Bose used to ask me quite often what I’d take with me into the afterlife, and I would always answer diffidently, or playfully, “my new necklace”, or “bananas”. I never gave it consideration, when I was young. The afterlife was so far away, but now that we are both old, and Bose has become ill, the question haunts me. What does one take? Can you take anything of this world?

While I tend to Bose each morning, wiping the mucus from the corners of his mouth, and mushing his food so that he can keep it down, I wonder about Heaven – or Hell. When I was at school, we read about the Kings of Ancient Egypt. Frozen in time, in great pyramids, they lay in state, surrounded by statues, weaponry, jewels, foodstuffs. Dried out corpses, entombed with the remains of their lives. All the things they needed for the afterlife. Models too, models of servants, wives, concubines, horses. . . or sometimes, not models. I found out when I was much older that when the explorers broke into tombs, they found bodies, preserved for thousands of years by the sand, with gaping mouths and wide horrified eyes. People who had died screaming as poison was thrust between their lips, unwillingly accompanying Pharoah to the next life.

Bose gets weaker every day, and sometimes he mutters in his sleep. Cries out for his mother or his long dead brothers and sisters. I think that he must be growing closer to them; as he passes slowly into death, the spirits of those long dead are coming to greet him. He is drawing away from me. He twitches, in a feral, animal way. His limbs, once so strong, are spindly, and he cannot walk or rise from his bed. His breath is laboured. Sometimes, when we are in bed at night, I find myself counting the seconds between each breath and thinking that it might be his last. But then a hitching, grunting noise signals that the next wheeze of inhalation has begun, and that Bose has cheated death for another half a minute. There are nights when the whole night is an endless seeming last half minute. I am ashamed that on these nights I count the seconds with hope that Bose will at last succumb.

As I wash Bose today, I find myself wondering what he would take with him to the afterlife, and realise that I have never asked.
“Husband,” I say.
“Yes?” He answers with difficulty, the word coming out with a rasping gasp of air.
“What would you take with you – to the next life I mean?”
He gives this some long consideration, and then turns to me, his brown eyes looking straight at me out of his tired, wrinkled, brown-grey face.
“I would take the most precious thing in the world to me.”
“And what is that, husband?” I ask curiously. He thinks again, and, giving me a long look, replies,

“You, Sita.”