Of Wasted Wedding Wishes And Cruel Condolences....

                         The traditional North Indian Bridal Chura (red and white bridal bangle set)
                                                      Picture Credit: The Inter Net

A little more than two months ago, I woke up rather early for a Sunday morning. Diwali had just got over and I was feeling languorous. Five days of festivities, coupled with my husband's office and son's school routines on in full force, does not leave much time for leisure. The only saving grace was that since my students in India had Diwali holidays, I, too, had the week off from on line classes. But I had invited our former neighbours for brunch on that particular Sunday, since their daughter was leaving for college in Singapore at the end of October, and I wanted to say good bye to her. I switched on the net, as I waited for the water to boil for my tea. The first group I always check is the security group on WhatsApp and a solitary message had popped in. 'Asian male shot dead in the early hours of Sunday, on XYZ road.' At first I mentally dismissed the message, sorry as I felt for the unknown victim, even as I thought that Asian males should know better than to be out on Nairobi streets at pre dawn hours. I'm ashamed to admit that my second thought was 'must be a young guy coming home from a drinking binge, and probably feeling invincible, as a result of all that alcohol floating around in the blood stream.' (Those who know me well, know that I am puritanical in my dislike of alcohol and tobacco and cannot understand to this day why men and women need to down a couple of pegs or ingest smoke to enjoy life, but I rarely air my views on this particular subject.). I could not have been more wrong about the circumstances of the death, as the next set of messages, which were rapidly pouring in, proved...
In what was later explained away as a bungled police operation and a case of 'mistaken identity', one of Nairobi's richest young businessmen had been shot in his own bungalow. The armoured vehicles had allegedly entered his compound by breaking down his gate and when he tried to retaliate from his bed room window, he was gunned down. Soon his identity was freely being shared on all the Nairobi groups and I was horror struck when I realized I had met his young wife, (who had recently had their baby), a couple of times, a few years ago, because she is very close to friends of ours from our Dar Es Salaam days. She also works for one of the Asian Radio channels as a Radio Jockey and is a celebrity of sorts in Nairobi. And we had heard all about the impending wedding on radio too, at that time...
Brunch menu forgotten, I sat down with my cup of tea and tried to process what the steady stream of messages was saying. I remembered our common friend flying down from India for one of the biggest weddings Nairobi has seen in the last few years. I went onto to Face Book to look at pictures. When you have common friends tagged in pictures, you can usually view them on Face Book. And there she was in all her bridal glory, wearing bangles very similar to the ones in the picture I have shared above, her proud, brand new husband by her side and our mutual friend grinning broadly, especially as she had made a special trip from India to bless the happy couple.... It was hard, SO hard to believe the young man was no more..
Just a week or so before this terribly tragic incident, one of my school friends, who had been keeping vigil outside the Intensive Care Unit in a Pune hospital where her mother had been admitted, shared a couple of stories with me, during her weekly telephonic updates about her mother's condition. She told me about a young girl, from a small town near Pune, who she met outside the critical care unit, who had just lost her husband to dengue. That day, she told my friend, through a flood of tears, was to have been their six month wedding anniversary... "How will I live without my husband?" she plaintively asked my friend. "The way I do.." was my brave friend's reply, even as she showed that young stranger her own husband's picture, whom she had lost to brain tumour very early in their married life. Another young bride, my friend said, had just lost her husband to a massive heart attack and was busy trying to make her new in laws eat a few morsels in the hospital corridor, in the midst of tragedy..
So what happened to all those wedding wishes? Did they never reach these couples? If not, where did they go? You know, all those 'congratulations and best wishes and long and happy married life' ones that we dutifully spout at weddings,( but genuinely mean), just before we systematically attack the lunch or dinner buffet?
I like to believe they float around everywhere and though they may not always be of use to the couples that they were intended for, they do sometimes reach those who were, may be, meant to have them....All those young husbands and wives who were saved by a whisker from an accident, those who survived a life threatening disease, or a terrorist attack (like the young couple who was caught in the Taj hotel just before their own wedding reception, during the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, but miraculously made it out alive) definitely benefited from their own wedding wishes, and those 'wasted wishes' still circulating around in the Universe too...That's what, they say, spreading positivity is all about, after all.
The tail end of November brought more terrible news. My school music teacher's ten year old son passed away suddenly in his school, in my home town Pune. He succumbed to heart problems and could not be revived... Besides being my former teacher's son he was also my son's classmate's first cousin and before we moved to Nairobi, I had often met the boy, who was a mere toddler then, while waiting to pick my own son up from outside the school. So when my cousin from Pune , who was my classmate in school, messaged me the news, I literally had no words left...
I lost a former student too, a few days ago, the victim of a road accident in my home town. He was fifteen years old and soon to appear for his tenth standard board exams.. I have his mother's number in my phone, but I do not have the words to express my grief and sorrow...Many of his classmates and friends are currently my students on Skype and the day after we got the news, every one of them made mistake after mistake in class. All I could say to console them was, 'I know you are upset,don't worry about your errors now. You will do well in the exam...'
When a mother has lost a child, offering condolences seems so trite, it seems as if one is being deliberately cruel. How can you condole pre mature death? Nearly three decades ago, I read an article about facing loss in Reader's Digest which has stayed with me to this day. Never, ever, tell a grieving parent, 'Oh I know exactly how you feel.' NO, you cannot know what a person who has lost their baby in a particular set of circumstances is going through, so do not even bother to try. Instead, send a hot meal, send a prayer, send a warm hug...do NOT send condolences.
Why did I choose to write about this when almost the whole world is on holiday and on vacation in exotic locations around the world and in a relaxed 'end of the year' mood?
My former teacher's Face Book post from a couple of days ago compelled me to put down what has been on my mind for a while. She said there is a word for a woman or a man who has lost a life partner :widow/widower. There is a word for a child who has lost both parents: an orphan. (And also for a child who has lost either parent: motherless/ fatherless). But there is NO word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child... She has requested everyone to remember those parents who have lost children and to say a prayer for them..even as you go about enjoying and living your own life, as you should and you must...
Today it's also been two years since my son's friend lost his little sister. A few hours from now, I will plant a tree in her name in a location in our garden, where, when it grows after a few years, it will be seen from the road this child took to school every day. A school she left too soon...That's my way of passing on my condolences, to all I know who have lost a child. I know it's not enough, it never will be, but it is all I can do...