Funeral Home
BY HIYA CHOWDHURY
When Rania dies, we put her on a half-price mattress on the living room floor because there is nowhere else for her to go. There are no pyres left in the city.
Our living room is already small—which is true of all the houses in Azaad Colony—but it feels much smaller today because Rania takes up so much room. But she is a tiny person. She is so tiny it’s hard to believe that she should make anything look so small and suffocating, as opposed to making everything look impossibly, devastatingly large. She is too tiny for sixteen. Sometimes, when she drags herself over to my side of the bed on the coldest nights of the year, I sense her little feet propped up against mine and feel oddly maternal. Like I’m some big well of endless heat burning into the night. And like she’s a toddler: she lugs one skinny arm across my torso and traps my legs under hers, and though it takes a few minutes, the chill slowly melts away from inside the covers. Her face bores into mine—hollow and sharp against my fuller cheeks—and we sleep this way till summer comes, at which point she shifts to her side of the bed obediently even though I don’t ever complain. And then the year trudges on like it always does, and I no longer get to hold my sister—my little sister, who slipped out of Ma only a minute behind me—and pretend that the world stops moving, that the winter becomes warmer in Azaad Colony whenever she wants it to. But time has not stopped for me. I wonder when I can make the switch; when I will have to relent and let Rania become a thing of the past.
The last time Rania touched my side of the bed, I was dressing her in something more presentable than her scooby-doo nightie from when we were children. I outgrew mine years ago: I bloomed into my limbs and my chest and my shoulders so much quicker than she ever did, and scooby-doo stretched across my skin till he was a brown blob on the soft cotton cloth, his plastic face cracked and splintered in places. And then it was too inappropriate for me to wear but Rania could still wear it inside the house, though only in front of Ma and me. Ma is strict about these things. She only allows us to forgo shame in front of the women we are related to, and I think she is stricter about this when death is involved. This morning, Ma took me aside and asked me to put Rania in something that other people can look at.
My mother is the adult in this house: she is not much older than me and so much younger than my father, but she is always right. Today, there is an immense power in everything she is doing. When she speaks, it is a grunt, something hollow and brittle. She is moving around the house swiftly, picking things up and dusting things down and preparing for the long day that is coming, all the while muttering something under her breath. It is likely a chant, or a prayer: when she comes to the end of one couplet she pauses for a moment, closes her eyes, and flattens herself against the nearest wall. Then she is off again, cooking for the company we will inevitably have today, replenishing the tea leaves in the kitchen and the soap dish at the bathroom sink, throwing away fresh, unused tablets from Rania’s medicine box.
Ma is telling me to do certain things–like dressing Rania, or holding Baba’s hand when he cries–because she thinks I need direction after what has happened. For all our efforts to keep Rania alive, none of us had considered what we would do at the very moment of her death. I woke up at dawn today with her head on my chest, turned to face me: she looked asleep, but this sleep was sound like it had never been before. When I tried to wake her, she slithered into my arms like she had no structure at all, supple and slick like a fish out of water. I believe I screamed and thrashed in place till Ma and Baba stormed our bedroom, but I don’t remember much else. The next thing I remember is Ma grabbing the meatiest part of my arm with the sharpest points of her nails and shaking me like I was the last bit of frozen ghee inside the tin, refusing to come unstuck. Then she told me to pull out the pink kameez. I think she thinks that if Rania is dressed in her pink kameez, with its careful embroidery and shapeless frame, nobody will say that she was one of those truant girls who went and invited death into Azaad Colony.
But it is very hard to dress a body when it does not want to be dressed. I could barely achieve it. I fiddled with her limp arms, stuffed all the extra skin into sleeves, held her neck so gingerly between my cheek and collarbone that I could have let it snap. I told myself that this Rania was not my Rania. No, this was gudiya, the old rag doll we played with as children. Baba had rescued her off the top of the colony dumpster when Rania and I were four. She had come to our house smelling of Gold Flake cigarettes and paan spittle, and Ma had boiled her in saltwater till all the red in her cheeks had faded away into the steam. While gudiya had dried off on a clothespin in the verandah, Ma had sewn her a new dress overnight with a maternal electricity in her fingers that nobody had seen since her tailoring days, and that nobody saw again. Gudiya, uselessly fluttering in the wind, had needed to be pinned down and wrestled into her little outfit until she was brand new.
