The Immortal Dust

Betha Bibi’s head rests on the flattened, soiled pillow in bed; the sheets tangled and twisted around her limbs; her scrawny face disheveled but peaceful. Her body looks like one of the fallen electrocuted pigeons, feathers scattered around, like the ones I used to carry home from the street as a child, thinking that I might be able to nurse them back to life. Some of her clothes are on the bedstand, the room in severe disarray, as though someone had tried to put them properly. The doctor had been here only minutes ago, to issue a Death Certificate, and somehow the raisin-ed loaves she’d requested to eat earlier, the scent of the bake, wafts in the windowless confines. 

After her terminal illness was diagnosed in 2013, Popo and I had flown-in numerous times at short notice, away from our Karaoke and Yuzu tea nights in our small apartment in Kyoto, having hurried through leave applications at our respective offices, and flight tickets booked in spite of the surge in fares, but we were still not prepared seven years later. 

At the crematoria, I bring myself to strike the fire, and the wood is quick to be alive. Popo and I watch the pyre for the first twenty minutes, then decide to leave. I turn to see no one standing around, not even the crematoria men. Betha Bibi is gone.

At noon the next day, true to the foretelling of the crematoria men, the portal opens. Right after, Popo asks me, again, like he does every time wondering if I might be overthinking.

“What are your antidotes to fear?” 

Before I can answer, Popo raises a hand to shield himself against the frightening darkness of the portal we’re both expecting, but we have been assured it’s a minute’s ordeal, a rite of death, and a final adieu to Betha. Her dissemination back to atoms is imminent.

Preceded by nothing extraordinary, the wall of the kitchen is where the portal opens for a split-second, allowing us a conscious reconciliation with these ghostly people delivered to the other dimension, where, if we tried really hard, we might spot Betha floating away. 

I don’t particularly wish to see her in that state. Helpless and unborn. But I look on anyway—it has to be done, they have said. But what I catch sight of instead, totally unprepared, are those forms of the might-have-been-humans—the stillborn babies drifting away. 

#

When we’re on our flight back to Kyoto, Popo holds my hand. It is still shaking from what we saw: among the fully formed dead humans were some just pearl-sized, some larger like malformed apples, some handsome in their ordinariness, just enough privileged to have formed a body of its own, except never delivered to life, the womb their coffin.

As soon as the seat belt sign is off, Popo leans across to snuggle me, and says: It’s okay, not everyone is lucky. Things happen. 

Popo pauses to collect his thoughts.

And, as for you, he continues, it’s not because of Betha; you’d be in this birth, be my wife. And, we will all be dead. Remember, it is a return to our inevitable-ness. 

Popo is the same. That teacher-like tone. The deep, instructive voice. Who’d know that of all the young, good-looking boys in class, I’d date my professor, marry him? Ten years senior. Wisdom coming from his age. Now forty. Of course, his biological clock is ticking away.

The astrologers would certainly agree, in fact, applaud Popo for his decisiveness—how he was sure right from the start that I’d be his wife. 

I know it is impossible for ordinary people to predict death, but Popo believes in Vedic astrology which refers to the life span of a human as Ayurdhaya, death determined at birth. Apparently, thirty-two methods are mentioned in the original astrology texts to accurately predict death dates, depending on horoscopes and planetary position at date and moment of birth. 

When Popo dozes off in the long flight, I’m still shaking, and thinking of those that I saw.  If it was indeed ‘death determined at birth’ as per astrology, how were the deaths of those stillborn babies determined when they were not even born yet?

#

At home, we realize that, in sharing her death, it is our long-term rehearsal of the present and future of the voyages we’ll encounter, of the possibilities she made us realize. We ought to be glad we were with her in her last moments.

Later, in my work cabin at the seventeenth floor of Kuroto Towers, I am struck by the dust dancing in the beam of sunlight — plain construction debris, sand, DNA, even cosmic dust. Living, floating, dancing dust. I collect the fragments between my palms, star-struck and in spite of myself, as though I was a celestial being collecting cosmic dust, breathing planetary life into them. 

Catching me in a similar position at home soon after we married, my palms folded, like protecting pearls in an oyster, Popo had said: Do you know Hayabusa returned with samples of dust from an asteroid? And, I had become more attached to dust, like it mattered more.

Those days, I posted high-definition snapshots of dust in light with the same fervor as I posted our wedding photos on Facebook. We had gone to the Waishi temple to marry, and later to pray for afterlives distinct and better than the ones we were in now. I’m not sure what Popo prayed for, because immediately thereafter, he had a bad case of food poisoning. I think the lobsters at our hotel were responsible, they were obviously alive and avenging their death in Popo’s digestive tracts. I remember the Chef being skeptical about our dinner choice, and especially recommending we have Turritopsis doohmii, the immortal jellyfish, which was on top of their menu. Apparently, the immortal jellyfish cheats death by reversing the aging process, and when it is injured or sick, it returns to its polyp stage over a three-day period, transforming its cells into a younger state that will eventually grow into adulthood all over again.

Popo would love to be that jellyfish, he’s so sad about his balding head.

When my focus returns, it is the money-plant on the desk, all wilted and dying, that screams for my attention. I haven’t watered it since I went to see Betha. Reminds me of the buds I grow in my abdomen every month, and shed, for want of a concrete reason to keep and nurture. There’s no particular reason I make them die. They are dead babies, who won’t trigger the same effect as Betha does to me. But still… If I did let them grow, more potential receptors of life than there’ll be days of light on the planet, they’d easily have a chance to enter the lottery to become people, and not die. I actually am guilty of condemning them to utter ignominy of death-before-life. But it’s a choice that’s made for me — who wants to flood the planet with more people than it can support, and thus, end all life as we see it?

