Before dying, Great-Grandpapa asks for my newly wedded mother, his voice ringing louder each time he enunciates the alphabet Ns—Nina—in his granddaughter’s name. Great-Grandpapa’s voice is so strong that at first his second wife, that woman, whose conjoining with Great-Grandpapa brought the word bigamy to the family door, thinks he must be dead; surely his illness-ridden friable body is incapable of issuing forth such a resonant voice and so must reverberate as though ripped from that liminal space, where souls with unfinished business pause before their ascension. That woman screams, and my great-grandmother, who has been sitting on the other side of the short betel-nut-stained red cream boundary wall of that house—the nurse’s quarters—on a large green sofa her four sons have transported all the way from the ancestral bungalow, from the other side of town beyond the general hospital, and placed facing the wall with the muck and thoroughfare of the town behind her, stands up and brings her wooden stick down hard twice against the flat top of the boundary wall. This smack and thud is my great-grandmother’s way of asking that woman, whose dalliance with Great-Grandpapa resulted in an illegal second marriage instead of furtive meetings between a man and his mistress, if her husband is finally gone.

There is no language that would allow a conversation between the two women who made up her father’s private life, my grandmother often tells my mother when she comes to visit us in the winters in Delhi from Bihar. Over pots of cardamom milk-tea they speak invariably, behind cupped bejeweled hands, of certain blemishes in the family history. “A butterfly and a moth may descend from a similar order, but their lives and the manner of leading those lives is never the same,” my grandmother will say, as though by rote.
“Neither is their death, Nina. Some dust, some burn.”

Some have their wings ripped, Mother tells Father one night when we are still children and they’re still in the habit of standing in our room watching us sleep. I was not very good at pretend sleepbreathing, nor was my brother at lying still, although we were always very good at running around the various family estates looking for something to catch. One day in the storage rooms of the old hospital building, out of where Great-Grandpapa’s surgery had been run, we find suture hooks no one uses anymore and attach them to the handheld sweep nets that are our hunting weapons and set out on mid-afternoons to capture and impale whatever life there is to pin in our insect books.

The weight of my mother’s face, her 19-year-old unforgiving face, has made her grandfather’s passing difficult. His body lingers that day. He continues to cry out for her, repeating her name—Nina—as though it’s a prayer between sips of water that woman, still wearing her nurse’s uniform, administers. His four sons stand around him a few paces away, temporarily united by the slight touch of their billowy white kurtas. Each hunches protectively into himself, stiff against the softening he feels in his core for that woman as he watches that woman’s love-laden ministrations, unable to stand the pain and humiliation their father is surely reliving in hourly increments. When my mother’s youngest uncle calls out to my great-grandmother he can only get the word Ma out of his mouth. He doesn’t know what he wants to say, but he knows that right now in his pain only one person can soothe him. He leaves the outer room his father has been dying in for the past weeks. My mother’s youngest uncle will sometimes say, when his brothers are no longer in the same room, that his father called out for his first wife even before “I reached my mother,” who would not enter that house and had remained for the duration of her husband’s illness on the other side of the boundary wall. “Papa asked them to move his charpai near the door so he could speak with her.” And his brothers picked up their father’s roped bed and wedged it within the doorframe so that when their father chose to turn around and look out as he spoke, he would see that boundary wall.

When that roped bed is raised above the boundary wall of that house—the nurse’s quarters—over the shoulders of my great-grandpapa’s four sons, each clutching a wooden leg, the people of Siwan think that he has finally passed. The knotted woven rope, which makes up the rectangular frame of the charpai, on which my great-grandpapa had lain since the start of his illness months ago, does not sag from his weight. Years later the town milkman’s granddaughter, who witnessed the event, will inappropriately query my 15-year-old brother about the logic of carrying my great-grandpapa through the town to his original home. “If he had been alive surely family Fiat car would have been summoned?” she will ask my brother, who was at the time unaware of this particular family skeleton. “Why would his sons carry him on their shoulder as though they were taking him for the last rites of the departed?” Unaware of the chasm of emotion she has created in my brother, the town milkman’s granddaughter, who herself was only 14 at the time of this occurrence, will ramble about how the charpai was so straight and taut, almost like the day it had been woven, that people were certain that Great-Grandpapa’s body had been transferred onto this new bed for his final journey to his family home so that the townspeople would not witness the marked curvature of his sins on the roped body of the original bed he had lain restlessly in for the duration of his illness. “We were all shocked when Doctor Sahib called out for your mother—Nina. His twitching elbows (that were visible off the sides of the bed) we put down to after-death shivers that one sometimes sees in the dead.” My great-grandmother walked in front of her husband’s bed, leading her sons and her husband to their ancestral home. “That woman, walked behind your Great-Grandpapa’s family, his true family.”

On the day my mother—Nina—is born, my great-grandpapa lost his feet in a dream. When he visited his granddaughter in his dreams, as she grew older he would fly above her with his bird’s wings stretched out and perch his claws on the branch of a teak tree, the same kind of tree whose twigs he whittled down into earring hoops with his surgeon’s knife so that the earring holes in his granddaughter’s ears would enlarge naturally. This was the gift of that tree to maiden girls whose ears had not yet learned the pain of being weighed down with heavy earrings that sometimes tore at their tender skin and left them bloodied. This was also the kind of tree under which Great-Grandpapa first saw that woman standing in her widow’s white with her two infant sons in tow. “The tree itself has always been hidden from my vision,” he tells his wife after he turns around and faces that boundary wall of his second home, “but now I can’t see Nina either. I am flying too high even though I try not to and she flits firmly in another world.”

My grandmother made the nightlong journey from her marital home to her parent’s ancestral home when her mother finally called for her. My great-grandpapa did not ask for his granddaughter anymore, and my grandmother did not tell him that his only granddaughter—Nina— had refused to come when she was called. She did not tell him of the word wars that had already begun within the newly wedded home of his granddaughter Nina. She did not assure him that he was forgiven for the distrust and rage the women of her mother’s family had inherited and continued to breed because of the humiliation he had brought into their lives and homes. She did not speak to him at all. She held a silver cup brimming full of water from the Ganges to her father’s lips so that he could drink one last sip of water.

Of the thirteen days of mourning that follow, the sky only rumbles and leaks once. In all that time that woman continues to stand outside my great-grandpapa’s ancestral home. She never changes out of the nurse’s uniform she had on for her shift at the hospital when the call came through telling her that that man had gotten sicker. She never calls out to anyone. None of my great-grandpapa’s stepsons stand with her on her vigil. My mother’s youngest uncle can no longer recall that woman’s face, but he remembers the yellowness of her hands on his father’s face and the tender steadiness with which she held the washcloth. The combined smells of carbolic acid and iodine she brought with her calmed Great-Grandpapa in the first few days of his illness. Those smells lingered in the days that followed, putrefying everything. My mother’s youngest uncle remembers that woman twisting that washcloth in her hand and its corners flapping like fettered wings as the men carried the man that woman loved for cremation, and the women who had his name stayed within his ancestral home, mourning in crescendo in their clothes of spotless white.