In Ruthvika Rao’s “Thirteenth Day,” the worst has already happened: a father is dead, and his children must make sense not only of their loss but of the thirteen-day mourning ritual that’s been thrust upon them. Over the course of the story, the familiar comforts marshaled against the grief—food, family, scripture—begin to overwhelm the young narrator. Her home swells with distant relations who suck the air, click their tongues, and belch; the shoes they pile at the door give off a “smell of old leather and musty feet”; a looped recording of the Bhagavad Gita etches itself into her skull. Early on, as the father’s corpse is prepared for cremation, a group is sent out to buy air fresheners “to bury the odor of the dead under the plastic, manufactured smells of jasmine and lily.” Shared grief, Rao reminds us, can take its toll on our senses and also on our relations. Family members become strange: the narrator’s brother appears looking like “a stranger showed up at our house wearing my brother’s eyes,” and the mysterious relative Amruth thaatha, who nobody seems to remember, is fatefully welcomed into the fold. Amruth thaatha steps in as the children’s caretaker, tenderly untangling the narrator’s hair and preparing her for each phase of the ritual. He is warm and kind, and she grows fond of him, making the emotional unfolding at the story’s sudden end that much more nuanced. With “Thirteenth Day,” Rao gives us a compelling exploration of the sensorial and relational complexities produced by mourning rituals, community caregiving, and trusting others. – The Fiction Staff
Thirteenth Day
First Day
They take Arjun. He is required, as the only son, to perform the holy duty of setting my father on fire. I don’t know what he thought then, what fears swirled in his mind. I stayed home with my mother and the other female relatives while Arjun walked out the door, stepping over the embers of his crumbling childhood. Amruth thaatha goes with Arjun. This calms me. Thaatha was the type of person you immediately trust, in whose hands you feel safe, warm. He holds Arjun’s hand and pats the top of his head. Then they leave with our father.
We called him thaatha, my brother and I, even though he was not our grandfather—this previously unknown relation, who showed up at our door on the eve of our father’s death. My brother and I were sitting at the feet of our departed father in the middle of our living room. He is shrouded in white from head to toe, and the mourners spread around us like the tracks of a magnetic field. The furniture had been pushed away to make room for the grievers and the grieved.
There was a gauze bow on my father’s head. The cotton gauze ran around his chin and ended at the top, like a cruel present. More gauze was packed into his nostrils. This was highly discomforting for me, and I suppressed an intense desire to crawl over his torso and pluck the gauze padding out. It looked uncomfortable. I wanted him to not be uncomfortable. I was dimly aware of the odor seeping out of him, despite the room-freshener and the rose petals. It is a scent that imprints itself under the surface of your brain and condemns you to carry the memory of it for the rest of your life.
When I first met thaatha, I could not see his face. This was because I had misplaced my glasses and was afraid to ask my mother to find them, like I normally did. She was sitting in the corner of the room, her sari and hair disheveled and her vermillion bottu a smudge. Her dark eyes were purple from a day of crying. New wrinkles had shown up over the course of the day, and deep lines had sewn themselves into her caramel skin. In her current state, I did not want to ask her to find my glasses. I was glad that I was seated close enough to our father to be able to see his face. A few feet away and all I would have seen would be a blurred vision of snow-white gauze hiding a chestnut-brown face.
Arjun sat in the far corner, nearly burrowed underneath the television set. The mourners patted his head and hugged me. Perhaps because I was a girl, I was given the privileged spot at father’s feet and allowed to weep at will. I was exhausted from crying. My eyes struggled to stay open and my head drooped into my chin. A relative would say poor little girl and suggest moving me into the bedroom to sleep. In that moment, I would force my lids apart and prove to everyone that I was indeed quite awake. I clung onto my father’s motionless feet and refused to move. It was nearly time for him to go. I wanted to stay until the very end.
They came in the morning, the breast-beating women and the stoic men. They came in droves, raising dust that we could not see. My mother has no siblings or parents who are still alive. So a group of helpers from my father’s side took over the house. They sent people to buy more air fresheners from the kirana shops, to bury the odor of the dead under the plastic, manufactured smells of jasmine and lily. They passed around steel glasses of water to wipe the salt from the mourners’ faces.
