Finding Maya: In the story of a friend’s death, a love story about family

After a certain age, loss is a constant. Sometimes it is sudden: you saw someone yesterday and today he is gone, just like that, without a word. Sometimes it is inevitable – ageing, too many birthdays – and sorrow intertwines with a gradual acceptance.

Then there is the long illness, where hope and despair chase each other like a mad dog and his tail. One minute it is almost fine, another minute the results don’t look good. Words like biopsy, chemo, infusion enter daily vocabulary. You know many who made it, and then you knew someone who didn’t.

Nothing prepares you for losing a friend, someone you belly-laughed with, with whom you shared details of your heartbreak, who got angry on your behalf and gave you the books they loved.

You grew up together, you were beautiful at the same time, ready to take on the world, poised on the sweeter, giddier side of age; you were going to live forever. Which is why you never made laborious plans to travel together or consciously made time for each other. When you are in town, you meet. Else, you text. There’s time, you thought.

There is a genie bottled in old friendships, sparking the magic of newer meetings with the familiarity of shared experiences that transcends awkwardness and second-guessing. One never has to lie awake wondering why and if and whether.

There is a calm taking for granted that’s exciting. We know each other from scratch, we know each other’s stories, we were there when it happened. A friendship without misunderstandings, giving each other space enough to grow in other directions with other people – it is rarer than true love of the amorous kind.

Maya was a friend’s elder sister, traditionally beyond our league. And there was no reason for her to find us interesting, not only because we were not, but also because compared to her we were a timid trio. I at least was well on my way to be a first-class people-pleaser, saying all the right things and nodding before anyone finished speaking.

Maya scared us a little because she said it like it is. Standing up for what was right, a fight we were too meek to fight back then. The tallest among us – we were all skinny enough to warrant medical attention – she wore a half-smile if anyone spoke what can scientifically be termed nonsense. She just had to say “what?” with a particular inflection for us to break down and take our nonsense back.

In her presence, we had to own what we proclaimed; she’d ask for a backstory, her honey-brown eyes warm and alive with listening.

As we grew up and a bit apart, incidents and adventures were upon us, so that meeting up in Kerala was an incoherent, joyous exchange of story so far. Maya did not do the done thing; she was the last among us to marry, doing so only when she had met the man she wanted to marry. Immediately the rest of us wondered if we had been too hasty. Maybe we should have waited too…

Exactly two years before the day she died at the age of 59, she called me late evening. “You are the migraine queen. Tell me, have you ever fainted from a headache?”

She fainted once more that night, so the next day she went for an MRI. Glioblastoma. An angry tumour right in her brain. It was taken out, it grew back immediately, chemo, exhaustion, hair loss. She brought a practical note to the matter of mortality, only once telling her husband in a garden she planned with time-consuming attention, standing among all the fruits and flowers, more wistful than sad, “I wish I didn’t have to go now.”

Behind her back we marveled at how self-aware she continued to be, how clear-eyed and unsentimental. She said on the phone, “One night I woke up breathless. And thought, oh, so this is death, this is how I die. But then guess what? I woke up the next day.”

I confess I never knew what to say in reply. I had expected a small amount of melodrama and therefore was unprepared for the mundane chitchat she demanded of me.

Once diagnosed, she said she wanted to urgently talk to her daughter. She wanted to calibrate what she wanted to say so it didn’t come across as maternal paranoia. And this is what she told her: “You may be the most talented person in the world, but no one is going to knock on your door and come find you. You have to go out there even if you fear your work is mediocre, and keep working till your work is less mediocre. The world won’t find you, you have to find the world.”

If I hadn’t fallen in love with her long ago already, I would have at that moment. I liked that she demystified money and placed it in the larger context of spiritual essentials. She was always whittling down to bare bone what I made a song and dance about.

As she settled down in her sister’s home, unable now to move around, she had me thinking hard about this thing we call family. What is a family, how are they made, who does what? Maya may have suffered from a fatal condition that was in the end ordinary and common but her going was anything but ordinary.

This is not a story of her death, it is a love story. A story of how her immediate family – parents, sister, husband, daughter – surrounded her with meaning and music. In my last phone call to her in February she said nothing beyond hello. Then she fell silent.

The medical bed arrived. A day nurse and a night nurse. Palliative care began. Her sister said, “I needed to think for her. As she lay there unmoving, I had to guess what she feels or wants.” If Maya was preparing to stop living, her family was learning to love her in new ways.

When Maya’s daughter thanked her aunt for looking after her mom, the aunt said softly, “Maya would have done the same for me.” What I knew from faraway Bangalore was that her family clamoured to be around her, to be there for her. They spoke to her all the time, sharing gossip and news, they cut a cake on a wedding anniversary, played the western classical music that she was so fond of. A father gallantly keeping up a one-sided conversation; a mother holding hands. For hours.

I could feel the grief but also the deep love, and finally a dim understanding of what a family could come to mean. She was not alone for a moment during those last days; everyone took turns to sit with her even at night. From the moment they knew about the cancer, any hope in their hearts was coated in pure terror.

Even though Maya herself calmly said, okay so I have a 5% chance, the last two months were difficult for the others. Because they were with her and yet had to plan for a future without her. At the back of their mind was the funeral they had to arrange. To come together with that knowledge, to let her know they were there for her, right unto the moment she went like a whisper.

I have seen ornate funerals, with extravagant speeches and lavish feasts. Funerals that can be mistaken for weddings. I have seen relief and indifference on the faces of kith and kin. What it is to live and die, leaving behind not sincere mourners but a bunch of relatives biting off their smiles during the last rites.

Losing Maya, to me, was finding Maya. In my memories, in the exchanges during teenage sleepovers, in texts and panic phone calls, in the flower firm that reminded me of her upcoming birthday because I sent her a bouquet once… She knew all the words. Intimidatingly articulate, the levity and analysis she brought to problems rendered them somehow manageable. I remember in great detail her wit. The way language danced for her alone.

In the end it matters only that we are missed. Maya created websites, called plants by their botanical name and knew exactly when a fruit in her garden wanted to be plucked, sewed double-sided quilts and cloth dolls with unruly wool hair, and said what had to be said, because no one else would say it...

I don’t think I can ever say anything without thinking Maya would have said it better.

Shinie Antony is a writer, editor and columnist based in Bengaluru.