He Has Become Time

Sushma Soma on Grief, Music, and the Courage to Feel It All

Grief was the Wordle word of the day on May 19th, 2023. She didn't get it in her six tries. She really didn't see it coming. That was the day her husband Sri summited Everest — the last time she heard his voice. What followed was not what she expected grief to be. It was not all sadness. It was not something to "fix". And it was not something separate from her relationship to music.

Sushma Soma is an award-winning Carnatic vocalist, poet, and environmental advocate based between Singapore and Chennai. A former chartered accountant who left corporate life for music, she is a recipient of Singapore's Young Artist Award and the first Singaporean to win the All India Radio vocal competition. In May 2023, her husband Sri reached the summit of Mount Everest and did not return. In the years since, she has channeled that experience into an EP (The Mountain Has the Last Say), Tamil poetry, and a forthcoming production called Foreverest. This Awakin Call, hosted by Andrew Hinton and moderated by Pavi Mehta, opened and closed with Sushma singing — and in between, offered one of the most unguarded public conversations about grief, art, and what it means to feel everything at once.

The First Initiation

Before Sri's passing, Sushma had no frame of reference for grief. She imagined it would be unrelenting sadness — constant tears, a single key. What arrived was something she couldn't parse. On the second day, surrounded by friends who had flown in from around the world, something unexpected happened:

"I actually burst into a huge laugh. And even my dad, who was just so shattered by all of this, broke into a laugh as well. And I remember thinking — wait, how is this possible? How am I laughing?"

It wasn't that grief was light. Moments later she was wailing. What shook her was the coexistence — that she could be fully present with laughter and fully present with devastation, and that both were equally real. The people around her couldn't hold that either. If she was laughing, she must be okay. Nobody had a map for what was actually happening.

She opened the call with a Carnatic prayer by the Tamil saint Tayumanavar — a poem about the dichotomies of existence: clean and unclean, war and peace, pride and humility — and the recognition that all of it lives within us. She had always loved that poem. Now she was living it.

"That was perhaps the first initiation into my lived experience of this poem. I held it because somewhere it rang so true — the multitudes of life exist together."

Nothing to Be Fixed

Six months in, Sushma wrote a public post she called "6 months living out of my grief case." She could see how lost everyone around her was — how much love there was, and how much of it landed wrong. People sent diagrams of grief shrinking over time. They said it would get better, that Sri was in a better place.

"I know it's so well-meaning. But the one thing I've learned through this journey is — there is nothing to be fixed. Don't offer me solutions to fix it."

What she wanted was not a strategy for recovery. She wanted to be seen. The first resource that actually reached her was a podcast by Megan Devine — sent by Pavi — which simply validated her pain as real. No timeline, no silver lining. "In that moment, it made me feel so seen and so heard."

She wrote the grief case not because the grieving person should have to educate others, but because she saw that the gap between love and helpfulness was enormous — and maybe something could bridge it. She is learning the same lesson from the other side now, catching herself reaching for solutions with a grieving friend: "That's exactly what you did not want. Don't do that."

When Music Broke Too

Everyone told her she was lucky to be an artist. Music heals. Just sing. But on the day she heard the news about Sri, she had been composing music at her computer. The mind makes irrational associations — she couldn't open Wordle for six months afterward. And she couldn't sing. Not just emotionally. Muscle tension dysphonia made it physically painful to produce sound.

"People are telling me I should sing. And I physically couldn't. I was resentful — not just of people, but of music itself. Hearing people constantly tell me that music will fix it, but music was not fixing it, made me feel like — you're such a failure. You've been with me for so long, and yet you're failing me."

She went for voice therapy. Her voice has never fully returned to what it was. But over time, what had felt like betrayal revealed itself as something else entirely — a form of intimacy she hadn't known was possible:

"How poignant is it that my music practice mirrored my life. It sat beside me in pain, mourning with me. It, too, was broken and hopeless."

