was my father’s daughter, and vindictiveness at the same luck that took him from us so early, and worst, a luck where his farewell was full of suffering. These came together, came one after the other, came in no sequence. 9 months later, I feel the same things, but in between or during these feelings, I make eggs, I write multiple coherent sentences, I read a book that’s not about grief, I seek pleasure by adding lemongrass to my tea, I step out for breakfast at 7am. I submit to the dailiness of life. This and that my mourning is not endless makes me feel like a betrayer. I’m told to blame it on an almond-shaped thing inside my brain that is increasing and reducing the intensity. I am told to blame it on time.

But reconciling myself to any label or name is so easy, I am surprised. I am a betrayer. I fail my father in grief too.

*

I can only say this in a matter-of-fact way: losing my 71-year old high-spirited parent who is the anchor of my life in a reversible situation is the greatest failure of my life.

During multiple times a day, I ask myself “What would Papa want me to do?”. He’d want you to give him back the life he loved, but you cannot. I think of his voice. It is an innocent quest when he asks our guide, “This is Arabica?”, generous as it stops and explains the meaning of bajid as he reads from the back cover of the book Reth Samadhi, sprightly as he says “good morning” when I step out of my room.

What I land on is this: he would want me to live with the awareness of what happened. He would never want us to forget. He would want his stories in the rooms we are in.

This direction legitimizes the time I have been devoting to counting my sub-failures: Discontinuing with his regular gastrosurgeon, diminishing his feelings when I sided with the hospital staff after his surgery was delayed and when his food was regularly late, not changing the doctor and the hospital when there was still time, not anticipating and preventing sepsis when he was immunocompromised, failing to keep him alive.

My father’s mind was my father’s mind for as long as it could. On the day before we lost him to the ventilator, he told my sister to help him sit. Pull me up, get someone’s help, I need to sit. The resolve of his mind had the power to penetrate through his body and fix his sepsis, his IBD, any body ailment.

Why doesn’t our own mind control our fate but a foreign speck that enters our body, an egregious cell, a gene we inherit, and anything else we have no control over does?

*

My therapist tells me that I am tethered to my father through a thread, the color of which is up to me. On some days the grip of the thread is fastened and on some days it’s loose, but it is always around my wrist.

I try feeling my end of the invisible thread. It is the color of pistachio, the ice cream which was Papa’s default order. The thread, I, and my failure will later go for a walk. We will listen to Kabhi Kabhi sung by Mukesh. Papa loved Mukesh.

• Ye cheez hi alag hai: This thing is completely different

• Bajid: Stubborn

---

Note: My gratitude to Ankita Shah and her Interior/Exterior essay writing workshop where this essay’s seed was sown. Ankita has a gift and she is sharing it with care in her workshops. My gratitude also to the nine wonderful people in whose company I wrote and whose comments gave me the courage to write another draft. I hope I meet you again.