We explain our shortage of funds. “Will you need a whole hour, do you think?” he asks us. “Why not log on and I’ll just charge you for the time you spend?” A coffeepot perks briskly on a small corner table. Cups, milk, and sugar are arranged invitingly for customers. A few people drift in and settle down at terminals. Some look like tourists, checking their e-mail, some like students. Modems hum, dialing up. Fingers click on keyboards. Screen-saver patterns zoom in steady rhythm on unused monitor screens. The place has its own heartbeat.
Within minutes, we are seated at one of the dozen computer terminals arranged against the wall. Mr. Mohanraj logs us in with flying fingers, and soon we have six possible search engines at our disposal. Eagerly, we get to work. We key in memory and problems and wait. In a matter of seconds, we are rewarded with three million plus hits, most of them having to do with memory problems on computers.
“Great! Now what do we do?” My terrific idea seems less brilliant now.
“How is it going? Everything all right with your connection?” Mr. Mohanraj hovers by.
We look at each other. Then in a rush the story of Mami pours out. I tell it, with Sumati adding details. To my ears my voice is high and nervous. I race to my conclusion. “And so we have to know, are we imagining things or is there something really wrong with her? Can you help us run a search that will tell us more?”
Mr. Mohanraj pulls up a chair. “How old is your Mami?” he asks. Sumati thinks eighty. I have no idea. He pulls up a Q-and-A site for us, hosted by a local hospital foundation, where people can find out about major illnesses. He types in a few words. Memory loss, seniors, symptoms. Soon we are reading about conditions that commonly afflict the elderly, illnesses with names like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
After a while, the text begins to blur into a mass of meaningless words of many syllables. My head whirls with information overload.
Then, “Look!” says Sumati. “‘In Alzheimer’s disease a pattern emerges over six months or more. The patient might routinely forget recent events, appointments, names, and faces.’ Does that fit?”
“Some,” I say.
She reads on. “‘He or she gets easily confused, suffers mood swings, bursts into tears for no apparent reason, or becomes convinced someone is trying to harm them or others.’ Well, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. It sounds really bad, and I don’t think Mami’s that bad, somehow.”
“It says here,” Sumati points out, “that ’there is no single point in time when you can really tell it started. And after a while’ …” She stops, and frowns.
“Yes?” I try to find where she’s reading, and I stop too.
“‘After a while,’” she continues softly, “‘relatives of some patients say there are good days and bad days. On bad days they feel they are living with a stranger. The person they knew is simply not there any longer.’”
We sit there, stricken by the chilling thought, seeing together, because we have read together, the dreadful possibility that aging brings to some people. That Mami might be one of those people whose mind slowly decays. Then the phone rings on Mr. Mohanraj’s desk, and we jump. It rings again and he answers it.
“Thirty-five rupees per hour.” A pause. “We are open till nine-thirty.” Another pause. Sumati and I say nothing to each other. “Yes, we have a superfast connection.” Finally, he hangs up.
He walks over to us, leans on the desk. “If I might make a suggestion,” he tells us, “I’d say you should take this lady to see a doctor. You can get some information here from Web sites, but you can’t be certain.” He points to a cautionary warning on the screen informing readers that the “information on this page is not intended to replace consultation with a licensed medical professional.”
“Talk to your parents,” he urges, “so you can take your Mami to see a doctor.”
He charges us twenty rupees. I glance at the clock and realize we have been there for more than an hour. “But …” I begin. He waves us away. “It’s all right,” he says. “Never mind. Good luck.”
Invisible Ribbon
I fess up to Mom that evening. It takes her a while to unravel the threads of my account. “You what?” she says. “You and Sumati went and researched what? Where?”
“Dementia,” I say, “except we think maybe it’s Alzheimer’s. Mom, it sounds really bad.” I tell her about our trip to Cyberconnexions, feeling more and more foolish as the story unfolds.
