Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  I woke early, to a roomful of people. Reema auntie and Sanjay uncle were stooped over Ammamma’s bed. Matthew, Vasani, and Rupa peered at Ammamma from the foot of her bed.

  Ammamma couldn’t feel anything on her left side, not her leg, or her arm, she said she had no sense of anything there, not even pain. Her eyes looked dulled, far away. Reema auntie worked at getting through to a doctor on our phone, and Sanjay uncle drove to the factory to call people from the phones there, to bring the doctor from the infirmary, and to try to find a larger car or van in which to take Ammamma to the hospital. Matthew, Vasani, and Rupa stayed in position at the end of the bed, not speaking, their eyes big.

  I sat on Ammamma’s bed on her right side, holding her good arm with my good arm. I tried to sound normal, saying, “Ammamma, now you’re going to get all the attention—is that why you’re doing this?”

  Ammamma smiled at me, her eyes fluttering open, then closed. “My daughter, my daughter,” she said.

  An electric convulsion ran through me. Was she not able to recognize me anymore? “I’m not your daughter, Ammamma, I’m your granddaughter, I’m Maya, do you remember?” I pressed her hand.

  She squeezed back, opening her eyes. “I know you’re Maya. Tell your mother, tell my daughter I took good care of her daughter. I did, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” I said. I was trying to keep the tears from coming. “You tell her yourself, Ammamma, we’ll bring Mother from New York, and you can tell her, she’ll come right away, okay?”

  “It takes a long time to get here, Maya, you know that. Don’t trouble her.”

  “Please wait for her, Ammamma. She’ll come, and we can have Onam together, you can see our dance performance, and Reema auntie’s planning a big feast.”

  “That would be nice. Take care of your mother, Maya,” Ammamma said. She closed her eyes. She kept them closed.

  “Ammamma.” I called her name again, loud, but she didn’t answer. Matthew and Vasani and Rupa looked at me, alarmed. I bent over Ammamma, laid my head on her chest, and listened. 1 could hear her heart, not loud, but I could hear it. 1 lay there like that, until Sanjay uncle came back with the doctor and moved me off her bed.

  The doctor and Sanjay uncle and Rupa and Matthew carried Ammamma to the verandah. The palloo of her sari floated down like a white flag waving under her. Sanjay uncle had brought a transport jeep from the factory, and Reema auntie and 1 pushed the fold-up seats against the sides, and spread blankets in the back, and then sheets over the blankets. They had brought a stretcher from the infirmary, so they lifted Ammamma onto the stretcher and laid her diagonally across the floor of the jeep. We tucked sheets around her, and a nurse crouched in the back next to her. The doctor climbed up in the front next to Sanjay uncle, and they took off for Coimbatore.

  Ram was woken up to take Reema auntie and me down the mountain. Reema auntie collected clothes for her and Sanjay uncle, and packed some of Ammamma’s things also. I packed a small bag and waited for her. I looked over at Ammamma’s bed, and there was a valley in the mattress, where she and I had been lying together. I went and huddled there, fitting entirely within the silhouette of her body, breathing her smells, the Vicks, the rosewater, the sweetness of hair oil.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Hospital

  THE RIDE DOWN the mountain was interminable. I kept thinking of Ammamma lying in the back of the jeep, wondering if she felt each bump in the road that I felt. Reema auntie and I held hands in the back seat, neither of us able to think of what to say to cheer the other one up. We concentrated on the road and the forest around us, trying to stay focused on the distracting creatures crossing our path. It was between four and five in the morning, as early as the day we had taken Brindha to school, but I hadn’t taken in the outside world that day the way I did today. There were outlines of sleeping bison in the distance, standing clumped together, leaning on each other for balance. We saw two sambar deer, rubbing their three-pointed antlers against a tree, to clear the velvet and sharpen the antlers, Reema auntie said.

  Ram rolled down his window and told us to listen for the animals announcing our vehicle’s disruption of their morning routines. We heard the howls of wild dogs, the tsk-tsking of bonnet macaques, the protest of the scops owl. We slowed the car to let a fat pangolin trundle across the road, its long narrow ant-eating snout stuck to the ground like a vacuum cleaner.

