Motherland

by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

  There were smaller, everyday tests that occurred in Ammamma’s room, right in front of us. Doctors and nurses would casually come in, prick her palms with needles, pry open her eyes, put a stethoscope down her blouse, hammer on her knees and elbows, and then leave. Reema auntie had brought a stack of Ammamma’s white saris, not knowing when we left home that Ammamma would stay unconscious and lying down the whole time. It would be very hard, impossible really, to wrap a sari around someone who was lying down. Reema auntie tried, with a nurse helping, but it wasn’t working. So they took off the old sari and put a new petticoat and blouse on Ammamma, and no sari. When Sanjay uncle and I were let back in the room, it was the first time I’d ever seen Ammamma without a sari. Reema auntie touched die hem of the long starched petticoat skirt, saying, “See here, this is one of Ammamma’s best petticoats, see this pretty embroidery that her sister did for her.” She looked perfectly modest and neat in her blouse and skirt, but just not like my grandmother.

  My mother did not look like my mother, either, when she arrived. Her hair was pulled tight off her face, secured with bobby pins she usually bothered to hide. Her face was pale and taut, and small, it had closed in upon itself. Her lips were unlipsticked but unnaturally dark, as if they were grape-juice stained. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, which I hardly saw her wear at home, and never before on a plane trip, or in India. She had no makeup on, no earrings, no rings. Also, she carried nothing. A porter carried the three pieces of luggage. My father had my mother’s office briefcase in one hand and her stuffed handbag slung across his chest like a baby in a Snugli.

  And she didn’t speak. She dropped her head onto her brother’s chest and sat next to Ammamma’s bed for over an hour before she found words to say anything. Even then, when she asked about Ammamma’s stages and what had the doctors said, and what medications, it was not in the normal authoritative way my mother asked most things, waiting to hear an answer she already knew she was going to challenge. She asked listlessly—she asked fatalistically. It was like whatever was going to happen was going to proceed according to a fixed sequence. She had come to witness, not to intervene.

  People came. Ammamma’s two sisters, my grandfather’s sister, nieces and nephews in the Middle East and their children. Madhu’s parents came from England, and Madhu heard through them and left her trekking to come. She had little braids, cornrows, all over her head that some backpacker in Goa had done for her. Madhu’s parents had been very attached to my grandmother because Madhu and her mother stayed with Ammamma for some months when they were waiting for a visa to go and join Madhu’s father in England.

  Reema auntie’s parents came, the sister with the new baby, my father’s family. Friends of Sanjay uncle and Reema auntie came down from the hills early in the day, so they had time to go back up before dark. Friends of theirs who lived in town came after work, some of them came several days in a row. Childhood friends of my mother and her brother came, whose growth spurts had been nourished at my grandmother’s table, who could barely recognize each other now. Old friends and their children, now old and even gray themselves, came from the northern city my grandmother lived in when she was first married. These friends had the longest trip, two overnight trains and a bus, and they made me the most worried. The more people who came, and the farther away they came from, the more it meant eveiyone thought this was the end. I felt like they were betting against my grandmother.

  I saw that there were circles within circles of grieving. I felt far away from Madhu, whom I had wanted to be so chummy with just a few weeks ago. Now, this was not her loss in the same way it was mine: I felt remote from her, from our late night chats and our rebellious allegiance. And she knew, like other second cousins and third cousins and neighbors knew, that they were on the edges of this grief, and that there was a bubble around those of us who were in the middle. The middle included my mother and father and aunt and uncle and me, and perhaps my grandmother’s sisters and brother (I say perhaps because my grandmother’s siblings, old and infirm themselves and in a way inured to death, were perhaps even jealous of its power to individualize a person again in her last days, to draw loved ones back and revive one’s name, and one’s good deeds, on their lips).

