In many ways, I’ve never found closure after Atishoo’s sudden death that I got to know a fortnight later from her daughter. I’d often start an email to the abyss, addressed to Atishoo, telling her how much I miss her English wit and her counsel and her irreverent wisecracks about everything under the sun and so much more but they would end up as drafts or get deleted. Nothing seemed to fit the bill to accept that this person, who I knew for a very brief moment in time, is no more here.
Friendships with older people – Atishoo was pushing north of sixty when I first knew her – are few and far between because it’s not often that one meets old folk who can vibe with the younger ones. But those that do are a wellspring of youth even as time and disease cripple their physicality. I was lucky to know and be befriended by Atishoo.
That wasn’t her real name of course. It was a “nick”, a handle she used on an old internet hangout place that I sometimes frequented. When we exchanged emails, I got to know her real name but for this recounting, Atishoo will remain so, as she does in my memories and recollections of her.
She would regale me with tales of the garden she set up and tended to. She had recently set up something like a bird-feeder which a noisy, bulky pigeon – who she named Bert – toppled over with his friends, so she had to rebuild something stronger with the help of her son. Eventually, “Bert and family” would begin to feature a lot in our emails. This was her quip when I enquired about Bert: “Bert and his extended family are still eating me out of house and home but enjoy their new found – no expense spared I might add – spa!” She also had created a pond and let some tadpoles mature in it. When the time came, I received an email with the subject “Ungrateful frogs”, declaring, “They all left overnight, never said thank you for your hospitality or even a wave goodbye for giving them a good start in life.”
At the time I knew her, she was suffering from cancer that the doctors and the family were trying hard to keep in check. But all that pain could do nothing to her spontaneous wit nor to her stoicism. It was very rare for her to let an inkling of all that pain through her words to me. A lot of our chats would hover around about animals and her narratives would often crack me up good. She also had four dogs, one of which, in the last leg of my acquaintance with Atishoo, got lost and then found, all in a matter of several stressful hours.
Atishoo’s presence coincided not just with the discovery of cancer in her but also the discovery of a lymphocytic ailment in my maternal grandmother. She (Atishoo) would have just come back from a bout of scans but was ready with an unassuming, serene dose of counsel for me. Somehow, she’d distill all her stoic wisdom into a pint of English wit and offer it to me and that would make all the difference.
More often than not, she’d lure me into pleasant conversations with her and other folks that used to hangout during times when I’d go under the radar for the recluse that I am. Her emails would always bring a sense of happiness, a sense of familiarity and inexplicably, a sense of home. It was also fun to watch her craft a new email thread in response to a previous one instead of just hitting “reply” and that first time she learned to “reply” instead of starting a new email and I almost missed it.
After a while, “where are you, it’s been a while?"s became more frequent from me to her than in the other direction. And then, an email from her daughter in the middle of September informing me of Atishoo’s death. Atishoo had managed to not let on that things were so bad that I was not the only one taken aback by the suddenness and the finality of the news. She was gone but it didnt quite register for months. Perhaps, more. Years have passed and this feeble fantastical notion that Atishoo is still here, just gone silent, lingers around.
Atishoo was gone before the pandemic years. She was gone before the sparrows made a brief comeback during the lockdown months. She was gone before I’d eventually adopt a kitten, or start volunteering at an animal shelter. And I’ve missed her presence all the more in my inability to share the zeitgeist with her and read her irreverent and humorous hot-take responses.