For a moment, when my father takes Rania from our bed to the mattress, the death mattress, the mattress that will never quite leave us, it feels as though gudiya—pale, boiled, discoloured—is lying in our living room. Only now she is life-size.
*
The weather has only just begun to turn in Azaad Colony. The neighbours’ voices are becoming more hoarse everyday; the construction crew working on the unfinished metro flyover across from the colony are turning up in two, three, four layers of itchy hand-knit cardigans; the air is dense with little puffs of white breath and cigarette smoke. It’s that time of the year. Down at the chai stall, Ramesh-bhai’s youngest boy is secretly mixing rum into the chai and selling it for an extra twenty rupees by special order only. Mindless noise: the little whispers exchanged over the tinkling steel utensils, the brief, staccato thud of palms hitting the wooden table and coming away with crushed elaichi and little shards of clove stuck to them. The soft slurping, the burning, agitated exhale that only the local variety of rum can produce. It is very alive, in a way that is difficult to stomach.
By afternoon the winter has flooded our house too, making everything still and stern. Rania looks serene: pink like the inside of a mouth against the textured, grey-black mosaic floor. The sight of her has finally folded Ma into a small, dilapidated shape on the sofa, her knees grinding against her belly, saree falling off her shoulder, spiralling down from the brusqueness of the morning. She is looking at Rania so carefully that she is almost not looking at all. Baba is pacing around the room, clutching the landline phone to his chest and waiting for the dial-tone to become a voice. He pauses at Rania’s feet every time he comes close to her. Sometimes, as he walks past her, he unspools a strand of her hair by mistake and dips down like a small sparrow to tidy it back into place. I am trying to stay very still to keep out of his way. All I really want to do is put a pillow under Rania’s still head, as though she is suddenly a newborn with a soft spine that needs to be cradled. The news says to try and prevent contact with the diseased body, but it does not say what to do when the body has died. Is the body still diseased? Is Rania still sick if she is not Rania at all? The questions pinch my head like the tooth comb Ma uses to take lice out of our hair.
Baba only stops pacing when the phone connects. Immediately, the house is awake again: Ma’s head comes off the sofa, Baba brings the receiver to his ear with such speed that I don’t even see it happen, and I almost expect Rania to move too. Baba barks obscenities into the mouthpiece: Motherfucker, I have a dead daughter, don’t tell me you can’t cremate her! You have to! Spit goes everywhere. No, I can’t bury her, are you a fucking idiot? We don’t bury anyone! The dial-tone comes back. Ma’s head falls down as quickly as it came up. Baba begins to pace again, now quicker. He stretches the phone cord from one end of the living room to the other, wrapping us all in wire, sealing Ma and Rania off together to one side of the room with the sofa set and the dirtier end of the rug. Like this we wait for the next call to connect, even though we know that all the funeral grounds are overflowing and people are dying in the streets. In the midst of all this a chilly sleet comes grating down on the roof of our house, filling everything with an empty clattering sound. I cannot hear when Baba dials the next number, and what it is he says.
*
Some people from the colony materialise on our doorstep, and I know that more are on the way. I wonder who tells them that Rania has died. I try to imagine the possible chain of communication: at some point, Baba must have called Jitesh-uncle, who works with him at the bank, then Jitesh-uncle would have told his wife, his wife would have run down to the colony park, which is really just a sandy plot of land where the women gather every afternoon to gossip and sip chai, and they would have told Ramesh-bhai, and then Ramesh-bhai’s boy would have told everybody else who came to the stall.
I understand why they are collecting outside our house like this, toeing the threshold of our small verandah and waiting to be called in. Nobody like Rania has ever died in Azaad Colony. They must be so perplexed, so bitter at whatever power has cursed our colony this way: none of them knows what has really happened, or at least none of them knows for certain that Rania was one of the diseased. The ones who suspect it are not here; they will never come here again, and maybe it is for the better. But like Ma and Baba, most of the others don’t believe what the news says about protecting people from all this deadliness. They say that the news gets in the way of how we live our lives in the colony.