She gets very quiet as I repeat the contents of the Web site as best as I can remember them. When I am done she says, “You’re right. There is something wrong with her, isn’t there? I’ve been wondering that myself for a while, wondering what we should do.”
“We can take her to a doctor, right?”
“Well, we can. But first we have to get in touch with her son and Jana. I’ll go talk to her at the bank tomorrow.”
That is when we realize Mami is missing.
We look all over the house for her. She is not upstairs. She is not in the kitchen. She’s not in the garden. She’s vanished.
“Dear God,” says my mother. “Now what do we do?”
I am struck by an inspiration. “Mom. Mrs. Rama Rao next door. Isn’t she Mami’s friend? Won’t she know how to find her son? Maybe she’ll have a phone number.”
“You,” says my mother, “are brilliant.” She goes next door to talk to the Rama Raos. In a few minutes she comes back, all out of breath. “They don’t have a phone, but Mrs. Rama Rao had a phone number of a neighbor of theirs. Her son’s still not back from work. I talked to Jana. She’s on her way. I think they live pretty close to here.”
In twenty minutes, Jana arrives by auto rickshaw. She is understandably and loudly frantic. “Ayyo, what will I tell my husband?” she cries.
Mom tries to calm her down. “We’ll go look for her. Don’t worry. She can’t have gone far.”
We are spared the trouble. Mrs. Rama Rao scurries over, bursting with news. “You are looking for Kamala Mami? Lakshmi just phoned—she is in their house.”
Pretty soon Lakshmi Auntie herself comes over. My head is starting to swim. The pace of this drama is electric. “You’ll have to come and get her,” she says. “She’s refusing to leave until she talks to Maya. Should I take Maya back with me and you all wait here?”
Mom nods. “Come on, Maya,” says Lakshmi Auntie, all businesslike. “Otherwise Mami’s going to settle in for the night on Sumati’s bed.”
Jana wrings her hands. “This is terrible. What will four people think?” she says. The Tamil phrase is an odd one. I remember hearing it when I was younger. It was a favorite phrase of Ammamma’s. It always puzzled me—what four people, and why should I care? Mami certainly wouldn’t care what any four people might think.
When we get to Lakshmi Auntie’s house, Mami is curled up on Sumati’s bed, laughing to herself. Words tumble soft and fast and frenzied from her mouth. She pays us no mind, giggling in time to her own racing thoughts.
“See?” says Lakshmi Auntie helplessly. “I can’t get her to listen to me. It’s like talking to someone who isn’t there.”
Sumati’s father, who is probably wishing he’d stayed in Bangalore, tries to keep Ashwin occupied in his room. Sumati says, “Oh, thank goodness you’re here. She’s been shouting for you.”
Mami cocks her head at me, the way some birds do when they’re trying to judge if they should put up with humans nearby or fly someplace else.
“Okay,” I say to Mami, “it’s all right.” I grab her hand. I sit on the bed next to her, and make her look at me. I hope I can get her attention. I hope she isn’t too far off in her own thoughts to be able to listen to me. She mumbles to herself without stopping. I can’t understand what she’s saying.
“Shh,” I say to her. “Shh.”
She mimics me, finger to lips, smiling crookedly, playing along like a little kid.
“Mami, come,” I tell her. “Come home with me.”
But she is off on a j
ourney of her own. “Home,” she says. “Come home. Such a brave girl. Oh, look how thin you’ve become!” She looks at me, but she is seeing another face, another time.
Past and present have mingled in her mind. I decide that if I can’t pull her from this world, maybe I can try to enter it. I say, “I know. It’s terrible. But it’s over now.”
“Over?” She hesitates. “They let you go?”
“Mami.” I’m talking slowly and carefully, knowing that the words I choose will either bring her into this moment of time or send her fleeing away. “It’s over. It’s all right now. Let’s go.”
She sighs as if there are dead-weight memory rocks in her heart, rocks made of unanswered questions, unresolved problems. The guilt of things said and done, of other words never spoken at all. She wavers between her worlds of inside and outside, then and now. At last she pulls her sari around her and gets up. “What are you people standing around for?” she says. “Go on! Nothing else to do?”