There was an eerie silence in the kitchen. The stove was cold, and no one went inside. A tape recorder played and replayed the Bhagavad Gita, as narrated by Ghantasaala. After ten hours, the words of the holy book were etched in my skull. Those who take birth cannot escape death, and those who die cannot escape birth. The dulcet tone of Ghantasaala would both calm me and drown me in inexplicable sorrow for the rest of my life.
The leader of the helpers—the tape-replayers, the air-fresheners, and the water-glass-passers—was Amruth thaatha. His desperately yellowed clothes stood out amongst all others who dressed in crisp white cotton. I only saw his face when he sat by me holding the water glass and told me to wipe my face. I was unsure of what that instruction meant and stared at him. He had kind eyes, like wrinkled almonds. I shook my head. He dipped four fingertips in the glass and wiped my salt-caked cheeks. I felt his warm, callused fingers on my skin as he dipped them into the glass and got my other cheek. I had only then noticed that my cracked skin was singeing underneath the salt tracks my tears made, in the breaks in my cheeks and the torn corners of my lips. I continued to observe Amruth thaatha as he repeated the instructions to my brother.
When Arjun came back, he was wet. He had taken a bath in the river that ran along the cremation ground. There was sand between his toes, and I imagine him walking along the riverbed after his dip in the cold water, shivering while his bare feet pick up the sand. He was also completely bald now, his dark locks offered to no god. I knew it was my brother, but it felt like a stranger showed up at our house wearing my brother’s eyes. He wasn’t crying. He looked like the dutiful son, and with his wet clothes and his bald head, he looked honored. He was no longer a child but a man then, unafraid of what life was to bring him in the future. Amruth thaatha held him close, patted his shoulder, and picked a stray hair from his face.
After the men return from the cremation grounds, the kitchen swung back to life, and the business of feeding the mourners took hold of everyone’s minds. Everyone except my mother. She did nothing. She had showered and, as custom dictated, washed her hair, like I had and like everyone in the house had. She had not bothered to dry her hair. It was in a loose braid that made a wet, snaking patch on the front of her sari. I did not recognize her white sari. It was produced by a concerned relative who had taken it upon themselves to welcome her into the fold of widowhood. She sat with her back to the window. A path of sunlight filtered through and warmed her hair as Arjun lay in her lap. They were both suspended in stupor, in private mourning without me. I watched them and felt an alienation that only the youngest child of the family was capable of feeling.
At my father’s side, they cooked, they ate. The men drank, the women gossiped, while we sat by ourselves near my father’s newly constructed altar. A blown-up passport photo of my father, without his usual dimpled smile, had been framed and garlanded with copper marigolds. A vase of rice lay before him, with two standing sticks of incense burning at its center. A mud lamp burned a low flame.
The sight of the brown whiskey bottles and the raucous laughter drove my brother and me to the storeroom, where we sat among the jute sacks bulging with rice. Amruth thaatha found us.
“Come outside,” he said. “It isn’t hot today, you should sit in the sun.”
The heat warmed our heads as we sat on the stone steps outside the house. A sea of footwear lay before us, whose various owners had left them haphazardly before entering the house, and the smell of old leather and musty feet was not altogether unfriendly. The street was calm. A scooter passed by the house, and a dog wagged its tail expectantly toward the smell of cooking food. Amruth thaatha produced a pocket comb and worked through the knots in my wiry hair. He told us stories about the king Krishnadevaraya’s conquests and about his clever court jester, Tenali Rama. I still couldn’t see well, but I travelled far, far away.
Third Day
They immersed his bones and ashes today, Arjun told me. I was not allowed to see them, but Arjun went again to the river. They warned us not to touch outsiders until the thirteenth day. We were kept from school. It had swept over me when his thatched bed was lifted off the ground, a feeling like relief, when the marigolds and rose petals spilled out, like a logical end, expected. The relief dripped away with every reminder of my father’s non-existence—there was a steady drip, drip, drip. His slippers by the bathroom. The dozen starched shirts delivered by the dhobi’s son the day after, and the smell of his leather wallet that Amruth thaatha counted money out of, as the pimpled boy waited awkwardly. The dresser in my parent’s bedroom, the only room the relatives had not overrun, on which his watch glinted against the striped gray Decolam. His comb, his talcum powder, his coconut oil, jumbled together with my mother’s broken bangles, dried flowers and plastic packets of bindis she would never again use. I felt his presence everywhere, and a hole dug its way into my heart. It grew bigger every time I rounded a corner and saw his stacks of books and every time I heard the iron gate creaking open to let another relative leave.