The front door is open. In its place, the mesh, fishnet gate is latched tight against our door frame, telling everyone that we are not ready for them yet. I imagine this upsets them: these are not patient people. Privacy unsettles them, as though private people are always holding on to some disturbing secret that will hurt them. They try to coax the secrecy away, nurse it into submission. At the threshold of the door, just in from the rain, they all look like they are bleeding into each other. Sushma-didi’s big nose and her two soggy pigtails fuse with Fattoh-jaan’s dark skin and leaky eyes. Sushma-didi’s hair is the colour of Lalit-uncle’s dripping moustache, and two shades darker than little Ronnie’s tousled, greasy hair; they are all standing next to each other like a wet tapestry. Only Rukhsar-aunty from next door is standing a little further away from everyone else because she knows that Ma doesn’t want her near the house. Rukhsar-aunty, with her neon knitting needles and sparkly hijabs and long painted nails, is watching us intently from her own verandah opposite our house, but her face is hard. I cannot tell what she is thinking, or if she is thinking of us at all.
In Azaad Colony, there is no choice but to love them all and to be watched by them all. The colony is small. There is tenderness here that must be repaid. Sushma-didi taught us history in the fifth grade and skipped over all the boring chapters in the textbook, like the ones about peculiar hillside vegetation or the Bolshevik revolution. Ma hates Fattoh-jaan, but she always slides me free mango candies under the cash counter at her canteen. Lalit-uncle plays football with the children in the colony and always loses on purpose. When the construction crew employs someone new, Ronnie shows them bike tricks on the dirt road that separates us from the flyover. And Rukhsar-aunty is our keeper: she keeps our secrets and tells us stories. Often she sits outside the schoolyard a few kilometres from the colony and waits for the children to leave their classes and flock around her for their regular story-hour.
There is one story she tells particularly well: it is about how a long, long time ago, the chief minister had wanted to bankroll a new gated colony in the outskirts of the city, something far enough away from himself to make people forget that he was, after all, a terrible chief minister. It was supposed to be a wonderful place to live in, with twenty-storey buildings, with a real park for the kids, so close to the metro and the hospital and a school—there was even a fountainhead somewhere. The Municipal Corporation came promptly, showing everybody that they could be prompt when the men in patloons and topis needed them to be, Rukhsar-aunty would say. Then they razed down all the trees and they burnt down the houses that we made on this land. They took everything: my school photo, my red saree, my namaaz mat also! Kutte! Rukhsar-aunty would spit into the sand, and the little flecks of foam would land on the earth like pebbles.
Then she got to the meat of it. Something had happened back then—the government ran out of money or there was some court dispute or a worker ran away with the chief planner’s wife—but it had made the construction stall for a couple of months. Bas, that’s where we jumped back in! We just swooped in and took our land back; now Rukhsar-aunty would whoop and cheer and the children would join in, already late for their afternoon baths. Everybody came together and we built it back into our home. The chief minister can’t hurt us, you watch! It’s true, nothing ever happened. The big men didn’t care enough. The people who lived here—about two hundred of them, all with small families—put up smaller, flimsier houses than the Corporation would have liked, and Ramesh-bhai set up his stall next to the basin of the half-finished fountainhead. Some colony members got jobs with the construction crew booked for the flyover, which has been halfway built for decades now. This felt like betrayal because it was a Corporation job, but it got us electricity and running water. Then they opened up a bank in the district and attracted people like Baba, who had real degrees but nowhere else to go, and so that got us a TV. Houses with a bedroom and a kitchen. Refrigerators.
The year all the houses came up, somebody found a number plate from some unfortunate car lying in a corner of the dirt road and carved the words Azaad Colony onto its back with a blade. Now it sits on our gate, telling everyone that we are far enough away from anyone who actually matters to consider ourselves free.
I do love them all. They are all we have. They are bursting through the seams of the verandah, aching to be invited in, to touch the girl who has died and to comfort those who loved her. This is what it means to live in this colony. The more they all look at us, the more dead Rania becomes.
