However, against my silent plea, Mummy replied, “Initially the doctor wrote, ‘acute renal failure and depression of the central nervous system’ as the cause of death. But when it came up that he had been tasting herbs and leaves the day of his death, hemlock poisoning was suspected. The doctor said Shekhar must have mistaken it for parsley or immortelle, other similar looking plants. That’s when they did an autopsy.” She sniffled. “Isn’t it ironical how these two identical looking plants have exactly the opposite names: One’s immortelle, and the other’s poison hemlock.”
Rosy/Miss Nosy, the one who drinks the elixir of naam
asked, “Speaking of hemlock, how’s your asthma, Ma’am?
Did Tana’s hemlock seed soup help?” At that point I could
have axed the motor-mouth’s nose off the way Lord
Lakshamana cut off Shurpanakha’s.
Mummy gasped as though Rosy had lanced a boil and I
exhaled in utter disbelief. A muscle convulsed in my jaw. My mother’s not a fool and I’m sorry to say she’s a formidably
ethical woman—not that that’s going to do her any favour
today. Not with me, and not today, considering the grand
scheme of things. Knowing her, she’s gonna blow my life to
kingdom come. Catastrophe is imminent.
I have to do something—and quickly before I end up in the
electric chair. However, a form of paralysis swept over me, my breath suspended as though I had ingested the toxic plant. So uncharacteristic of me. Am I dead? Come on paramedics, do your job. Resuscitate me. I still stood rooted to the spot. Am I stoned? Do I need to get stoned? Whizz, Speed, I need you. I took out the powdery-pink amphetamine from my handbag and dabbed it onto my gums. Ugh! Double ugh! My phone buzzed. I wheeled Mr. Kumar to another therapy room on some pretext. Next, I switched off my mobile phone, walked back into room 1, picked up the intercom, changed my voice as best as I could and announced, “Code-Blue, Room 109. Code-Blue.”
I heard the chair next door scrape on the floor. “I gotta go.”
As soon as the big-mouthed-troll was out the door, I walked
into the station with a firm step, my mind made up. To hell
with the middle path.
“Lovely surprise, Mummy.” I gave her my best smile.
She didn’t smile back, her oval-ish face as pale as her off-
white saree. “It was you who killed Emperor-Ashoka-the-Great. I know now. There can be no other explanation. You’d always been a bit off. Things didn’t quite add up.”
Dear Diary, sometimes people can be uncharacteristically
dumb as hell. Of course, it was me, and it’s taken Mummy
close to twenty years to figure that out. Mummy/Dummy is rather slow to catch on. Who does she think she is: St. Anthony, the patron saint of animals? What about us humans? Banishing me to my room without food for an entire weekend with only the poor two-month-old Pug to give me company— what were my counterfeit parents thinking? That I’ll come out glowing with strength? “Keep her isolated. Contained,” Papa told Mummy as though I were a contagious virus. Penance through starvation might be their idea of parenting but I now know that anywhere else it certainly would be frowned upon. Whatever their pretzeled minds expected would happen I can’t imagine—but what did happen was by no means pretty.
Deeply tortured by hunger pangs, I sniffed gum after which I slipped my moorings and misconstrued the Pug’s whimpering and sharp yelps to be ghost voices that needed silencing. Hence, the pillow smothering. People give trophies to Matadors who finish off raging bulls. What do I get for dispatching Emperor-Ashoka-the-Great to his final resting place? Though admittedly I forced an untimely death on the poor puppy, in my state of delirium, for the sake of my sanity, and in the interest of self-preservation? Accusations flung at me! You know it all Diary, the minutes of this terrible incident constituted my second entry on your pages—the first being an account of my separation from Mr. Chatterjee. The dog-biscuit soaked in milk stays right up on my list of the meals I’ve relished the most, racked with hunger as I was. My love for animals is almost legendary—I’ve even beaten up creeps who tie cans to puppies’ tails. It’s on you Mummy, Papa that I see the mournful, wrinkly, short-muzzled face of Emperor-Ashoka-the-Great in every dog I see. Things didn’t add up? Why should they have? You cannot boil down facts and events to mere digits and numbers. Life’s not Math!