  I would walk out in the hall, and two children of my uncle’s college roommate would be playing card tricks, and their father would take the cards and everyone would fall silent as I came by. That was the difference between the outer circle and us. Our place in the middle was as defined as if we’d been called by name onto the dance floor for the first song at a wedding. We were the ones who could not play cards, or trade addresses with people we had not seen in a long time, or go back to the office afterward to receive a late package delivery. Everyone there would probably never forget my grandmother, but we were the ones who would never forget losing her. But even in the middle, there were circles, and I was outside the one around my mother and her brother, who were losing their mother, and there was nothing else, no one else, who could match that.

  My father and I spent a lot of time together, especially in the evening when the hospital did not allow more than two visitors to stay in patient rooms. We were all staying at a small hotel near the hospital, where most of the other families we saw in the hospital also stayed. The hotel was clean and well-kept but gloomy all the same, full of tearstained guests in the lobby, and a staff that knew better than to attempt levity. The poorer families were accommodated in the hotel restaurant adjacent to the lobby, which at night was cleared of all its tables and chairs and refilled with charpoys, no more overcrowded or uncomfortable than the patient wards their relatives were in at the hospital.

  Even in their rush to the airport, Dad had thought to bring me some things: a recent newspaper article that profiled my high school’s swim coach, a package of Snickers bars, and some cinnamon Big Red gum. He was also the one who noticed right away that my hair was pinned in an odd way—I couldn’t do the ponytail with the hairpiece without Ammamma’s help. He made me tell him the whole story. He wanted to see for himself, and so I took out the barrettes. I showed him the smooth flat scar just below what had been my natural part when I parted my hair on the side.

  I begged him not to tell Mother, I didn’t want her to have to think about me right now. Whatever tension there’d been between them at the beginning of the summer had disappeared, and I was relieved to see them close again. Dad was hesitant, keeping a secret from Mother seemed like breaking ranks to him. Whenever I had sworn him to seaecy in the past, it meant he would tell no one else but my mother. Finally he agreed to wait a day or two, until we had a better understanding of what Ammamma’s condition was, and until Mother had had some sleep and was more herself. To agree even to wait at all meant he was very worried about Mother.

  When my mother did find out, she was very worked up. She took the barrettes out of my hair and found the scar and asked my father to call my doctor at home and put him on the phone with the doctor I saw at the hospital and also to call the neurologist at the medical college who had come up to the house. And set up appointments for me back at home with all the necessary people.

  “The doctors were good here, Mother. I’m not worried anymore,” I said.

  “You’re not worried? Well, that’s good that you’re not worried,” my mother said, sarcasm so immediately at her disposal.

  My father said to me later, “You have to know how hard on her it is, with your grandmother so ill right now. I’m sure she’s overreacting about your situation, but it’s probably because she can do something about that at least. With your grandmother, there’s nothing to do.”

  My father and I took care of the mundane things so that Sanjay uncle and Mother didn’t have to leave Ammamma at all. We brought food to them, we sent their clothes out to be washed, we went to the bank to exchange money, we went out in the street to hail rickshaws to take everyone back and forth between the hotel and the hospital. Every evening we laid out an outfit for the next day for Mother, matching sari, petti
coat, and blouse, on the chair next to the bed, so when she woke up, she could dress in the same numb daze she did everything else in. I had moved from my uncle and aunt’s room to my parents’ room. I was on a bed that had rolling wheels on the bottom (it resembled my grandmother’s gurney) and was positioned at the foot of the double bed my parents were sleeping in. In the early mornings, I could hear Mother moving around and I tried to lie still so she did not know I was awake. I didn’t want to be alone with her; I didn’t know how to do that. It was easier when there was a roomful of people and when 1 was doing things, helping one of Ammamma’s brothers find his cane or corralling the second and third cousins together and monitoring them as they did their homework hunched over on benches in the hallway peering into thick textbooks. One morning Mother was crying, for the first time I’d ever known of. She cried quietly so as not to wake my father. I lay still with my face turned into the pillow, slowing my breathing the way we did at swim practice.

