The call came at three in the morning. My mother, in New Delhi, was in tears. My father, she said, had fallen again, and he was speaking nonsense. She turned the handset toward him. He was muttering a slow, meaningless string of words in an unrecognizable high-pitched nasal tone. He kept repeating his nickname, Shibu, and the name of his childhood village, Dehergoti. He sounded as if he were reading his own last rites.
"Take him to the hospital," I urged her, from New York. "I'll catch the next flight home."
"No, no, just wait," my mother said. "He might get better on his own." In her day, buying an international ticket on short notice was an unforgivable act of extravagance, reserved for transcontinental gangsters and film stars. No one that she knew had arrived "early" for a parent's death. The frugality of her generation had congealed into frank superstition: if I caught a flight now, I might dare the disaster into being.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/my-fathers-body-at-rest-and-in-motion
