The Deepest Cut

Death has no vocabulary in Indian families—so how does a daughter find a way to mourn her father’s accidental death?’

- Sreemoyee Piu Kundu

I was in a long-distance relationship last year with a man claiming his ‘long, broken,’ 24-year-old marriage ‘was over’. He constantly referred to his wife as ‘ex’, while occupying the same suburban London home, co-parenting their autistic daughter, and our relationship ended a day before our one-year anniversary. It was just the kind of complicated affair that being single in one’s mid-forties one desperately hopes to avoid that wound up on a cruel, one-sided voice note sent in the middle of my night (“I am now going for an office dinner,” it winds up, matter-of-factly), barely three weeks after a holiday in Thailand, as I writhe in bed, battling a complicated chest infection contracted from him on the same trip. My eyelids are heavy from steroids. My auto-immune, fibromyalgia, is through the roof. Everything is in pain. Everything feels broken…

I don’t know why I think of Baba again that morning.

Replaying the audio, my fingers trembling, devastated by the finality, sitting on the pot, warm tears streaming down my face and neck and melting into my bosom. I sob violently as I pee, breathing with difficulty. My left lung is not the same after the deadly second wave of Covid 19 wrecked my system, post a three-week haul in a faceless, overcrowded HDU unit of a private hospital in Kolkata—the city of my birth. Around me, the all-pervasive stench of death and disinfectants and stretchers and ambulance sirens, return to haunt me.