Relief floods the room in waves, washing over all of us. We go downstairs in single file.
We have one last hurdle to cross. Mami will not get in Lakshmi Auntie’s car. She has decided Auntie is a spy. “German spy!” she says to her with a glare. “We’ll shut down your bakery!”
“What?”
Sumati’s dad explains this historical reference. “She’s remembering the Second World War, when they closed down the German bakery in St. Thomas Mount because the British thought the owner was a spy. She’s very confused.”
“I am not confused,” says Mami with dignity. “You are all traitors and spies!” She lunges at him.
I say, “Shh, Mami,” and grab her hand in mine again. She quiets down, but refuses to ride in the car.
In the end, by flashlight and erratic streetlights, up and down the uneven sidewalk, dodging homeless families settling in for the night here and there, I lead Mami home. Lakshmi Auntie drives on ahead of us, stopping from time to time to let us catch up with her, keeping an eye on us the whole way. Like burglars on the prowl, we walk in the darkness down St. Mary’s Road to my grandfather’s house. One old woman with crazy eyes, talking to herself, trotting along behind a girl who keeps a firm hold of her hand. If the late shoppers at the stores along the way think we look peculiar, they don’t let on. They just make way for us. Like the people on the overcrowded buses here who make room for more passengers even when you can’t imagine there is any more room to be made.
You’d think it was the most ordinary thing in the world, my leading an old lady down the road, my soul connected to hers with an invisible ribbon woven of stories and fragments of memory.
What Will Four People Think?
Mami, despite having calmed down after our walk, refuses to go anywhere with her daughter-in-law. “I will take the number 45B to my room in Tambaram,” she insists. It is so late, however, that the last bus to Tambaram has left.
“Maybe you should just stay here tonight,” Mom suggests.
Jana pleads with Mami. “Why won’t you come and stay with us? People will say we don’t look after you, your own family, isn’t it? That’s what they’ll say.” From under the soft round mask of her face, Mami’s daughter-in-law throws Mom a dagger of a look.
Lakshmi Auntie says, “Mami, they are your family. Why not go there, just for now?”
Even I, despite feeling like a traitor and a spy, add my voice. “We’ll come and see you there, Mami.”
Mami considers it all. Then she delivers her pronouncement. “When Sita sat imprisoned in the garden of the demon queen, she was still a princess.” put
“Why don’t you come home with me?” Jana argues. “Don’t you think we’ll take care of you? Why are you working in other people’s houses as if you had no family to support you?”
Mami doesn’t miss a beat. “They tied a firebrand to Hanuman’s tail,” she snaps back, “and he ran through Lanka like a storm, burning the city up as he went.” She pauses dramatically, eyeing her audience. “And Sita the goddess, Sita the gentle, Sita of the good heart, could see her rescue was at hand.”
Not much we can say to that.
“All right,” says Jana to Mom. “Let her stay here for the night. Tell us if anything goes … wrong. Tonight you can phone my neighbor if you have to. Tomorrow I’ll be at the bank. My husband can come over in the evening. Yes?” Beneath the bluster there is a tremble in her voice.
“Yes, of course,” says my mother.
Jana leaves, defeated.
Lakshmi Auntie offers to sleep over.
Mom agrees gratefully. Auntie pulls out her cell phone to call her family and let them know they shouldn’t expect her back. She says, “You should have a telephone handy anyway. Just in case.” Just in case of what? None of us can imagine, since Mami in her right mind is unpredictable enough.
We camp out in the living room, where Mami has settled down for the night. She is curled up on a cotton rug spread out on the floor, in the enclosed porch between the kitchen and the garden. The cooling night air wafts in through the wrought-iron grille door. She is tired, and in a short time she is snoring like a freight train.