*
Ma hates it when people look at Rania. Rania is loud and likeable, which terrifies her. In the summer holidays, Rania would trot up to Fattoh-jaan at the canteen, streaking through drunken men singing folk songs, and she would ask her for two-rupee glasses of lemonade while I stood outside staring at my feet. Then she sat there for hours, delicate and wild in a rickety chair, hair knotted in the summer loo, till Fattoh-jaan raised her eyebrows at me and I took Rania away. The next day, Ma’s gaggle of colony women would gossip ferociously about the devil girl she had raised (Socho, sitting with all these men, drinking Fattoh’s lemonade! Fattoh, of all people!) and so Ma would pick up old newspapers in the evening and snap welts into Rania’s knuckles. Then when Ma took us to the women’s kitty parties in the colony so that we, too, could lay claim to our womanhood, Rania shoved greasy, fried kachoris into her salwar pockets and smuggled them into my hands on the way back home. And then we chuckled so hard that peas fell out of our mouths and our noses caught fire, and Ma would only know the truth if she saw our fingers before we washed them—mucky, coated in mashed potato and a thin sheen of sweat.
Ma tried to pray the rebellion out of us the best she could. Each morning, she put her ceramic idols on our pillows and pricked our palms into a prayer before we could protest. Little postcard pictures of Ma’s gods were lodged into odd cracks in the house— under the fridge magnets, next to the kitchen sink, in the lining of the sofa set—and she liked to know we were always being watched. Her faith has odd rules. You didn’t eat anything na, Ma asked us in a higher register than usual after we spent an evening with Rukhsar-aunty without having told her first. She heckled Feroze-mama when he walked past the temple with his skull cap on. Ma, who never sewed gudiya another dress, dug her nails into our cheeks and stuffed holy prasad into our mouths on the verandah and beamed back at Azaad Colony. Still, Rania would usually spit her share into a roadside ditch, and we’d watch the sweet, yellow blob float away with the rotting leaves and litter and candy wrappers into nothingness.
When Rania got sick, then, I know exactly what Ma didn’t say out loud: that it was god’s will.
Rania and I were there, right in the thick of things, when it first began. Or at least we were paying attention. Three months ago, when the city first started to get sick, everything was under control. People were dying of a mystery disease, but not so much that it was on every news channel. Only on the really serious ones, and then, later at night, on the ones that enjoyed conspiracy theories. Rania and I rummaged through the kitchen every night after Ma took her sleeping pills. We brought out jaljeera and banana wafers and guava quarters in rotation to watch moustachioed men wring their hands and scream that the city was falling into ruin because Jupiter was too close to the Earth or because the Prime Minister had bought himself a secret pet parrot that spoke Urdu perfectly. We would fall over in splits, Rania’s head quivering on my lap and her feet crossed up against the living room wall, spitting guava juice all over the floor.
And then when it wasn’t funny anymore, we switched channels. Then everything was slick with gore and shiny white powders and awful-looking tubes, and enough people were sick that the pattern was clear; Rania and I were keeping our limbs to ourselves and scribbling symptoms into the backs of our geography notebooks. First, the fever would mount, then the body would squelch into new pains every hour, and then the skin would blister into odd shapes till everything melted away into the bleached hospital sheets. The whole process took three days, and the sickness travelled like fresh, hot gossip. Some people said that it entered the body like a doomed lover and killed you from the inside. Some other people said that the young bounced back fast, faster than the others. But the people who recovered were no better than the ones who had died. The news cameras were unkind, so naturally they showed us everything: people climbing hospital gates with sick mothers strapped to their backs, whole slums contracting the illness in a week, doctors sending oxygen cylinders into the streets for the beggars, even a mourner pulling a pistol onto a sea of onlookers for the last empty spot on the funeral ground. Most people were very particular about the kind of funeral they wanted. Those who wanted to go by fire would never go noiselessly into the land.
Once people started lugging their dead into backyard bonfires, the government banned the sale of kerosene. Soon after, they worked up a new memorandum with Malaysia to import firewood for the hindu pyres: teak and pine and oak, scraps and logs and planks. Then the defence minister held a major press conference where he clarified in a nasal croak that the Prime Minister did not, in fact, own a Urdu-speaking parrot. He would never, he said, palms folded together, he would never betray your trust that way. Then for a few weeks everyone wondered whether or not he was lying, and by the time they decided he was, it didn’t matter anymore. Rania and I watched everything till she went to school one day and came back with a red nose and a burning forehead. After that, I didn’t watch at all.