The pile of abandoned footwear outside the door shrank by the hour. Tradition forbade them from saying goodbye to the family members in whose house death had occurred, and they vanished gracefully into the cemented street one after the other. The interlude was over. Life resumed. The newspaper boy started throwing us our newspaper, and the milk boy rang the doorbell after dropping off the leaky half-liter plastic packets of buffalo milk. My brother and I found ways to occupy ourselves without entertaining ourselves.
Everyone left. That is, everyone except Amruth thaatha. He cooked for us, cleaned after us, bought the vegetables, weighed the rice and the dal, bargained with the green leaf seller in the foggy morning with a towel wrapped around his head like a scarf, and barked at the careless garbage boy to not leave trails of wet waste in the courtyard.
He made cars out of clay for us and fed us rice while narrating stories in an arresting baritone, of kingdoms many, many moons away. He slept on a canvas cot in the yard with a large cane next to him, to scare off robbers, he explained. He was up before us and slept after tucking us into bed.
Our mother, on the other hand, relinquished all household duties and confined herself to the bedroom for the entire day, asleep on the bed in a white mound, a figure that sometimes did not move for days at a time. Thaatha left some meals at her door, a plastic water bottle, a steel glass filled to the brim with salted buttermilk or lime sharbath.
The only time I saw her outside her room was in the morning after her bath, when she walked into the living room and lit the oil lamp in front of the framed passport photo. She removed the dried garland and replaced it with a new one, refilled the sesame oil in the mud lamp, changed the cotton wick, and lit it with a wooden matchstick. She briefly held her palms together and shut her eyes, and for a moment, she was transported into a world where I imagined she spoke to my father alone. Stolen conversations like the ones they used to have when he was alive. The image of her standing there would stay with me through to adulthood; the diaphanous, cloudy white figure standing against the filtered light of the sesame lamp. I did not wonder at the time why Amruth thaatha was still with us.
Thaatha brings me a plate of sambar rice with a generous helping of ghee. He mixes these with his hands and sits me down on the cement verandah. One meal a day, we sat together on the veranda and he narrated fantastical stories.
“I owned so much land in my day,” he said, “that I had to ride on my horse for an hour to cross it.”
“Where is it now?” I ask.
“The horse?”
“The land.”
“Long gone,” he said.
“Why?”
“Some bad habit or the other in the old days.”
“What habits, thaatha?”
“What use is talking of it now,” he said and refused to answer this line of questioning. He smiled and nodded until I exhaust all my questions, then distracted me with tales of talking monkeys and sly crocodiles until there were only remnants of my yogurt rice left on his fingertips.
Eleventh Day
We clean the house. Amruth thaatha pulls out all the sheets from my parents’ room and dumps them in the yard. He tells the dhobi to take them and to keep them. Don’t bring them back into the house, he warns. He sweeps the yard with a reed broom. The yard is paved with Shahabad stone and littered with dried leaves from the neem tree. He gathers them up and lifts them into a green plastic bucket. They crinkle under the broom and thaatha’s knuckles bleed from accidentally scraping the stone. He empties the bucket behind the house and sets fire to the leaves. I follow him around, watching every move. The acrid smell of burning leaves makes my eyes water. He refills the bucket with water and carries it back into the yard, then dips a small mug into the water and sprays the mug-water onto the ground in a great arc. The droplets slap the stone and steam rises. The day had been hot.
The rhythmic spraying, the fragrance of wet stone and dry earth settles into my nostrils. He goes back inside and sweeps, mops, and dusts the numerous crevices in the house with a sprout of bushy yellow reed, which he has tied to a tall bamboo stick. He holds it in his right hand and reaches up to the ventilators, while covering his nose with his yellowing upper cloth to avoid breathing in the decades-old dust. He washes all the linens and dries them on a line behind the house. The fluorescent clothespins are interspersed with the flowery bedsheets my mother had bought at the beginning of her marriage. He calls the catering contractor and selects meals for the thirteenth day: two rice items, two veg curries, two non-veg curries, two buckets of curd, ten blocks of Scoops-brand vanilla ice cream, and five liters milk for masala chai afterwards. A large canopy for the yard, he says, with blue and red stripes. Don’t forget the matching maroon carpets. He bargains with the flower vendor: twenty yards of marigold garlands, and throw in some loose flowers. He stacks extra LPG cylinders in the kitchen; a neat row of ferrous capsules stands against the grease-scrubbed wall.