If her music had been flourishing while she was shattered, it would have felt like something bolted on — not truly part of her. The fact that it broke when she broke was, in the end, proof that the relationship was real. Through Gabor Maté's work, she found the language: body and mind aren't connected — they're one and the same. The grief was in her throat all along.

Falling in Love with the Form

Sushma learned Carnatic music from age four — enrolled by her parents as a way to stay rooted in Indian culture after their move to Singapore. For most of her teenage years, she resented it. It was the reason she couldn't play sports or be "cool" with friends. She loved her teachers but not the form.

That changed in 2017 when she met her mentor, R.K. Sriram Kumar. In his class, sought-after performers and beginners learned the same song, side by side, as equals. It was the first time she understood that the artist is never bigger than the art. And for the first time, she fell in love with the music itself — not just the person teaching it. "That's such a gift — it means that whether he's there or not, I'm still gonna be crazy about the form."

T.M. Krishna's writing opened the final door. He showed that Carnatic music's essence is simply melody, rhythm, and words — and that the ancient composers wrote about religion because that was the world they inhabited. Today, Sushma could write about anything she experienced:

"That made it so intimate. This form no longer just had to be about the numinous. It could speak to the fact that I just want to go to sleep today."

This is what made it possible, years later, for her grief to become art — not because anyone prescribed it, but because the music was already intimate enough to hold it.

Making The Mountain Has the Last Say

In grief, Sushma instinctively returned to Tamil — one of many childhood things that surfaced unbidden. Her friend Jayaradha Krishnan, a screenwriter, would listen to these outpourings and say: write it down. Then she'd help shape the poems.

When Sushma shared them with her collaborator Aditya Prakash, his response was careful. He had been one of the friends she sent all her grief reading to — he knew what not to say. He never told her to sing. He asked what she wanted to do with the words, and added: if you choose to make this musical, I'm right here.

They recorded with a deliberate constraint — only her voice and whatever instruments were already in the room: a tanpura, a guitar Aditya had given her as a birthday gift (with instructions to leave it out in the living room, never in its case), and a childhood violin untouched for twenty years. The rawness wasn't a limitation. It was the point.

The inspiration to share the work came from an unexpected source. Nick Cave's album Ghosteen had made Sushma feel profoundly seen — long before she knew it was made after his son's death.

"Art can do that, where you find a piece of yourself in someone else's story. Someone from Australia can create this, and someone from Singapore is listening and finding her story. If even one person could find themselves in it, and find some sort of healing, or cry with me — that togetherness is really all I needed."

He Has Become Time

Asked which song most captures what she believes about life, loss, and love, Sushma chose "His Time" — built around the Tamil phrase kalamanaan, used when someone passes away. It means, literally: he has become time.

"You say he's kalamanaan — he's passed away. But actually it means he's become time. Something with no start or end. Something that cannot be trapped in our hands. Ever constant."

If Sri has become time — the two hands of the clock, giving us both good days and bad — then what grounds do we have for dividing experience into welcome and unwelcome?

"That captures life. It's both the good and the bad. But it's good and bad because we call it good and bad. It just is. Life is all of it coming together."

Trust Yourself Fiercely

Asked what she would tell her younger self in the depths of that initial loss:

"Just listen to your inner voice. There's no one who knows you better than yourself. Listen to yourself completely and wholeheartedly, with no doubt."

She named her privilege clearly — the support of her father, the freedom to process grief on her own terms, the absence of dependents. Not everyone can do this. But for those who can: "I hope people can fiercely just trust themselves. Through whatever they're doing. Especially during grief."

And asked how the community could support her, she turned the question outward:

"Don't deny ourselves of what we're feeling. The beauty of the human experience is the ability to feel. There's gonna be fear, trauma, pain. But equally, there's joy, laughter, all these things. I really hope we allow ourselves to feel. Because that's what makes being human so beautiful."

Sushma closed the call with a song Sri loved so much he had the sound wave of its first line engraved on his wedding ring. A poem by Mahadeyar: "If I'm the eye, you're the racing light. If I'm the vina, you're the hand that plays it. You are the flame, and the very basis of my existence. How could I ever say in words the vastness that you are."