The four of us told no one for the first two days, and then that was all we had with her. During those days, Ma prayed, Baba rifled through all the medicine boxes in the house, and I pushed tablets and powders down my sister’s throat to make her fever manageable. When the pains came, Rania screamed at all hours of the night; it was this dog-like, uncouth thing that didn’t belong to any language. She begged and begged me to cross the brief distance I had ordered between us. I couldn’t help but touch her then, and we fell into each other: I let her rest her head on my chest and put her feet over my calves like we did all winter. I massaged her frequently, starting with the shoulders and moving downwards, downwards. Her hair was matted and sweaty against my collarbone, and when the boils erupted across her torso, they were surprisingly soft. I touched them while she slept sometimes, imagining how much worse they would look on my full belly when I got sick too. But I was never afraid: who was better prepared for this than us? There was nothing in the world we hadn’t shared. I was only dipping a finger into her sickness and tasting it. I drew closer and closer to her every hour, breathing her air and pushing my heat into her body like I always did. It was like standing outside Fattoh-jaan’s canteen, waiting for Rania to come back so that I could follow her stride to our next adventure.
There is a story people often tell us. When Rania and I were born, the midwife had soaked her bloody hands in a warm-water bath on the floor where Rania now lies, waxing gruffly to Baba about how I had wrapped my arms so decisively around Rania’s midsection that we both could have died on the way out, simply crumbed off onto the old bedsheets, stuck to Ma’s legs. I thought about this when I was holding Rania so close that we were one and the same. I wanted her to take me with her wherever she went.
*
The rain turns into darkness. The crowd of spectators outside has rearranged itself; some of them have left, and new people have filled in for those old or tired. In the darkness, the whites of their eyes are glistening hungrily, like fox-eyes peering through a shehtoot bush. They want to come in. They think we have grieved alone for long enough and now it is time for us to let them help. The verandah will not hold them much longer: they want to touch, breathe, caress this tragedy. Some of them might suspect the truth, but their sense of caution is not as sticky, or as persistent, as their affection.
Baba is finally sitting on a chair he has drawn into the room. The phone wire is wrapped around his wrist and the receiver is dangling off the side of his palm. A newspaper page with the numbers of the last ten funeral homes in the city is tucked away under his armpit. He is steeling himself to ring the next number when something changes.
Jostling to the front of the crowd, Doctor places one hand on the mesh gate and peeks into the house as though it were his own. Suno, baraf laao, he says, looking only at my father. Ice, we should keep the body cold. She will need ice. Ice? None of us like him very much: Doctor is an old man who sticks us with needles even when we don’t need them and touches us leisurely on the examination table. He has a degree from somewhere nobody has ever been. But we trust that it exists because he has framed it and keeps it high on the walls of the clinic he runs out of his house. The golden lettering on his name shines across the room and it makes us believe that he knows more than the rest of us do.
So when Doctor says the body needs ice, everyone ticks into action. Baba snaps his neck in Ma’s direction and she floats off the sofa and begins to peel ice trays out of the fridge, rubbing her arms vigorously to keep herself warm. The crowd outside descends upon the task furiously, finally unleashed. Baraf laao! Bring the ice, somebody yells again, and the people break into a run till everyone is cawing the bizarre battle cry. Ice trays get passed down from hand to hand, verandah to verandah. The barrier breaks. Little Ronnie shovels ice cubes out of his jacket pockets and puts them on Rania’s lips. Rukhsar-aunty sends her ice trays with a stranger and nods at me from her verandah, and then disappears for hours. Fattoh-jaan’s only hindu busboy comes into the house with the yellowing chunks of ice they use to keep the expired beer cold at the canteen. They all tip their offerings onto Rania’s chest from where they slither to her waist like snails, watery trail in tow.
They are all touching each other, brushing shoulders and offering to hug my father in turns. Somebody takes the landline phone away from him and begins to dial new numbers. Some of the women have penetrated the inside of the house and have found my mother; they are shaking her by the shoulders, maybe to make her cry. They are all already crying. There are people kneeling next to Rania, covering her with their tears and snot, the rainwater dripping off their bodies. Somebody is caressing her face, somebody is beating their chest. Next to me, someone explains to little Ronnie that the ice is to keep the body fresh. Fresh for what? I want to vomit because they make Rania sound like a mutton chop, waiting to be cooked. Ronnie asks if the ice will bring her back home. When finally someone grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me into a hug, I can think of nothing that feels better, that feels more like home, than this invasion. My body warms at their touch and I let myself think, for just a moment, that the news lies to me.