  Ammamma’s blood pressure was worse that day, and the doctors said her heart was getting tired. I had stopped wondering whether a person could be in a coma and come out of it and be all right. I had started wondering whether a person, and everyone in that person’s life, could be in a coma and stay in it forever. This change in Ammamma, it was not a good change, but it signaled the passage of time, that events still happened in a sequence, that stories had a beginning and an end.

  Brindha was coming that day. She was brought by Reema auntie’s sister’s husband, who was her favorite uncle. Suhash uncle took his ham radio with him so they could spend the whole ride from St. Helena’s talking and listening to other people and there’d be no opportunity for her to ask questions. Reema auntie had called ahead to arrange things with Miss Granville, and even with Old Granny, tragedy parted the seas. Brindha could come, and stay, for as long as we thought she should. In some ways, this was not what Reema auntie wanted to hear. She wanted someone else to take charge and say, ten years old is too young to come home for death, let her stay in school and do sums and play jacks. And then Reema auntie would not have to decide for herself whether ten years old was too young, and what the right and compassionate and sensible thing was.

  Brindha was the only one among us to be really loud in grief. It had been a typically quiet morning, the five of us sitting in Ammamma’s room. Sanjay uncle, who had offered to help me on my summer homework, was speed-reading through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and suggesting more passages to analyze in my term paper. Suddenly, we heard screams of “Amma! Amma!” Reema auntie’s face went pale and tight, and she joined me in the hall, closing the door to Ammamma’s room behind her. Brindha ran toward us, a blur of white shirt and blue tie and pleated skirt, with Suhash running behind her, dodging staring people.

  “Amma!” Brindha tackled her mother, almost knocking her down. Reema auntie backed against a wall, Brindha pressing into her stomach, Brindha’s tight fists full of folds of sari. “Amma, are you sick?”

  “What? Oh, no, darling, I’m fine,” Reema auntie said. “Suhash uncle could have told you that.”

  Suhash uncle said, “She was teaching me movie songs the whole way in the car, only when we drove up to the hospital, she started screaming …”

  Reema auntie said, “I meant to meet you both at the front lobby, so we could go for a little walk and have a talk. Shall we go for a little walk, Brindha?”

  Brindha looked mournfully at Suhash uncle, at me, at some aunts who were murmuring a prayer together, at people passing by in white coats. “Just me and you, okay, Amma?” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Yes, darling, of course, just us, we’ll have a walk now. Let go for a second so Amma can fix her sari, okay?” Reema auntie said, nodding her thanks at Suhash uncle over Brindha’s head. She disentangled herself from Brindha’s grasp and straightened her sari.

  “Is Brindha all right?” Sanjay uncle asked when I went back into Ammamma’s room. He sat next to my mother on one side of her bed, I took one of the two empty seats on the other side. The seat was warm from the sun.

  I said, “Reema auntie took her on a walk to explain everything. They’ll be back soon.”

  My mother looked up, her face brightening, thinking on the seven-year-old version she had last seen, spindly legs, two pigtails that stuck out at funny angles. She would be surprised when she saw Brindha in her starched pleats, crisp and serious.

  Brindha came in the room, Reema auntie behind her. Everyone reflexively stood up. Sanjay uncle went over to her to hug her, but she slipped through his grasp. “Come sit by me,” my mother said, patting Sanjay uncle’s vacated chair.

  Brindha said nothing to any of us. She went up to the bed and looked. She looked for a long time, then she put her head down close near Ammamma’s mouth, as if she thought something might be whispered she alone could hear.

  Brindha turned around and looked at us. “This isn’t my grandmother,” she announced. She said this matter-of-factly, with the assurance of a coroner, so that for a second, we looked again at the bed.

  I was sitting at the side of the bed near the window, and Brindha was standing on the other side of the bed, and she walked around the foot of the bed and came toward me.

  “Do you see this?” she said, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward the bed. Her fingernails dug into my arm, and I tried to shift away a little.

  “I know, Brindha, I’ve seen her,” I said gently. I didn’t know what else to say. I backed away from her and found my chair again.