I go upstairs to get ready for bed. There is a small glow inside me. It comes from knowing that Mom and I have worked together to make things better for Mami today. It gives my steps a bounce. It makes me smile. As I turn the bathroom light on, the gecko scrambles up the wall. It gives me a warning chirrup. “Guess what?” I tell it. “You don’t frighten me a bit.”
When I go back down to the living room, I find that Mom and Lakshmi Auntie have made themselves comfortable. They’ve spread a few cotton rugs around, and created makeshift beds for the three of us. Lakshmi Auntie says, “Would you believe that Jana? So much more concerned with what four people will think than with what’s going on with Mami?”
Mom says heavily, “We were all brought up with that, right? Always worrying about what others would say. Didn’t you have to deal with that mentality, Lakshmi? With your in-laws?”
“Not as much as you,” she says. “We’ve had our share of differences, who doesn’t? But you, my dear. We should build a temple to you, what you’ve had to put up with.”
I pretend to be occupied with fluffing up pillows.
“So many rules, so many restrictions,” says my mother. “So many expectations. I didn’t meet any of them. I was unprepared for it. It was never like that in our family.”
She is digging into her past and unearthing episodes of which I am a part. The Dad voice in my head cautions me, They’re about to start on me. You know that, don’t you?
Mom has never talked about these things before, perhaps because there’s never been anyone to talk to.
Sure enough, Lakshmi Auntie says, “Well, Ravi should have put his foot down, yes? He did marry you. So why didn’t he tell his parents to leave you alone? I mean, interfering with everything! There’s a limit. You couldn’t name your own daughter, you couldn’t make the life you wanted to.”
Mom says, “Lakshmi, please.”
I turn my face to the wall and try to get some sleep. But Lakshmi Auntie says, “Now, don’t you ‘Lakshmi, please’ me. Does Maya even know what they’d planned for her?”
“Me?” I am instantly awake. Mom tries to evade the question, but I want to know. “Who? Planned what for me?”
Lakshmi Auntie shakes her head and says, “You never told her, right? I don’t believe it.”
For so long, we have allowed silence to grow and take over our family. Silence and secrets, promises from one to the other and back again, not to tell this or that to someone else. And I have been part of it too.
“When your father and I decided to separate,” says Mom, finally, “his parents kept trying to tell him that it was all my fault, and that I was unfit to take care of you. They suggested that you go live with them.”
“Me? Live with Ammamma and Rangan Thatha?”
“Yes. They had it all figured out. They would raise you because they thought you shouldn’t be with me. T
hey even sent a pair of plane tickets, one for you and one for your father.”
“Dad said this was okay?” It hits me suddenly. “The letter …”
“What?”
That letter. That overnight letter that arrived the day before we left. The one he made me promise not to tell Mom about. “The letter,” I say. “It had tickets in it.”
Now it is Mom’s turn to look astonished. “You knew?”
I nod.
“He made you promise not to tell me?”
I nod again. My mother closes her eyes as if these memories are too hard to bear.
Lakshmi Auntie rolls her eyes. “You two,” she says. “How long has it been since you’ve talked to each other?”
“They hardly even call anymore,” I say.
“Too busy managing their bags of money,” mutters Lakshmi Auntie. “It’s all they cared about.”
The ghost of my father, which has been getting blurry at the edges over the last few months, turns on its heel and walks out of my head.
All I can say is, “I wonder if that ticket was in my name or Preeta’s?”
The Developers
Mami is restless throughout the night, but we do manage to get some sleep. In the morning we find the city has wrapped itself in a haze that promises rain to come.
Lakshmi Auntie tells Mami she is going to arrange for her to see a doctor.
“What for?” Mami demands.
“Because at your age,” says Auntie, “it’s a good idea to go for a checkup. I’m going to phone your son, and he’ll make an appointment for you, all right?”
Mami grumbles, but she agrees. It seems so simple.
Mom tells Mami to go ahead and take her bath in the upstairs bathroom. After she is done, I find she has splashed so much water about that the gecko has retreated to the farthest, highest corner of the room. Only its tail is visible from behind the hot-water heater.
Naming Maya Page 8
