My uncle sped down the main road, mostly empty. Past midnight…No one comes out now but party-goers or dead drunks…or frantic relatives. The turn into the small winding road that cuts through the villages was sharp and urgent. The fumbling of the car lights. Big to small and the big one again. Every car we met on the way had to bear with our incessant horning, and so must the villagers. I sat at the back, and wondered if it was some kind of secret signal between villagers. That someone was going. Going.
When we reached we rushed into the main room. His body was propped up with a few seats and a crude mattress, and covered with a blanket hastily folded and sewn together thicker to avoid the chill. His frame was skeletal – hollows in the face I didn’t know hollows were. At the temples, and the cheeks sunken in so deep. Spasms coursed through his body. His eyes cloudy and unaware. Two days ago we stood beside him and said that we were good kids, thought that Tina was absolutely pretty, and wanted to give out candy to everyone in the village. It’s hard to imagine him then as I saw him, his mouth opening and closing and too weak to say a thing.
And I’ve never had so many adults crying in the same room as me before. The village priest stands on the head of the bed, chanting in a dialect I wished I learnt. I never really talked to him properly before, because we never really understood each other. Now I can’t hear him and he can’t hear me.
My baby cousin cries and kicks up a fuss. It was 1am. He must be sleepy, but maybe, maybe he knows what’s going on. My uncle retreats from the bed and smokes furiously. The crying has died down by then, but the sniffling continues. In his illness he hasn’t drank anything, so we took some water, which my aunt mixed it with the holy water the priest brought, and fed it to him through a spoon. He gurgles, and it doesn’t go down. Not for a long time. He must be drowning in the phlegm in his lungs.
It was 3am. My toes were freezing in my boots. Every other part of my body was warm, but it felt so, so cold. We ate a little, toasty pieces of buns and bread, or chocolates. And the children were chased to sleep. In the huge 4-storey house, only the first floor looks fully lived in. The second had just three beds, for when we visit, the third storey was hardly renovated at all (In the summer, he would sleep there on a bamboo mat when we came to visit. He can’t walk now.), and the fourth storey was a just a giant balcony, and we used to climb up there to look at the starry nights of the unpolluted countryside.
We slept on a queen bed, the three of us. When they woke us up, it was 6.30am, 2nd January, and he was still alive. He couldn’t talk, but was conscious. We took the scheduled flight home. When I woke up today he was gone.
I don’t know how he went, but I know my other grandfather did so very quickly. He coughed twice and just…just died, as opposed to spasming through the night or something, I’m not so sure myself.
How will I die?