  When we pulled to the side of the road to let the first huge, smoking lorry of the day pass us, Ram pointed at the ditch filled with water on the side of the road. It was an almost perfect circle, a little bigger than a child’s inflatable swimming pool. Ram said an elephant had dug the hole out with his forefeet, burrowing deep down until he reached water.

  A little while later, we saw the elephant, a stony monument under an awning of trees. It was tuskless. Reema auntie said there was a whole breed of tuskless males, called makna. She said with the poachers around, the maknas would eventually be mateless and alone.

  The hillside forests were behind us then, followed by a long spell of dodging traffic, and then we pulled up in front of the imposing two-story hospital. They had just whitewashed the front of the building, and water dripped down the walls into puddles whitened with lime. Reema auntie and I hopscotched around the puddles to reach the entrance. Big banners proclaimed CAMPION HOSPITAL, flanked by slightly smaller banners that said X-RAY, ECG INSIDE, CAT COMING SOON. Reema auntie said Campion was one of the two best private hospitals in Coimbatore. The two hospitals had been founded by rivaling underworld families, to turn black money into good. Even in philanthropy, they competed with each other. They brought equipment and drugs from as far away as the Philippines, Malaysia, Kuwait, and Egypt. A sign inside over the information desk said THAI KIDNEY MACHINE COMING SOON.

  Whirring fans spread the smells of bleach and rubbing alcohol. I stumbled, feeling faint, and Reema auntie tightened her arms around me to prop me up. She passed her handkerchief across my damp forehead, and said, “Only the sterile rooms, for operating and such, have air conditioning. But there’s a nice breeze from that courtyard, isn’t there?” She walked me over to a bench facing the rectangular courtyard.

  The information desk was in one corner, and around the perimeter were offices, examining rooms, medical wards, and private patient suites. All these destinations were reached by walking down wide cement sidewalks bordering the big open courtyard, filled with lush flowers and even a delicate Japanese bridge. Intruding upon the garden diagonally on one corner was a long narrow ramp connecting the first floor to the second. As Reema auntie talked to the information desk people, I stared at the orange and black oriole that had just landed in the sprawl of vines in front of me, and saw a team of millipedes crawl out of the garden soil onto the cement path. I watched to see which squad of doctors or which passing gurney would be the first to crush the millipedes, but they calmly crawled along, unharmed. My aunt took my hand and we walked down the hall, looking for Ammamma’s room.

  When we were still three doors away from her room, we saw Sanjay uncle. He had just left Ammamma’s room; he said she was still the same, still unconscious.

  “Unconscious? You’re sure she’s not sleeping?” I said.

  Sanjay uncle said he was sure. He told us to go on in, he was going to the billing office and he would be right back. I wasn’t ready to see Ammamma. I went with Sanjay uncle, I could hear the door slam shut behind my aunt as we turned and walked away.

  The billing office had air conditioning. Sanjay uncle opened his purse—he brought a purse when he wanted to carry more money than would fit in his wallet, usually on business trips or family vacations—and pulled out stapled stacks of hundred-rupee notes. He counted them and handed them over to the billing officer and countersigned the receipt. They told Sanjay uncle that each time Ammamma’s doctor prescribed medicines or procedures, he had to sign a receipt and bring it to the billing office and then they debited it from this account, until another deposit was necessary. Sanjay uncle tried to co
nvince them this was excessive bureaucracy, but, failing that, he got them to agree that I could run the receipts back and forth for him. “1 hear you could use the air-conditioning breaks anyway, Miss Delicate Flower,” he said, elbowing me and smiling for the first time that day.