Though I had come to love the Pug dearly, it had actually been thrust upon me. A couple of weeks before my mother
brought him, I came home with a street performing monkey.
“Mummy, you’ll never guess who is with me.”
Startled, Mummy exclaimed, “Out, out!”
Papa joined her. “Out this second.”
“No need to freak out. Please, please let me keep it or else the madari’s gonna torture it to death. It checks all the boxes a pet should. He’s become my friend. It’s cute, it’s naughty,
it’s—”
“Did you not hear us? Out this very second,” shouted Papa,
his face a strange unnamed colour. “When I was your age, a
mere glance from my father was enough for me.”
The monkey clung fiercely to me, his hands grasping my
hair. “Relax, Mr. Chatterjee.” I stroked its back. “You’ll have
to throw me out, too,” I declared to my procreators, “this
fellow is family now. I’ve already named it.”
“I said, not another word from you. Naming this gorilla here doesn’t give you the license to keep it,” yelled Papa.
“Naming me did give you the license to use me as a
punching bag. What about that?”
The slices of a smelly sandwich exchanged knowing glances. Whoever said, Nothing like a parent’s love has obviously not met my parents.
That night the simpatico couple locked me out of my room,
tossing my mattress down in the narrow hallway. A fortnight
or so later Mummy gifted me the Pug perhaps as a peace offering on the insistence of my Aunt, Rekha Maasi.
“I should have done something, though God knows what,” Mummy said, pulling me yet again out of my thoughts. Hey Tana, you should do something. Put your mind to the first order of business. My brain worked furiously, One, Mummy is fond of her drinks and two, she is a habitual pill-popper. Plus, you can bank on the fact that old habits die hard.
“Mummy!” —I rolled my eyes— “not again! You mixed
Zolfresh with Scotch: Didn’t you?”
“Well, can’t remember explicitly but I did take something to get me to sleep,” she frowned, “I suppose we could both
check into a rehab.” Some of the colour seeped back into her
cheeks.
“Please! No jokes about such a serious matter, thank you
very much,” I said, hugely relieved, and feeling convinced I
had dodged the issue in a suave way.
“But I think I threw away the Zolfresh… some other pill I
think. Valium?”
Bingo. “See,” —I threw up my hands— “you are
hallucinating.” I said speaking from off the top of my head, not really sure if I was making any sense but I had to keep talking so as to not give her a chance to review and analyse the hemlock chapter. “Who do you think you are? A Professor of drugs? I told you it doesn’t sit well with you; this alcohol and soporific combo. Last—”
Grabbing her elbow, I chivvied her along to the exit door
that led to the staircase and continued to talk, while praying
silently like I have never prayed before. Sweet merciful Lord,
if I’m your child, if you are the fellow everyone makes you out
to be, just don’t let us bump into anyone until we reach our
destination. I promise I’ll throw my rather expensive collection of shoes into a bonfire. Amen!
“—time when you took Zolfresh after yo
ur whisky-binge-
session, things happened.”
“You did tell me I acted strange.”
“Mad-more-like. Absolutely weirded me out. You’d rung
me up saying red ants crawling on your dining table were spies
of some sort. I had called up Papa who had woken up to check
up on you.”
“Possibly my most embarrassing moment. But from what I
remember, that reaction had been immediate. This Valium-
whisky thing was last night. Almost,” —she checked the time on her cell-phone— “fifteen hours ago.”
“That doesn’t matter. It all depends on the user’s
constitution.”
“But still … meds stay in the bloodstream just a couple
hours.”
“Who told you that?”
“I google all sorts of stuff,” she said, “don’t you?”
Who gave you the right to swoop into my bailiwick in your
Bata slippers only to denounce my professional competence?
