In the doctor’s clinic, where you heard the words routine surgery. 

Outside the ICU, where the surgeon showed you a tumor in a stainless steel bowl half-filled with blood. 

In the middle of the night, when you received a phone call from the hospital, and your first instinct was to look at your watch and commit to memory the approximate time of death. 

In the hallway, where the nurse handed you a polythene bag containing her essentials. Toothbrush. Towels. Saris. Comb. Talcum powder. Tubes of fairness cream and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the cover of which was smeared with tea- and coffee-colored rings.

(Not) at the funeral. 

On the side-lower berth of the Coromandel Express. A clay pot containing her ashes rocking next to you. Outside, blurred faces. Unidentifiable villages. Dimly lit stations. Shops and shanties running alongside railway tracks. Miles of darkness behind you and miles and miles of darkness still ahead of you.

On the toilet seat of a cheap hotel room, where you watched a video from Gaza that had gone viral in recent weeks. A woman in a burqa was screaming for her two-year-old son who had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. She was holding his shrouded corpse tightly while a few members of her family were trying to wrest it away from her. Around her, there were loosely formed clusters of people who were physically mourning his death—who were behaving in an ethically bona fide manner in which you were incapable of behaving yourself. 

At the Babu Raj Chandra Ghat, in Kolkata, where you released her ashes into the Hooghly River, which is a distributary of the Holy Ganga and flows eventually into the Bay of Bengal. The priest told you about the origins of the word soul—which seems to have been derived from Proto-Germanic saiwaz, and originally meant “coming from or belonging to the sea”—and you ended up grieving into your body; you ended up grieving into your soul. 

At the bank. 

At the therapist’s office, the decor of which was as ordinary as your grief. 

At your desk, where a few days after she died—or was it before—you tried to put her down on the page, you tried to stash her away in a poem. 

While reading Premchand’s Kafan and wondering if death can be expressed as an economic event, if grief is a function of capital.

While fucking a woman on the same old bed and mattress on which your mother had probably consummated her marriage. 

At your wedding. A framed photo of your mother kept on an old plastic chair, garlanded with flowers that had dried up in the sun. 

At the gynecologist’s office, where the doctor tried to console your wife. It’s more common than you think. About 20% of all known pregnancies end up in miscarriage. 

Many years later, in another hospital room, where the nurse handed you a prematurely delivered baby that had, against all odds, survived the night.