  When we entered Ammamma’s room, it was bathed in sunlight, and birds twittered outside the open windows. Reema auntie sat at the side of the bed, her eyes closed, her thumb holding her place in her prayerbook. She opened her eyes, read to herself, her lips moving, then closed her eyes again. Sanjay uncle pulled two more chairs near the bed. I didn’t sit right away, it was bothering me the way Ammamma was positioned, her head all the way to the right side, her right shoulder angled upward awkwardly to meet her head. I tried to rearrange the pillows behind her, but Ammamma felt heavy, hard to move. Sanjay uncle helped me cradle her head and shoulder, and he pushed the pillows into place behind her, and then I laid Ammarama’s head squarely in the middle of the pillow. In one jerking movement, her head lolled to the right side again. It made me shiver, the looseness with which her head moved, as if the centripetal force in her body that kept everything in alignment had gone out of her.

  I tried to hold her hand but it twisted limply. It received no messages telling it how to respond, how to resist or accept my touch. When, after some hours holding her hand, her fingers closed around mine, I called for Reema auntie to come look. Reema auntie brought a nurse, who showed me how if I removed my hand from Ammamma’s grip, her hand still stayed clenched; it had been an accident, a coincidence, she had closed her hand not knowing she embraced mine. To even say “she” had closed her hand was suggesting too much will on Ammamma’s part, the nurse said. The only safe thing to say was that Ammamma’s hand had closed itself, or safer yet, her hand was closed, however it had happened.

  The doctors came to check on Ammamma and told us to go and eat, to take tea. The youngest one of the three of them, with a sporty checked shirt under his white coat, said, “You won’t necessarily be rewarded for your patience. We don’t know if she will come out of this.”

  The two older doctors scowled at the young doctor. “When, not if. We don’t know when she will come out of this. Please, Mr. Pillai, have something to eat, and take some rest. We are doing everything.”

  The young doctor tried to redeem himself with his colleagues, make up for his callousness. He turned to me and touched my bandaged arm. “What have we here?”

  My uncle explained about my fall. The doctor said, “Now that you are at a real hospital, you really should have that X-rayed. Why don’t we set up an exam room for you?”

  “I don’t think I should leave my grandmother,” I said.

  The doctor looked over at my grandmother lying in her white sari on the white bed. Lying peacefully. He said, “I’m sure your aunt or uncle can come get you if anything changes in your grandmother’s condition.”

  My uncle said, “Yes, yes, Maya, go with the doctor. We should have brought you down to Coimbatore earlier to do an X-ray, you must have one now that we’re here.”

  I had never had an X-ray before, except for my teeth at the dentist. They would put that heavy lead sheet on me, and then the dentist and the hygienist would leave. It made me wonder, if X-rays were so harmless, then why did everyone else leave the room, and have me face it alone?

  “My arm feels fine,” I said, wriggling out of the doctor’s grasp. “The other doctor said the bandage can come off in another week.”

  My aunt said, “Maya, go have the X-ray done. By the time your mother gets here, at least the doctors can tell her they’ve looked at you also.”

  “My mother? She’s coming?” All the argumentativeness drained out of me. The realization of how ill my grandmother must be flooded through me.

  My uncle said, “I called your mother after Ammamma was admitted. She and your father are trying to get on a flight tomorrow. That means they should arrive here two days after that, by Thursday.”

  The two other doctors were giving Ammamma’s charts and their instructions to the nurse who had come in. More medication, more tests, I couldn’t understand much else they said. They started talking to my aunt and uncle and I moved closer to them to listen. My aunt interrupted them to say, “Maya, go with Dr. Kumar now, please.”

  “But I want to hear how Ammamma is.”

  My aunt looked at my uncle and he shrugged. “If she really wants to know, maybe she’s ready for these kinds of things.”

  They let me stay and listen. The doctors wanted to talk about what the options were if Amraamma did not wake up. The longer she stayed unconscious, the more potential damage there was. It was unclear yet whether she had had one large stroke or several smaller strokes. Right now, she was still breathing on her own, but what if she needed respiratory support—there were a limited number of respiratory machines in the hospital, and the doctors could only put her on one if she had a decent chance of eventual resuscitation and recovery.

  I didn’t want to hear more. 1 decided to go with Dr. Kumar to get my x-ray. He took me to the second floor to a door marked RADIANT ENERGY LAB. I asked Dr. Kumar if sometimes people came out of comas and they were fine. That happened often on the soap operas I used to watch with my babysitter.

