From a review of Sandeep Jauhar's Heart at work in progress.com:
Perhaps the most consequential event in my life occurred fifteen years before I was born. On a sweltering July day in India in 1953, my paternal grandfather died suddenly. He was only fifty-seven. The circumstances were unusual, and like most family tragedies, ours has acquired a touch of myth. Everyone agrees that in the morning on the day he died, my grandfather was bitten by a snake coiled between sacks of grain in his little shop in Kanpur. He did not see the type of serpent, but snakebite is common in India, and by all accounts my grandfather was feeling fine when he came home for lunch. My father, who was almost fourteen, was going for an interview at Kanpur Agricultural College the following day, and my grandfather had planned to accompany him. They were sitting on the stone floor, inspecting my father’s high school diploma, delighting in all the academic honors he’d received, when, midway through the meal, neighbors brought in the corpse of the shiny black cobra they claimed had bitten my grandfather. (It had been killed by a snake charmer summoned to the shop.) My grandfather took one look at it and went pale. “How can I survive this?” he said, before slumping to the floor. The neighbors exhorted him to say “Ram, Ram,” a Hindu prayer, but his last words, lying on the floor, his eyes turning to glass, were “I wanted to take Prem to college.”
A government ambulance used to make rounds in the village regularly. Around 7:00 p.m., several hours after my grandfather’s collapse, it was flagged down on a routine drive. By then, rigor mortis had set in, traveling like a slow wave from my grandfather’s neck and jaw into his limbs. The paramedics immediately declared my grandfather had passed—he had no heartbeat— but the family, in denial, insisted they take him (and the snake) to a British-built hospital about five miles away. A doctor there pronounced my grandfather dead on arrival.
“It was a heart attack,” the doctor said, dispelling the family’s belief that a snake had killed their elder. My grandfather had succumbed to the most common cause of death throughout the world, sudden cardiac death after a myocardial infarction, or heart attack, perhaps triggered in his case by fright over the snakebite. With nothing to be done, and the summer heat threatening to spoil the body, my grandfather was brought back to the village and cremated the following day. Before a garlanded casket set on a pyre soaked in oil, people beat their heads in grief under a light blue sky.
Listening to family lore, I grew up with a fear of the heart as the executioner of men in the prime of their lives. Because of the heart, you could be healthy and still die; it seemed like such a cheat. The apprehension was fed by our grandmother, who came to live with us in California in the early 1980s (until she got homesick and returned to the tiny village in Kanpur where her beloved husband had died). Even thirty years after his death, she still wrapped herself in white gossamer shawls that smelled of mothballs, befitting a widow. Once, at the Los Angeles Zoo, she bowed respectfully to the snake they brought around, clasping her hands and muttering a prayer before insisting we take her home. She was a strong-willed woman who ably took over the reins of the household after her husband died. And yet, like Miss Havisham, she spent her life in mourning over one freakish, incomprehensible incident. In India, snakes symbolize infinity and timelessness, as well as misfortune and death. To the end, in her mind, it was a venomous snake that killed her husband. And in a way, in the suddenness with which a heart attack can fell a healthy and vibrant life without warning, it was.
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