“It was the last thing she was supposed to wear,” recalled Subash Kumar. He had just finished taking a shower when he spotted his grandmother’s batik sarong, along with her towel, hanging on the rack.

“I remember sobbing into it,” he told me.

Subash’s grandmother died in February this year, just a month and a half before we spoke. That sarong would have been the next thing his grandmother had worn—had she taken her next shower. Before she could, she was admitted to the hospital.

Death is fossilised in the sarong, in its folds and wrinkles. The tubular garment, designed to contain and wrap around a torso, will never be filled again by that very body, a cruel reminder of the permanent absence—“an utter impossibility of return”—of the person we love. The postcolonial feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie articulates this pain in her memoir Notes on Grief, written after the unexpected death of her father.

But the sarong can nonetheless be a memorial for the body, where spirits and souls take residence. With his hands, Subash gestured to the sarong’s shape by making a circular motion away and then towards each other, then tried to reach for the right words: “You know, it sort of envelops something, which feels very, sort of, almost whole.” This (w)hole, which the baker-poet described as a “house [for] a person’s physical body”, was made complete by his determination to grieve his grandmother viscerally, haptically, to “hold onto a big part of [my grandmother]’s self”.

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