My mother hands him the keys to the beeruva. She does not want to get up every time and fetch money for the arrangements that thaatha makes. The keys hang by the waistband of thaatha’s dhoti. He opens the beeruva when he needs to, counts out the money without disturbing the violent colors of mother’s silk saris. He pays the caterer, the plastic chair renter, the canopy and carpet renter, the milk-boy and the paper-boy.
Thirteenth Day
The thirteenth and final day of mourning is for feasting and celebration. The caterer arrives. The sun hits the red and blue striped canopy unspooling in the yard, and a few stray beggars settle in neat rows outside the gates. Arjun runs with the children of our relatives who have showed up again. Thaatha has picked out a bright yellow shirt for him to wear, with navy long pants. His head has acquired a dark shadow and no longer reflects the sun. Thaatha dressed me in a red silk langa and a green blouse. I had grown a few inches since the last time I wore the langa, and it stopped above my ankles now, instead of brushing the tips of my toes like it was supposed to. It had a folded pleat sewn in, an extra length of fabric discreetly sewn underneath in anticipation of my frequent growth spurts, a forethought on my mother’s part in order to make my clothes last longer.
Amruth thaatha stood me up on the cement platform in the yard and attacks the pleat with a safety pin. His eyes were not great, he misses every so often and made pinholes in the silk. I stood watching the blue-and-red-striped canopy unfold and the stale maroon carpets unroll. Thaatha plucked around my skirt, releasing the seams of the pleat. The skirt was too long afterwards, and it swept the floor behind me as I walk. The gold brocade border refracted light when I lifted it off the ground to race my brother.
The carpets cover the entire yard. They smell stale, like they had been left overnight with cooked rice and incense. Today is a day of remembering the departed and cooking their favorite dishes, thaatha tells us. My father’s favorites were fried masala potatoes, lentil stew, and bagara rice, I tell him. The caterer cooks these according to thaatha’s specifications.
My mother sits in the hall, and she is drab and colorless in her white sari. It was strange to see her outside her room. She is surrounded by relatives in colorful saris, and they stand sucking the air around her, clicking their tongues.
The house swelled with guests. People ate, belched, drank, and the house filled with their laughter. They prayed at my father’s passport photo. They pinched my cheeks and complimented my skirt. Thaatha nudged me with a finger and reminded me to say namaste, so I smiled and brought my palms together and said namaste.
Evening falls, and I’m by myself in the yard. I’m playing with pebbles that I had collected in the yard, and I was throwing them at the neem tree, three misses. I did not change out of my silk skirt, and there were still many relatives in the house. I would be back in school tomorrow, an end to the sanctioned isolation. My father walked me to school every day, and I was not sure how I felt about going without him. Perhaps it would feel like showing up without an arm or a foot.
I see thaatha walk out of the door and toward the gate with a large cotton bundle under his arm. He spots me at the tree and comes over. He runs a hand through my hair.
“Your hair knots fast. I combed it only a few hours ago.” He smiles.
I continue throwing pebbles at the tree.
“Look what I found,” he says, producing an object in his palm. My glasses. I grab them out of his hand, greedily put them on, and let out a satisfactory groan. I could see the lines in the leaves, the grooves in the tree, the stripes in the canopy, and the clouds spelled out in the sky. I also see thaatha’s face smiling down at me. He is older than I thought. The lines on his face are deep. Gray floated in his eyes.
“Thank you,” I say. I’m grinning so hard, my cheeks hurt.
I notice that thaatha is no longer standing behind me.
There is a singular scream from the house. The sun was setting and the crows that were feasting on my father’s thirteenth-day rice cakes fly away. More startled shouts and raised voices. Whispers. My mother’s bedroom is crowded. The sea of legs becomes thicker as I navigate towards the epicenter. I push through the stubborn ankles and nudge reluctant elbows. A firm hand pulls me and holds me in place. I squirm and wriggle out of the grip with violent force My shoulder hurts. I can feel the fingerprints burning in place.
It is all gone, they say. The beeruva is empty. The wedding jewelry, the silver, the cash, all of it. It is all gone. The poor widow, they mutter around me. Arjun holds my hand.
We hold our breath.
“Did either of you see Amruth thaatha?” they ask.
“No,” we chorus back.