#

Popo says I am over-thinking. Betha was a mother, but still a surrogate, and tries to comfort me when we’re in bed later that night. I knew the question was coming, the reverse of being dead, the anarchist in a tableau of death as is our existence.

“Do you not want babies?” Popo sits up and tries to appear normal, but I know he’s agitated by the tautness in his shoulder, the way his limbs appear like tightened strings of a sitar. The night is dull, and the worst time to rake up conflicting opinions. I choose not to answer. I just turn on the other side and pretend to sleep off a headache.

#

I’m awake before Popo the next morning and can see the sliding door that leads to the veranda of our apartment open on its own, and a gust of air swooshes in. Not air exactly, but stinky grey smoke. There is a leather factory some distance away, but it is not facing this direction. 

The Dead come to visit, mother said. The mother, my birth mother, not Betha.       I couldn’t just call her mother. She was Ranee for me, as my father called her, and he was Jhantu, the same as my uncles called him. In fact, they were amused that I called them by nicknames. Another curious habit—I just sort of put names to anything I could, even the copious mosquitoes we killed between our palms.     

It was those not-so-innocent creatures—the mosquitoes—that Ranee meant. And she was right. No matter how many were killed by smashing against the walls, between our palms, or by the insect-repellent’s toxic fumes, they returned the next evening, yet many more. When I was told they were the Dead revisiting, I felt a sudden compassion for the mosquitoes. So, let’s just say I was compassionate towards the dead. Whether or not they really came to revisit us. 

I’m not sure but the thought of Betha coming to visit early in the morning      is off-putting. Weird. There is only one reason I can think of for my strange line of thought: I hadn’t bled that month. So maybe I am not a cemetery yet, at least for this month, and Betha is here to check up on me? Her diffused atoms and electrical impulses, undying from the cremation, accumulated to respond to our timeless and infinite intimacy?

I can almost see the mass-less cloud taking shape and, at its center, a glowing miniscule portion where the chemicals are — the chemicals in our bodies that are remnants of stars, indestructible.

Paralyzed by the  worry that it might disappear before I have a chance to wake Popo up, I watch the cloud slowly spread out and move towards the furniture and walls of the apartment. Some of it floats and reaches out for the apartment block next to ours.

#

Popo is up at noon. He usually plays tennis on Sunday mornings, but the grounds are drunk from overnight rains. 

“Even rains are dead matter, no?” he asks over a table full of Chinese takeaways, when I tell him about the morning incident. I can hardly eat though Chinese food is my favorite, and Popo thinks it’s indigestion from staying all day in my crammed office cubicle. It’s the period, you fool, I hear myself say, though I’m certain I’ll never say it aloud. Girls aren’t supposed to mention     it. Ever.

“Some of Betha’s atoms were in the drops, and returned to the surface and became …. Drinking water?” Popo says this as he chomps, without an iota of emotion, saliva leaking from the sides of his mouth. I feel like throwing up, but he continues, “…in the poultry we will eat and veggies last night… absorbed and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves.” 

I rush to the washbasin.

#

I open the fridge late afternoon and gorge on leftover rice and ice-cream. Popo has gone to meet a friend, and it looks like I’ll spend the evening alone.

I hate Popo for doing this to me every Sunday, but what can I do? Before I cuddle a book and perhaps doze off, I am thinking of this shop Betha Bibi worked in. It was a tailor’s shop, where the marginal Muslim ladies worked, they were converts and so earned the ire of the tribal landlords. One afternoon, the shop was burned down. How far will people go to be possessive, mindlessly chasing permanence in an ever-changing Universe?

I think that is why Betha Bibi became a surrogate. She realized anyone could die any minute by the violence of mechanisms that exist universally—and then, their atoms are ruthlessly repurposed into new life. Being alive itself is a fluke, an accidental break in a chain of repeating lifelessness. She therefore registered her defiance and chose to anchor otherwise impossible entities. The utter improbability of being alive, and not-dead by pure chance, made her put her womb up for rental. 

She was obviously in that space when she had carried me. Betha might disagree but I think the portal is there if you are unbelieving about the whole story nobody actually tells you. Ranee said we are all, in fact, already dead, renting out our atoms to be molded into living bodies. Jhantu would nod in agreement. 

“It’s a hallucination”, he’d add, looking contemplative  that a six-year-old me was asking these questions.

I can’t bear to stay cooped in this apartment now.       It feels so full of atoms from Betha and Ranee and Jhantu. I dress up in my best shirt and matching skirt, although it’s something I normally don’t do on Sundays. I may not get to dress up like this anytime soon, with the baby, in case the atoms are working towards it, hell-bent on procreation in spite of all the dead matter floating about outside and inside. I wear the Dahlia-embossed brooch and use makeup. I want to conceal the tell-tale marks of aging and approaching death on my face. Grabbing the purse that holds  my entire month’s salary, though I’m clueless how I mean to use so much cash, I pull the door shut. 

Outside my apartment building, I cease to exist. I walk like a detached monogrammed branded dress, a mannequin strutting about on the cobbled pathway. Am I parading myself in a street of impermanent beings made of dead, or ceaselessly dying, matter? It’s funny how the thought comes as I pass the underway that leads to the Tube station. I watch the Dead hop on and off, and the trains stopping by, waiting a moment, only to carry forward again, in a merry Ferris wheel of existence. On the windows of the passing trains, I see myself as an atom in an infinite chamber of nothingness.