  It was very sudden. She sprang at me, hitting me with curled fists on my upper arm and shoulders and stomach, opening her palms to draw quick pictures in my skin with sharp nails. “It’s your fault—Do you see what you’ve done?”

  I tried to stand up from under her, half-carrying her, her head ramming against me, almost pushing me back down. The chair fell over as we struggled.

  “Brindha!” Sanjay uncle came to pull her off of me, but before he reached us, hardly thinking about it, I threw her to the floor. She landed, hard, and she curled into a little ball, rubbing her hand over where her thigh had bruised. Sanjay uncle stood towering over both of us, unsure who to go to. Brindha saw him coming to pick her up off the floor, and she moved herself, still in a ball, farther out of his reach, lying in a patch of sunshine right under the window.

  My aunt and my mother did not move from the other side of the bed, it was like they did not know us. They looked at us like they were looking at wild creatures out the window of the car, and they were afraid to move or attract our attention.

  Brindha was crying, and yelling, but out of breath from the crying. “I told you to watch her while I was away. I told you. Instead you get yourself hurt and she has to take care of you. How could you let her? Don’t you know she isn’t strong?”

  All the orderly paths inside my head, all the thoughts I kept in separate walled-off spaces, collapsed. For the last few days, I had been feeling something infiltrating, weeds cropping up in orderly gardens and hedgerows of thought. Now I knew it was guilt. I had pushed it out of my way into the dark corners, and now here was Brindha shining a light on it so everybody could see, and agree. It was my fault Ammamma was dying. I didn’t know how I let Ammamma take care of me. I didn’t know she wasn’t strong. I did know she begged me to let her do everything. I did know Ammamma had taken to her bed to keep me company and then I had gotten better and she had not.

  Still sitting in the chair, I bent over my knees, trying to make the nausea go away, the blood rushing to my head. I cried, covering my face with my hands.

  My aunt unfroze, she came around the bed, my uncle had scooped Brindha off the floor and carried her out. Reema auntie came over to me and stroked my back. “Maya, don’t think about it, please. Brindha’s just upset. None of us think of it like that; you mustn’t either.”

  I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t believe her. “That is how this happened,” I whispered from between my hands. “She was tired and she was staying up with me at all hours and she was m
issing her pills.”

  “Maya,” my aunt said, “we found out she was missing her pills even before. The doctor told us that when he came to the house. We don’t know why she wasn’t taking them, maybe she was already becoming forgetful or depressed. We don’t know. We were going to have a girl come and stay with her full-time and watch her. We were making arrangements. We weren’t fast enough; we didn’t do enough, I keep thinking that.”

  “If Amma was depressed, it was my fault, too,” my mother said softly. “1 have held myself apart from her for so long, we come for our scheduled visits, yes, but I’ve never asked her to come visit us in New York, or come to live with us. She must have seen so many of her friends go live with their children abroad, and notice that she’s never even been asked.”

  “Don’t.” My aunt went over to my mother and put her arms around her. “Amma couldn’t have gone to live with you, she knew that, her health was too fragile, and she hates cold weather. We all knew it was simply not an option.”

  We could hear Brindha’s howling in the hall and my uncle’s voice, getting more frantic the more he tried to calm her. Reema auntie went out to try to help.

  My mother and 1 were left in the room, the two of us alone with Ammamma. My mother was crying. I didn’t know what to do.

  “It’s true, you know, Mother. Ammamma showed me old photos she had kept of our house covered in snow. She said she imagined it must be like living inside the refrigerator. She didn’t want to come to New York. “

  My mother put a handkerchief to her face, and tried to blot the tears. “The awful thing is, Maya, I was secretly glad she couldn’t handle the cold, because it meant we never had to be open about the real reason she couldn’t come stay with us. Which is that I didn’t want her. And I know she knew that. Nothing could be more unforgivable.” The tears streamed down her face, and she gave up on the handkerchief, crumpling it up and putting it in her purse and looking for another one.