When I was six, my grandfather was on his deathbed. It was a bathtub in Pakistan. I was there. We were just visiting for a wedding. We didn’t even know he was sick.

The music was still blaring from the speaker in the living room. A woman was happily singing to my grandfather’s death throes. He was screaming something. His eyes were the size of golf balls. He could tell we couldn’t hear him over the music, and it was killing him. He was using every ounce he had to try to yell over the brain-pounding rhythm. 

I was scared. Because my grandfather was a good man. He was always grumpy, but only for the right reasons. He was a schoolteacher. He raised his seven siblings on his own while his father obsessed himself with the national politics. He got his baby sister married off to a good man in America. It didn’t seem right to me that he would die in a bathtub.

My grandfather screamed and he screamed and he screamed, but by God we couldn’t hear him. I could see tears streaming down his face and into his pure white beard. I could see that his throat was drying up bitterly and his lungs were looking for a chance to breathe in between the desperate pleas. 

It was the first time I had seen something so cruel and unfair in my life. He couldn’t die like this when he was a good man. Not in a bathtub, his family not hearing a bit of his last words, crying like a baby. I tried tugging at his arm, tried pulling him out of the tub, but his limbs hardly budged. I tried to tell my family, nearly forty of them gathered together in that tiny bathroom, I tried yelling at them: “Someone turn the music off!” But they wouldn’t move.

He kept yelling, shrieking, his face covered with salty tears that crept their way into every cut and wrinkle on his face. His eyeballs were the size of golf balls. They were aching to get out of his face. This was the first time I had seen someone get something they didn’t deserve.

Then something insane happened. Everyone just…left. They walked out of the bathroom. All of his siblings, and his children, and his grandchildren. He had raised three different generations. And every single one of them left him in that bathtub to die completely alone. 

My grandfather tried to pick himself out of the bathtub when he saw everyone walking away, as if he was gonna give them one last talking to before he left this planet. But he didn’t have the strength and the water and his flooded clothes weighed him down. He just closed his eyes, stopped screaming, and wept like a baby.

I was the only one there and I would be the only one who would see my grandfather die. I wanted him to know I was there. I still didn’t completely understand what was going on. As far as I knew he had just slipped in the shower. But that was just wishful thinking. I could see from his face that he wasn’t ever going to get out. My family wouldn’t have left him there if they thought there was a chance they would see him again.

But I wanted him to know I was there. That not everyone he had worked so hard for had abandoned him. So I put my forehead against his arm and cried with him. He didn’t pay me any reaction. Maybe he didn’t even realize I was there. 

I think even then, I understood why they didn’t love him. He just didn’t like it all. The women that my uncles were after, the girls my cousins were after. The partying, all the time. The constant gossiping and little rumors we would say to each other, the talking, talking, and talking.

And the music, that never once stopped.

Even now.

He had tried to let them know. They couldn’t hope to make it. It wasn’t enough that he had sent my mother off to America. That didn’t mean we were safe. He grew up with the Union Jack around his neck, so he knew: it wasn’t enough. We were never safe. If they didn’t get you they would get your children somehow. And they had.

He was so scared for them. And now he was dying.

And he is dead.

When I was sure it was, I came out of the bathroom to the rest of the family back to the festivities. My oldest cousin was getting married, it was time to celebrate. 

When they saw me, a few of the older men just went in and dealt with it.

And the music didn’t stop once. 

---

Sante