Mrs. Sehwal sits on the floor, numb, dumb, hollowed eyes. Mr. Sehwal stands like a stone carved statue in front of the door of his son's room where all the funeral processes are being held for the peace of his son's soul.
He stands at the door because standing at the door is the thing that is available to him.
He is a man of fifty-three who has spent thirty years building a life with a specific shape to it — modest apartment, adequate income, a wife whose laughter could be heard two floors down when she was in a good mood, and a son. One son. Deepak, who had gotten his mother's eyes and his father's stubbornness and a brain that had made both parents the specific, quiet kind of proud that did not announce itself loudly because it did not need to.
Deepak who had called every Sunday at six in the evening from Hyderabad at six in the evening for three years but had not called on the Sunday three weeks ago.
He should've known something was wrong!
He stands at the door because the room is where his son is, even now, even in this form that is not the form he knew, and standing at the door is as close as he can make himself go and still function.
If he crosses the threshold, he will not be able to stand anymore.
So he stands at the door.
He is a stone carved statue.
Statues do not have to feel what they are made from.
The priest chants the prayers and mantra in front of the deceased Deepak Sehwal's smiling picture with jasmine garlands around it. She simply sat there like a broken doll whose strings had been cut. The Sanskrit prayers and mantras moves through the apartment with the specific quality of ancient sound in a modern space — incongruous and necessary simultaneously, the way the oldest responses to the oldest human situations were always both of those things. The priest is a man of sixty who has done this many times, who knows the prayers completely, who chants with the focused continuity of someone for whom continuity is itself the service — the maintenance of the form when the people within it have no access to form.
Neighbours fill the adjacent rooms in subdued clusters.
Relatives have come from the local area — aunts and uncles and cousins of various degrees, the extended web of family that Bengali households maintained through decades of Sunday visits and festival gatherings and the specific, organic accountability of a culture that kept track.
Everyone is quiet.
Everyone is watching Mrs. Sehwal on the floor.
She does not move.
She does not eat when the food is offered.
She drinks the water that someone puts in her hand because the hand's movement is automatic — a reflex rather than a decision.
She looks at the photograph.
The slight smile.
She thinks: I know where the real smile is. The full smile is on the kitchen shelf in the birthday photograph. The one with the old jacket and the laugh.I should have brought that one.
She does not cry.
The scent of incense coils thickly in the air.
It clings to the curtains, to the white walls, to the silence that had swallowed the entire house whole.
The entire Sehwal residence had turned white overnight.
White sheets. White flowers. White clothes. White silence.
Only the sound of conch shells and low murmurs of relatives broke the suffocating stillness.
Mrs. Sehwal sits in the center of the room in a white sari that someone else put on her — she does not remember who, does not remember the morning, does not remember much of the three days that have passed since the phone call that ended the world — and her hands are in her lap and her back is straight in the way that backs stayed straight when the body had not yet received permission to collapse.
Deepak Sehwal's framed photograph rested on a low wooden stool covered in white cloth. Jasmine garlands draped around his smiling face — mocking, cruel, painfully alive.
He looked happy, alive. He looked like he would walk through the door any second.
This is the thing that the neighbours whisper about in the kitchen — the neighbours who have been arriving since the first morning with food that no one eats, with condolences that no one hears, with the specific, helpless generosity of people who understand that there is nothing useful to offer and are offering things anyway because offering is the only available response to grief that has no solution.
They whisper: she has not cried.
They whisper: she is in shock.
They whisper: it will come.
They are right that it will come.
They do not know what form it will take.
Mrs Sehwal's fingers trembled.
Her eyes remained unfocused. She had not cried. Why will she cry? She did not do anything, she had treasured her son ever since he was born. She loved him, cared for him. But she did not know that the perpetrator who had made her son take his own life is someone close to them, had it not been from her son's belongings did she find a diary where the scrawled handwritings of her son scartched her heart so bad that her tears dried up. She vowed for punishment of that perpetrator. And today, she'd exact the revenge for her son's death. Before sitting for the funeral ceremony, she made sure that a gossipy relative would spread among the guests attending the ceremony the truth of her son's death--who actually led him to stand on the terrace's edge.
"Offer the flowers," the priest murmured gently.
Mr. Sehwal stepped forward.