“I said every detox timeline is different depending on the drugs used and the individual’s body chemistry. Who’s the nurse of the year here? So, don’t get caught in the clutches of chintzy accoutrements.”
“Accountants? Who talks like this?”
“Those with a proper education.” Grade 10 pass out Mummy will now teach me with her google education. Meanwhile, wheels continued to turn at a frantic pace inside my brain. A first-rate idea hit me. Yes, this one calls for flakka. I pulled out a zip lock from an inner pocket and swallowed three white crystal chunks. Generic Name: Flakka. Street Name: Gravel. Dosage: Your guess is as good as mine. Use:
Gives the strength and fury of the Incredible Hulk. Side-
Effects: Extreme paranoia, delirium, death.
“Is that mishri? Can I have some?”
I waved the empty pouch at her. “Sorry, Finito.”
“By the way, don’t mind but—”
Now that’s a bad start to a sentence. “Huh?”
She waved at my sky-blue uniform. “Don’t mind but this
dress of yours—the colour washes you out totally,” she blurted. “A bright red lipstick could help.”
“Mm-hmm.” So, now you’re my personal stylist, too. Why
don’t you look into the mirror and first correct your own
bleeding lipstick’ “What brings you here?”
“I wouldn’t be here if you had taken my call.”
For the first time I regretted not picking up Mummy’s call.
“Listen, ask your Chotu to get a new Chotu for me. The old
one left.”
“I’m not surprised. The way you treat them.”
“Servants are hard to find.”
“Staff, Mummy, not servants.”
“What good is this staff if they can’t give you a foot
massage? Huh? Where are we going?” she asked somewhat
irritably, “can we take the lift? This one’s giving me grief.”
She patted her left knee.
“The lift’s not working. Just one floor down.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Whatever it takes. We are gonna get you something to fix
this,” —I rotated a finger close to my noggin— “’cause your
brain seems to have lost its balance and is flapping about like a
windmill; saying I killed my own darling Emperor-Ashoka-
the-Great.”
Meanwhile, the Lord listened. Not a soul crossed our path— we reached the morgue in the basement without stepping on any land mines. Phew!
His head bent on a corpse, Anupam bobbed in time with the music blaring on the system. He didn’t see us; he didn’t hear us. I hate to be judgy like Papa but this fellow creeps me out. What sort of a person dances when handling a dead body? People are unknowable. What I did conclude from the scene was the fact that the Lord is on my side and yes, I will pray daily. If all goes as per plan, you’ll get a professional oil massage, I silently told my amygdala, thank you for danger identification and helping me in self-preservation.
“Is that a mortuary where you bag dead folks? If you’re
trying to freak me out, it’s working,” Mummy said, her voice hushed.
“Mummy, I’ll show you something. I was protecting you and I still am.” Saying so, I punched the code on the gate of the medicine supplies room, took her in and quietly but firmly shut the heavy steel door. It is imperative that pain isn’t involved— not any more than the pin-prick kind. If I were to choose between falling on a guillotine and Mummy going through pain, I would choose the former without so much as batting an eyelid. This one called for the Forget-me drug. Generic Name: Flunitrazepam. Brand Name: Rohypnol. Street Name: Date-Rape-Drug. Dosage: Varies. Use: Incapacitates the user and thwarts resistance it being a tranquilizer about ten times more potent than Valium. Also acts like a memory eraser which was the need of the hour. With a large enough dose of forget-me there was a good chance she forgot all that hemlock conversation. Please, please dear drug, do live up to your name.
I pulled on the gloves I use to handle you, opened a drawer
and took out an olive-green pill from its bubble packaging.
Hey, what am I doing? This wouldn’t do! The caplet would take about twenty minutes or so to start working. She might end up cross-examining me and going hysterical in that time.
Therefore, I put away the pill and instead took out a 1-ml
ampule containing 2 milligram of the drug.
“You got water,” I asked, the tension palpable in my voice.