  “Not usually,” he said. He saw my eyes fill up, and he tried to think of something nice to say. “We have a new radiologist from Delhi, I think you’ll find him as good as anybody in the States.”

  The radiologist showed me the x-rays afterward, and he said we could leave the bandages off. He showed me the faded line in my bone where it had broken, and said it was knitting itself back together nicely. “Bones are amazingly regenerative at your age,” he said. “If an old person breaks his hip, sometimes he never recovers. But if a kid falls down a flight of stairs, he gets up and cries for a while and forgets it all if you give him a toffee.”

  He asked me if someone had accompanied me to the hospital, and I explained where my aunt and uncle were. He put his hand over his heart, shaking his head sadly, saying, “Very sorry, so sorry,” when I told him about my grandmother. He said, “Don’t worry, it is a very good hospital here, even the Tigers know to come here.” He moved aside a box of rubber gloves and a glass jar of gauze on the counter to reveal a small altar, with incense sticks and a small unlit diya ("just for show, the smoke would contaminate the machines") and some marigold petals. A small figure of Jesus on the cross leaned against the back of the counter. “I am a believer in His miracles, so I will say a prayer to Him for you.”

  I went back to my grandmother’s room, where nothing had changed. My grandmother lay still, my aunt meditated, and my uncle wrestled with the leg of a chair, trying to get it to screw in more tightly so that the four legs would balance evenly. The room hardly looked like a hospital room, there were no machines or medical instruments around, the bed had no support rails, the walls were bright blue and adorned with a framed picture of a seashore. Steady sunshine poured in through the windows, and occasionally the winds would toss a few petals or leaves into the room. The scent of sickness and chemicals had been so overpowering at the hospital entrance or when I passed by the large patient wards. In here, in these nice private patient rooms, you started with a clean slate—if there was anything unpleasant, anything that reeked of decay and deterioration, you had no one to blame but yourself. I thought of what the driver had been telling Reema auntie and me in the car, about how animals, especially animals in distress, leave scents along their path, more enduring than footprints. When Ram went hunting with his brothers, (the sanctuary was open for shooting for a couple weeks a year to control the population of deer and goat and boar) he said they would try to conserve their ammunition, so often they would only shoot one or two bullets, only enough to wound their target. Then, for the next few days, they would walk through the hills, following only the scent through dark, fireless nights, the smell of death growing stronger and stronger. They could tell by the scent that the day had come that the animal would give itself up and kneel m
eekly before them in some grassy corner. Ammamma lay in full view of us, under soft natural light. If the end was coming, would we know it by scent or sight first, would we have a sign? I willed Ammamma’s body to keep doing its work, cleaning its house.

  Two men rolled a gurney into the room and lined it up next to Ammamma’s bed. The man at the head of the bed took the pillows out from under Ammamma, and her head thudded flatly against the sheet-covered mattress. They untucked the corners of the sheet, and then, in one coordinated heave, picked up the sheet with Ammamma on it and moved her to the gurney. The ends of the sheet puckered underneath the gurney’s metal tabletop.

  “What’s going on?” my uncle asked.

  “For tests,” one of them said.

  “Which tests now?” my uncle said.

  “I don’t know,” the same one said. The other one stayed silent.

  We stood and followed the gurney. We walked single file because there were a lot of people in the halls now, and I was last behind my aunt and uncle. The gurney started up the ramp to the second floor. I was far enough behind to catch a sudden full-length view of my grandmother lying prone on the gurney on the incline that suddenly seemed so steep, her body tilted almost vertically. My heart lurched as I saw her left leg slip off the gurney table and hang limply in the air. Her leg was exposed from the knee down, pure white skin from knee to ankle that had never seen the sun, and dark blue veins latticed across it. 1 wriggled past some people to catch up to Ammamma. 1 picked up her leg—it was heavy, I started with one hand, then added the other for a better grip—and lifted it back into place, smoothed her sari over it, and kept my hand on her firmly, walking all the way up in step with the gurney’s stops and stutters.