His hands trembled as he picked up the marigold petals.
They slipped through his fingers. He tried again.
This time he succeeded.
The petals fell over Deepak's photograph.
The sound of someone sobbing quietly filled the room.
A relative or maybe someone distant perhaps someone unimportant.
Because the two most important people in the room still hadn't cried.
Still hadn't moved.
Still hadn't accepted.
A whisper spread through the room.
"They've arrived..."
"Shameless!"
"Sob e baap-maa er shikkha, bujhle. Everything depends on how the parents raise their child."
"Eto kom boyos e...at such a young age...how could he...that too to his own cousin!"
Birsha Sehwal stepped into the house with his parents. They arrived during the afternoon. His shoulders felt heavy. The weight of a thousand accusations already sat upon them.
The uncle, Birsha's father — Mr. Ramesh Sehwal, younger brother of Deepak's father, who had always occupied the specific position in family gatherings of the relative who meant well and caused problems simultaneously — came through the apartment door with his wife at his elbow and Birsha a careful two steps behind.
Birsha was wearing white.
He had chosen his white carefully, the way Birsha Sehwal chose everything carefully — the right degree of mourning without crossing into the excessive, the correct posture of a grieving cousin, the specific arrangement of his face into an expression that communicated sorrow in the way that his face communicated every emotion it needed to communicate, which was through practice rather than feeling.
His mother clutched his hand tightly. The whispers and murmurs had reached her sensitive ears anyway. She decided to enquire them after paying respects to the deceased.
His father walked beside Birsha, jaw clenched. They entered the room slowly. The murmurs intensified.
Eyes turned.
Judgment.
Whispers.
Blame.
Birsha lowered his gaze, pretended to be pitiful. But unknown best to all, he is thrilled and elated for finally defeating his long time rival--his cousin, Deepak Sehwal.
He had been in Hyderbad. In fact he had taken admission in that same B-school to torment Deepak like he had done in school. Pity, that he chose to end his life--cutting Birsha's entertainment short. Birsha had come back the same day.
He had not come up to the apartment in three days, which he had managed with the explanation that he was devastated, that he needed time, that the grief was too great for him to face the family yet. The extended family had accepted this, because grief was a credible reason for many things and Birsha had always been good at making grief credible.
He approached the photograph.
His throat tightened weirdly as Deepak's smiling face stared back at him.
Memories crashed.
Arguments.
Cold glares.
Unspoken resentment.
And the last conversation.
Birsha smirked inwardly in truimph.
He picked up the flowers.
Before he could place them—
A sudden movement took place behind him.
Mrs Sehwal's hollow eyes focused as they zeroed in on Birsha. They locked onto the perpetrator.
"Boudi....Sister-in-law," Ramesh said — the word for sister-in-law — addressing Mr. Sehwal with the gentle, careful tone of a man entering a space he knows is fragile. "We have come. We are here."
Mr. Sehwal turned from the door.
He looked at his brother.
He looked at his brother's wife.
He looked at Birsha.
Something moved through his face — too many things simultaneously to be parsed — and then the stone reasserted itself.
"Come," he said.
They came.
They moved through the neighbours and the relatives toward the front room, toward the photograph and the jasmine and the priest and the woman sitting on the floor.
Birsha's mother stepped forward first — the aunt, Deepak's father's younger sister-in-law, a small woman with the specific, apologetic quality of someone who had spent her entire married life managing the space between her husband's family and the various frictions of their extended relationship.
"Didi," she said to Mrs. Sehwal, gently, using the word for older sister. "Didi, we have come."
Mrs. Sehwal's eyes moved.
They moved from the photograph to the room.
They moved through the room.
They found Birsha.
What happened in the next thirty seconds happened with the specific, terrible speed of things that the body does when the mind has been standing aside for three days and has finally found something it recognizes as a target.
Something broke within her. A primal maternal instinct that surges from within a grief stricken mother after losing her one and only child. She lunged.
"YOU—!"
Her scream tore through the room. Before anyone could react, her fingers wrapped around Birsha's collar. She yanked him forward.
"You killed my son!" she screamed, voice raw, broken, hysterical. "You monster!"
Later, the people who witnessed it would struggle to describe the speed of it — this woman who had been sitting motionless on the floor for three days, who had not eaten properly, who was small in the way of women who had been small their entire lives. She moved like grief moved when it stopped being contained — without announcement, without warning, with everything.