“Relax,” Mummy produced a bottle from the large brown
handbag I have always made fun of. Are you carrying the
whole house in it? No wonder your shoulder hurts. Do lighten
the load. Dumping the purse’s contents unceremoniously on
the bed was a thing I did quite a bit. However, today I felt
grateful for her silly habit.
“Where’s your phone, Mummy? I’ve lost Papa’s number—
I’ll ask him to come.”
She produced her phone out of her bag with great ceremony
as though she pulled a rabbit out of a magic hat before pushing
it rudely in my face.
What’s wrong with her? —she’s going nuts? Stop bugging me lady before things get out of hand?
“Your Papa’s dead.”
I’m going nuts, I winced. How could I forget? Not quite a first-rate idea—taking flakka. It’s the f that’s making me see
things or in this case not see.
Papa stared accusingly at me through the framed photograph which happened to be the lock screen wallpaper on her phone. Receding-chinned, balding, and DEAD—still he managed to give me goose bumps from mast to keel. However,
I stared back defiantly at the decorated veteran with a garland decorated around his bull neck.
“Your Papa was a good man.”
“Yeah, I suppose. When he kept his mouth shut.”
“Did you know him at all? Do you know he was once
felicitated by the family of Naik Jadunath Singh?”
“What? Who Jadu?”
Mummy shook her head as though I had failed to recognise her. “More than me I think it’s you who needs help. Don’t think for a minute this is over,” she minced out the threat.
“It’s you who needs to relax,” I told her unconvincingly
while surreptitiously switching off her phone. “Yoga can help.
Relax and you’ll get there…um.” Scrambling for a response regarding the ‘will call Papa’ unfortunate faux pas, I was left groping, sounding to myself much like the scamsters who promise to triple your money by spinning words with no concrete takeaway from any of their claims.
“I haven’t relaxed since you turned into this” —she pointed
rather savagely at me— “wacko. So, do not tell me to relax.”
; “What are you talking about?” I asked, a line of sweat
breaking above my lips. What’s this with the third degree?
“Don’t act,”—she looked down on me from above her
spectacles— “Hemlock soup? I watched you grow.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Is she enjoying
this?
“For a while there I thought I was doing a decent job as a
mother. But then I knew,” she said mysteriously.
“Is that a riddle?” I asked brittly.
“Make of that what you will. We will talk about it over
coffee. I’ve heard you say the hospital cafeteria coffee’s the best and yet I never got to taste it.”
Sorry Mummy, and now I think—I cringed at the
unwelcome thought—you never will.
“I will have to report you,” said the Marvel badass
superheroine.
I pictured her sharpening her claws before slipping into a cat woman costume.
Careful Mummy, you’re on thin ice. “Then I will have to
kill you. Go on, it’s your funeral.” I tried to smile but failed.
For God’s sake how does Sadguru propose we smile. And that
motherkisser Rosy… she can smile even when she is saying
nasty things. It takes all sorts...
“I won’t put it past you.” Mummy did not smile either. Like
daughter, like mother—we aren’t exactly barrels of laughs.
“Look, this isn’t a game. You’re not hearing me. Sometimes, telling the truth serves no one.” I sighed tiredly. “I don’t have the stamina for churlish games. You could practice the middle path, Mummy,” I stretched my mouth to smile serenely. I squinted in her specs to see if it was a viable smile. Uh-oh! More like a distorted/grotesque sneer.
“Let’s just say I never really was a fan of your middle path
theory,” she said ruthlessly, “the fact is you need treatment.
Check into your own psycho department like my sister did.
Electroshock therapy set her mind right … er … for a while at least. You could try that. She was nuts and so are you.”
“Rekha Maasi’s diagnosis was consistent with paranoid schizophrenia.”
“Same thing.”
How I wished a surgeon could suture her mouth shut.
However, she spoke again.
ROSE’S BENT STEM: Girl Tangled. 'Best thriller of 2019,' -The Tribune Page 10