Pickled
Photo by Yangfan Gan On the morning of the funeral, I’m asked to dig a hole. My mom’s already picked out a spot in Naniji’s backyard. “That was her favorite tree,” she says, pointing through the kitchen windows at the only tree on the property. In fairness, the tree is impressive: a Japanese dogwood that flowers lavishly in spring. It’s green now, drooping with August humidity, and I can see the box of ashes sitting underneath it like a signpost. A bit of déjà vu. I dug a similar hole for my dad’s ashes a few years ago — also, incidentally, under a tree.
There isn’t a real shovel in Naniji’s garage. All I can find is a rusted old spade, which seems excessively ghoulish. I grab it and make my way across the back patio, where my aunt Anjuli is leashing her Siberian cat Vanya to a banister. Everything but Vanya’s face and tail are shaved close. He looks like he has an ill-kempt goatee and a tail like a corn dog.
“I hate it,” Anjuli says. “The groomer was like, ‘Nope, sorry, all we do is the Lion Cut.’”
My mom and I are staying here for a couple days with Anjuli, who’s recently moved into the apartment upstairs. Today’s plan is for everyone to gather on the patio with baked goods and Earl Grey tea. My mom’s going to read a poem she agonized over choosing, and then she’ll give others a chance to speak. The emphasis of this makeshift COVID-19 funeral is on the distant past because Anjuli and my mom’s fondest memories of their mother are the oldest ones.
In theory, I know that Naniji was once a likable person. Since I was a kid, she has been the subject of family lore. She escaped Pakistan in the tumult of India’s partition and wound up becoming a radio personality in Boston. In the ’60s, she hosted classical music programs for local NPR affiliates, and was admired citywide for her faintly accented English. She was often recognized in aerobics classes and restaurants by the sound of her voice. After she and my grandfather, Pépé, divorced, she sought a more lucrative career. She became a real estate agent and, at the time of her death, owned four or five houses in Cambridge — subdivided Victorians she lent out to young families and graduate students from Harvard and MIT. The Empire. She printed money.
My late father once described this later version. He developed a consistent mythology around the idea and dispensed it like a fairytale, a thing to tell kids to keep them from wandering off into the woods alone. The pickling happens when you become too rich and too powerful. People grovel to you, and you in turn start looking down on them. In other words, the power makes you mean. And that meanness is like a brine. It preserves the body, keeping you alive for much longer than expected, but sours everything. This, according to my dad anyway, accounted for Naniji’s almost 90 years of life, the last decade of which she endured in a state of constant agitation: her memory shot, her body broken, alone at the seat of her Empire in Cambridge. .