The room had frozen.
The priest stopped mid-syllable.
The incense smoke moved in the silence.
Birsha's face did something — rearranged itself from the carefully arranged mourning expression into something that was briefly, nakedly, genuine. Then the practice took over.
"Kakima, Aunty..." he said, using the word for aunt, keeping his voice very even, very gentle, the voice of someone who is managing an irrational person with the practiced patience of someone who has managed irrational people before. "Kakima, I understand. I understand you are in pain—"
"Don't," she said. "Don't you use that voice with me."
"Didi." His mother stepped forward, reaching for Mrs. Sehwal's hands on her son's collar. "Didi, please, he is grieving too, he was there, he saw it happen, he was devastated—"
"He was there," Mrs. Sehwal said, and her voice had a quality it had never had before — a quality that the people who knew her from before this week would not have recognized, because it was the voice of a woman on the other side of something. "He was always there. Every time something happened to my Deepak, this boy was always there."
"Boudi...Sister-in-law—" Ramesh started.
"She is upset," Mr. Sehwal said, from the door, in the voice of a man who is trying to hold something together and is losing the argument. "She is — Meena, let him go—"
"Tell me," she said to Birsha. Her grip had not loosened by a fraction. She was looking at him from a distance of approximately eight inches and her eyes, which had been hollow for three days, were not hollow now. They were full. They were very full of something that had no charitable name. "Tell me what happened. On that street. Tell me what you saw."
"He took his own life." Birsha said. Still even. Still practiced. "He jumped on his own. It was his decision, Kakima. A terrible, terrible decision. I tried—"
"You tried....?" she said.
"I tried to reach him but it was too fast—"
"You tried...." she said again, differently.
Something changed in the room.
Not in Birsha's voice, which remained practiced. Not in the room's other sounds, which were the continued attempts of multiple people to intervene and the continued failure of those attempts. It changed in Mrs. Sehwal's face — in the specific, terrible clarity that arrived there, the clarity of a woman who has been sitting with a piece of knowledge for three days and has now looked at the person the knowledge concerns and has had the knowledge confirmed by the looking.
"You pushed him," she said in finality.
"Didi, please—" his mother was pulling at Mrs. Sehwal's arm now, both hands, with the desperate strength of a mother whose child is in danger. "Please, Didi, he did not, I promise you he did not, he is my son, please—"
"He is your son," Mrs. Sehwal said, and her voice broke on it the way stone broke — not crumbling but splitting, along a line that had been there since the beginning, clean. "And Deepak was my son."
She was still holding Birsha.
Birsha was trying to free himself — quietly, carefully, without the drama of open resistance, because open resistance would have looked wrong and Birsha always knew how things looked. He was trying to ease himself free the way you eased yourself free of something when you needed to do it without anyone noticing.
He was not succeeding.
She had the grip of a woman who had nothing left to lose.
The chaos moved the way chaos moved in small spaces with too many people trying to do too many things simultaneously.
Ramesh was trying to get between them.
Mr. Sehwal had finally crossed the threshold of the room and was behind his wife, his hands on her shoulders, saying her name with the specific, frightened quality of a man who has just understood that the situation has moved past what he can manage.
"Meena," he was saying. "Meena, please, this is not—"
"Let her speak," said one of the neighbours, unexpectedly, from the doorway, in the tone of someone who has been watching for three days and has arrived at a position.
"No one asked you—" Ramesh started.
"Let her speak," the neighbour said again.
Birsha's mother was crying now — openly, with the helpless quality of a woman who loves her son and has arrived, in the worst possible way, at the worst possible moment, at the thing she had been not-quite-knowing for a long time.
"Didi, please," she was saying, and the please had moved past its original meaning into something that was only sound, only the sound of a mother begging, only the oldest request. "He is my only child. He is all I have. Please, Didi. He is all I have."
Mrs. Sehwal turned her head.
She looked at her sister-in-law.
She looked at the woman who had said: he is all I have.
She said: "He was all I had."
The five words.
The room went very still.
Even Birsha went still.
The priest, in the corner, had his hands folded in his lap and was looking at the floor with the expression of a man who has seen human beings in their worst hours many times and who understands that his function in this specific moment is to be very quiet.
