Why my mother's pyre had to be built on loaned cash

On November 8, my prime minister snuffed 86 percent of currency out of circulation.

On November 20, my bed-bound 80-year mother had to be transported to hospital after her condition worsened.

When she was being taken into the ambulance, I had a premonition it was her last journey alive out of the home where she had raised her six children.

My parents belonged to the generation of Partition survivors. Born in Dera Ismail Khan, now in Pakistan, they came down to East Punjab following the bloody division of the subcontinent in 1947.

After they got married in the mid '50s, they moved to Delhi and built a home in a refugee neighbourhood.

On the night of November 20, my widowed mother, moaning in pain from bed sores, left the same abode.

On morning of November 24, she came back to it in a hearse.

But what happened in those 85 to 90 hours was traumatic.

I had my cards and money in my bank account but, only few hundreds in liquid cash.

My generous neighbour handed over a wad of 50-rupee bills to my wife before we jumped into the ambulance.

We were not going to some random hospital but to a reputed private facility in West Delhi.

But it didn't accept cards for an in-house purchase of overnight antibiotics and other drugs. My cashless insurance could only be activated in the morning.

I am thankful to my neighbour for her voluntary loan of Rs 5,000, with which we could instantly order the emergency medicines.

My prime minister, perhaps, had no idea or maybe he just overlooked the constraints of a cash economy when he had dropped his demonetisation bomb on millions like me.

But it became clear to us at a stroke that we have to have at least Rs one lakh in hard cash for the rest of the critical week ahead.

My mother was leaving me. I should have stayed in the hospital where she was spending the final phase of her life.

I could not.

The next morning, I was at the bank with a cheque to get my ration of currency.

While in a queue, I wrote an agonising post on Facebook about what I was passing through.

Before my turn at the money counter arrived, many friends from the virtual world immediately offered their tiny cash holdings.

With my eyes wet, I said thank you to everyone and returned to hospital with my quota of banknotes, which was exhausted in the next two days.

On November 23, we were again cashless.

And that was the time, the first in my life, when I had to literally request a couple of neighbours to lend some valid currency.

My mother passed at 2.59am on November 24. We brought her back to her home at around 10.30am and carried her to the crematorium two hours later.

"Jinni chadar, unne paair passaro," was one of her strictest instructions to all her children. "Cut your coat according to your cloth."

And what an irony it was that the pyre she was laid on was built from our neighbours' loan.

And what an irony it was that most of the cash payments that we had to make for the post-funeral community meals and religious customs right up to her congregational service were made from borrowed money.

This wasn't an irony of fate. It was man-made and the author was my prime minister.