Like this, the night begins to pass. The crowd has quietened but it has not left us. People are draped over the sofa, they are leaning against our dining table, they are changing the final bedsheets that held Rania. Somebody has discovered the tea leaves in our kitchen cabinet and is promising to make chai for everyone in the house to ease the pain and the cold. I still cannot move and have greeted nobody, not once raised my arms to welcome someone in. Ma is sitting next to Rania on the floor, running one hand through her daughter’s hair, tidying out its many knots. Soon, when the trays of tea come spilling out of the kitchen, Baba takes advantage of the distraction and crouches on the floor next to my mother. Baba says that he has made his way through the phone book and the newspaper; Rania’s body is warm again, all the ice cubes are a soggy, undone imitation of what they used to be, and still nobody will cremate her. He raises a hand to touch Ma’s face, but suddenly thinks better of it and clears his throat. Can we be picky anymore? There is no more wood, there are no more fires, he says. He pauses. I suddenly remember that Baba never threw out the shirts he wore to Fattoh-jaan’s on the weekends, not even when Ma asked.
The next thing he says is a secret, a whisper, to be hidden from our neighbours and friends. We let this happen. We should have known better. And now, with all of these people–she needs to go, I can call someone who knows a burial–
If you bury her, you’ll watch me die too.
Ma cuts him off in the middle of his sentence, as though all that had to be said on the matter had been said already.
*
When dawn finally starts to break, Baba sends them all home.
I think we could all do with some sleep.
Who will sit with her?
Everybody looks at me, and so I do. They all filter out in a haphazard line, having done their duty. There are tea cups all over the house, laced with spit and smudges of lipstick. Baba swallows a sleeping pill dry and then pops one into Ma’s throat and suddenly, everything is still.
I peel my feet off the floor and stand over Rania, my hair falling over the wrinkles on her eyes, swollen from all the ice water. Nobody ever said we looked alike when we were children. So Ma dressed us in identical short-sleeved kameezes and ruffled frocks that she made on the sewing machine, so that our minor similarities–the curve of our noses, the mole on our right hands, the shine in our hair–became impossible to ignore. Back then, our faces would blend into one in the bathroom mirror and we would giggle so ghostly at the suggestion that we could be the same person, living the same lives and wanting the same things to be true. A giggle comes up now like vomit in my throat. I am already moving to stifle it when the vomit, real vomit, erupts into my mouth. I feel bile swing up to my lungs and flood my chest and I run towards the door, towards the mesh gate, into the verandah, and then outside to the edge of the dirt road, where I throw up nothing but water and the remains of a forgotten butter biscuit. I am retching uselessly in the corner, tears rushing to my eyes with every heave. I do this till the retching stops and only the tears keep moving.
Bachha, come here.
I hear a voice behind me and I know who it is. Rukhsar-aunty taps on the railing around her verandah with one of her knitting needles, the sky behind her turning the same shade as her soft pink hijab.
Suddenly we are walking through her house—empty and dusty in the corners. Rukhsar-aunty pinches crescents into my wrists with her long, shapely nails, which have some kind of brown muck lingering on their ends. She wraps her dupatta around me, as if to say that people have died before and that they will die again. I don’t want to hear it till she stretches her arm out and pushes open the back door to her house to reveal a prickly piece of land with a single, nearly dead sapling in a corner.
Her voice again. There.
At first, there is nothing remarkable about what she is showing me. What is she showing me? And then all of a sudden it makes radiant, absolute sense, the way waking up from sleep or being born does. There is a shovel lodged into the handle of the door, a mountain of soil in front of the sapling, and the beginnings of a deep cavity in the ground that nobody has found yet, that nobody has taken away from us.
We don’t have anything else, Rukhsar-aunty says, squeezing my hand.
I am strangely punctured by relief. The sapling in the corner of the backyard catches the light of the rising sun and I think of the harshness of a hospital light, the anger of the funeral flames, the smoke that sticks to everything when a body is burnt. I think that my mother is a devout woman who hates this house and the kind of people who live within it. I think of her gods and her anger and how the vein on her temple throbs when she turns righteous. And then, I think of Rukhsar-aunty, who has no children except the children of the colony. I think of the things we must share in Azaad Colony, when push comes to shove. I think about Rania living only one house away, forever. I think about crawling into a hole in the ground with my little sister, with all of Azaad Colony watching, and staying there forever, perfectly still.