The scuffle moved toward the door and the door moved toward the stairs and the stairs were there in the way that stairs were always there — present, physical, indifferent to the human situation occurring at their edge.
Chaos erupted.
"Boudi! Elder sister-in-law!"
"Stop!"
"Ki korcho tumi!? What are you doing?!"
Birsha stumbled.
Mrs. Sehwal's grip tightened.
Her nails dug into his skin.
"You killed him! You took him away from me!" she cried. "What did he ever do to you?"
Birsha's mother rushed forward.
"Didi! Sister-in-law! Please! Leave him!"
She tried to pry Mrs. Sehwal's hands away.
But grief made her strong. Stronger than reason. Stronger than restraint.
Mrs. Sehwal shoved her aside.
"Stay away!" she screamed.
Birsha's mother stumbled back, nearly falling.
"Please! He's your nephew!" she cried, voice breaking.
Mr. Sehwal moved forward.
"Enough!" he shouted. But even he couldn't stop her. His usual authority did not work on the veganance stricken Mrs. Sehwal.
Mrs Sehwal dragged Birsha backwards, out of the ceremony room.
Her grip shifted to now around his throat.
Birsha gasped. Even his own masculine strength seemed no match to this middle aged woman.
Air refused to enter his lungs. His hands gripped her wrists. His struggles and pleas were rendered useless. A fear overtook his consciousness for the first time in his life.
He croaked; "Aun—" but he couldn't finish.
The room dissolved into chaos. Relatives shouting. Someone crying. Someone yelling for water. Someone trying to pull them apart.
Birsha's mother clutched Mrs. Sehwal's arm.
"Didi! Please! Spare him!" she sobbed.
Mrs. Sehwal had not let go.
She had not let go through all of it — through the hands pulling at her, through her husband's voice saying her name, through the crying and the pleading and the chaos of a room that had been a place of mourning and had become a place of something older.
Birsha was at the top of the stairs.
He had managed, through several minutes of careful, quiet resistance, to move them in this direction — toward the door, toward more space, toward the specific calculation of a man who was assessing options and had concluded that the stairs offered the most viable geometry for extracting himself from a situation that he had underestimated.
He was near the stairs.
She was holding his collar. Her eyes burned with madness. She dragged him further.
Step.
Step.
Step.
They neared the staircase. Birsha's vision blurred. His ears rang.
He couldn't breathe.
In the instant between her hands releasing him and him recovering his balance — the instant that was not quite long enough for the recovery — her hands moved again.
And then—
Suddenly—
Mrs. Sehwal released him.
Birsha's foot missed the step.
Time slowed.
One small push.
Not large.
Just enough.
Not the push of someone intending to kill — not the dramatic, committed push of murder. The push of a woman who had spent three days sitting on a floor not crying and had found, in this moment, at this edge, the only thing that the body had left available to it.
Enough to break balance.
Enough to tip fate.
Birsha didn't even get time to breathe lungful of air before he stumbled backward.
The stairs were not kind. They were very hard. The ceiling was receding.
He went down them with the specific, terrible efficiency of a body that has lost its relationship with the ground and is in the process of renegotiating the terms.
The sounds he made were not the sounds he would have chosen.
His parent's scream pierced the air.
"BIRSHA!"
The sounds from below — his mother's voice, arriving at him from the bottom of the stairs with the speed of a woman who had been watching, who had seen the edge of it before it happened, who had moved without deciding to move — his mother's voice saying his name, saying it in the way mothers said names when the names were the only words left.
And in the last quarter-second before the darkness completed its work, Birsha's eyes found the top of the stairs.
Mrs. Sehwal stood there.
White sari.
Hands at her sides.
She was looking down at him with eyes that were no longer hollow.
They were full.
Full of the specific, cold, bone-deep satisfaction of a woman who has done the thing she was going to do and has found that the doing of it was exactly what it needed to be.
Not happiness.
Not cruelty in any theatrical sense.
Only the satisfaction.
His mother's voice followed him into it, saying his name, and it was the last sound he heard before the world went away entirely.
The last thing Birsha saw before darkness overtook his vision—
Was his mother rushing toward him. His father's voice followed.
"CALL AN AMBULANCE!"
The darkness came.