Padya Paramita

Water / Sign

Excerpt

August 29, 2020, 9:25 a.m.

Raisa Iqbal (to you, Rusafa, Shaafique, Zayan): Zayan passed away.

You: Raisa what?

Raisa: His mom had been trying to call him. Couldn’t reach him. They had to break his door down. He was already gone by the time they got there.

The phone slid out of my hand and lay still on the sheets as more messages popped up. Things around me started to blur. I stood up and chugged a bottle of water. My roommate ran over to make sure I wasn’t going to fall. “I’m fine,” I muttered, unable to really comprehend the fuzz in my brain.

Although Zayan had actually died on 28 August 2020, Raisa’s message to our group chat didn’t come through until the morning of the twenty-ninth. The chat included my childhood best friends, including Zayan and Shaafique, who Raisa had been dating for eight years at the time. She had sent three simple words that did not make sense to my brain at that moment—or for the days to come. Rusafa, who was an engineer in Arizona, was still asleep. 

During a pandemic when everyone was dying from the same cause, Zayan’s body had tested negative for COVID-19. Raisa had heard the details from his cousin, who was a doctor at her medical school. “A seizure” was the phrase going around on the various social media posts from classmates who barely knew him. Some who had even bullied him while we were growing up had started treating him like a martyr. 

Zayan had been epileptic but never wanted anyone to think of him as weak. He lived alone in Chapel Hill, his roommates all having gone home when the pandemic started, and he didn’t wear a bracelet that could alert anyone. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. But it was difficult to process anything around the situation. People messaged me. My mom called me crying, incoherently recalling the time when we had Rusafa and Zayan over to our house to study with our math tutor in the ninth and tenth grades, and how Zayan would rock in his seat so regularly that he broke our chairs. 

Rusafa cried too, once she woke up. I wondered where my tear ducts were going wrong. I remembered that I hadn’t cried when my grandfather had died, but we had been expecting that he wouldn’t live much longer. This was Zayan. He was the kid I’d met in third grade after he’d come back from England. I remember telling him we were family friends and he was convinced I’d been lying. He was a stubborn kid, but in a held-his-ground-because-of-his-beliefs way. This was the same Zayan who was the one guy in our friend group for a long time, and never complained about it. The one who won every game of red hands in middle school. The one who taught me the chords to “Smoke on the Water,” the only song I remotely know how to play on the guitar. He was the kid who was determined to get out of Bangladesh, to make change in the world. He was the guy who had nine tutors for his eight subjects at school. He had started studying for the SAT before any of us had even heard of it.

It couldn’t hit me because things felt normal. Zayan wasn’t a part of my daily life in America. I hadn’t seen him in a couple years, so it just felt like he was in a different state. Zayan couldn’t be gone. Zayan had always been there.

I tried to go about my day without thinking too much. There was a lot to process but I couldn’t fathom any of it. I tried to do my work as usual but nothing made sense. I asked my roommate to give me an undercut so I could feel the buzz of a clipper against my head, because I couldn’t feel anything else. I made a tattoo appointment. My friends who saw various Instagram posts sent me takeout money over Venmo. Lots of “I’m sorrys” flooded my inboxes. 

I also kept reading and rereading my last conversations with Zayan. “Congrats on starting your masters bro, I’m so proud of you.” He had always been nothing but extremely supportive. There were so many times I’d ignored his messages or sent a one-word reply. He had been like a brother to me, I had assumed he’d be there when I needed him, and just continued to tease him and make fun of him and rarely acknowledge the fact that he was actually doing a lot of great work as a PharmD candidate in various capacities. I’ve been through his LinkedIn hundreds of times since then; I probably have it memorized. Though to me he would always be my buddy to discuss soccer with, he wasn’t just that. The kid was good. I kept remembering how much he’d wanted to be a genetic engineer and find the cure to cancer when we were in middle school. Despite getting into Emory, his drive didn’t stop there. He’d started looking into pharmacy schools while still in Atlanta. I was suddenly hit with flashbacks about how much we had teased him when his mom made an eight-paragraph post congratulating him on getting into UNC, the number-one-ranked pharmacy school. He was now less focused on curing cancer and more into research on children’s medicine and of course, a lot of times, epilepsy.

As I lay in my bed that night, sleep seemed completely out of the question. I kept recalling all of these Zayan memories—goofing off on the bus throughout the years, teasing him about being rejected by his crush in the seventh grade, yelling at him about how he wasn’t cool for disliking pop music. I kept looking through old photos and texts as I was just about to drift off, but as I lay with my eyes closed, I was in a classroom in Dhaka, and Zayan was running around it. Rusafa and Raisa were there too, sitting with me. “You’re here,” I said. Zayan looked at me: “Am I? Do I get to have a twenty-sixth birthday?” 

My eyes popped open. I found myself unable to breathe. I sat up, chugged from my water bottle. I tried to sniff through my nose, and it was stuck. No air came up. My chest felt tight, and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. I tried to swallow, and it suddenly felt like I was taking in air rather than my own saliva and my stomach started swelling up. I hadn’t had a panic attack in a while, and since I had moved to New York to start my masters I didn’t have a psychiatrist here yet who could prescribe me the right medication. Instead, I tried to ignore it, lie back down, and sleep, but I still felt suffocated. I pulled up YouTube and tried to watch breathing exercise videos. I played games on my phone. I watched TV. The sun came up. I had to somehow go through Sunday running errands and pretending I was fine. Raisa sent more information to the group chat about how his body had been flown to Bangladesh. He’d be buried at the cemetery by Dhaka University, where his parents were professors, the area where he grew up. Raisa, a final-year medical student at home, would be able to go. Rusafa and I wouldn’t.

(11:35 p.m.)

Raisa (to you, Rusafa, Shaafique, Zayan): I’m scared I won’t be able to take it. Seeing him one last time. All I want is to remember his cute smile.

Rusafa: I think it’s OK if you don’t go look at the body, dude.

Raisa: I owe it to him. To say goodbye.

Rusafa: Your call.

Raisa: I’m on my way now. Need to pay my highest respects.  

I paced around my room for a bit, not the least bit tired despite the lack of sleep. I brushed my teeth and changed to pajamas, before getting under the blanket. I picked up my phone again.

(12:38 p.m.)

Raisa: Zayan is with me

Rusafa: Oh my god.

You: Fuck

Rusafa: Talk to us when you’re ready, Rai. We’re here for you. I know you’re not OK, I’m not either.

You: Please take care of yourself first.

Rusafa: Please be strong.

Raisa: They took him. In the car. I pray none of you ever feel what I felt.

About the Author

Padya Paramita is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, them., Color Blog, VRV Blog, and Dogwood Journal, where she was a finalist for the Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction in 2020. She is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of Dream Glow Magazine.