by Avni Doshi
‘Have you noticed,’ I say when we are on the way home, ‘when men change their diets everyone is so respectful, but when women do it everyone tries to convince them to cheat?’
‘But being vegetarian isn’t just a diet. It’s not about vanity.’
I put my head back against the seat of the car and look out of the window. ‘I told my mother to come and stay with us.’
Dilip is about to nod, but he pauses. ‘Stay with us? Or live with us?’
I look at him and my mouth opens. ‘Stay with us. For a few nights. A week at the most.’
Dilip sits against the seat and looks in front. ‘Sure.’
We go over a few speed bumps that are close together before I say, ‘I think, eventually, Ma has to live with us.’
Dilip leans forward and makes the music louder so our driver can’t hear. ‘When?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you an exact date. Soon.’
I slide out of my shoes as we enter our apartment, and I can smell the cheap leather. I wipe my feet against the legs of my trousers.
My husband lies on the sofa with his shoes still on. We’re looking at each other in spite of all the mirrors. Around us are eight sofas, sixteen lights, four dining tables and thirty-two chairs. I see fingerprints on the glass that I didn’t notice in the afternoon. There are countless other objects in the room that do not make it into reflections; they are cut off, halved and quartered, by other objects. The room in square metres cannot accommodate this profusion, these partial, smudged realities. Our flat feels too full and I have the urge to throw something away.
‘Do you think she should live with us? You can’t stand each other for more than a minute.’
My jaw grows rigid and I can barely open my mouth. I have an answer but I am not satisfied with it. He knows too much about my mother and he can use it against me. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t confided in him. I wish he were a stranger.
‘She needs me.’
He nods and shrugs. Does that mean he agrees but doesn’t know how to respond? Or he hears me, hears the words, but doesn’t think I mean what I’m saying? To be indecipherable in this moment seems unkind, unlike him, but perhaps what he has to say would be worse.
I want an answer about what he means, but I see that he wants an answer too, an answer to a question I have already forgotten. We wait in silence for one of us to go first, for the confusion to be broken. The alcohol, the comedown, makes us irritable and too lazy to be considerate.
‘It’s hard,’ he says, ‘for me to understand your relationship with her sometimes. Being around her is very stressful for you. And the other way round. To be honest, I wonder if you’ll make her worse or better.’
I nod. He’s right. But I want to cry for being stupid, for giving him the tools to make this incision.
I tape white index cards with names and emergency numbers written in block letters on the wall above Ma’s telephone. The paint is peeling and some of the cards float to the floor. I persist. Ma is sitting on the sofa, watching me. She puts her hand on my bottom and moves it around in a rough, circular motion.
‘You’re having a baby.’
I look at her. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Soon, very soon.’
‘I don’t think so. We aren’t ready.’
‘I know it. I’ve seen it in a dream.’
She’s been talking about her dreams a lot recently. To me, to the neighbours, to people in the street. Apparently, she advised the watchman to get his affairs in order. He took it as a threat and now refuses to open the gate for my car when I visit her.
‘You have so much here already,’ she says, her hand still on my bottom. It feels like she is trying to wipe it away. ‘And you haven’t even had children yet.’
I don’t answer.
She continues. ‘And you’re always on a diet.’
‘Everyone is always on a diet.’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m never on a diet. And at your age? At your age, I ate Parle-G biscuits coated in white butter.’
I shudder. I have done that, slathered biscuits with butter, eaten them by the plateful, delirious and hurried, afraid of getting caught in the act by the nuns at boarding school after we had raided their pantry in the middle of the night. The taste remains illicit for me, something swallowed too quickly, something in danger of coming back up, something that immediately went to my brain, which was always foggy, deprived of fat, forcing me to drift off into space.
Ma doesn’t know. I never told her that for a portion of my childhood I was always hungry and have been searching for some fullness ever since. Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.
In the kitchen, I can smell something sour, something fermenting. Inside an open cooker by the sink is a mountain of yellow split mung beans, soaking in water. The beans are melting, dissolving, white and bubbling. I ask my mother how long she has been soaking the dal. She walks slowly into the kitchen and peers into the pot. Her head is still, but her thoughts run through the past few days in circles, the loop continuing to be unrecognizable with each pass.
I push the cooker into the sink and turn the tap to full. The water on the metal sounds like crashing waves.
My mother tilts her head and looks me over, as if I’ve returned after many years away. ‘You look different,’ she says.
Cracks originating in another apartment climb up the wall, sprouting into full bloom in the corner of my studio. There are days when neighbours are a comfort and there are days when the closeness feels like danger. If cracks travel, I wonder what else makes it past the walls. Moisture, voices. Sometimes, while we shout at each other, I imagine the neighbours on the other side pressing their ears up to the plaster. Or maybe they sit on their sofa side by side and watch the sounds invade their rooms, sounds that nearly take shape, shifting weight.
It is a struggle to remain present wherever I am, because my mind travels in time and space, not just to past and future but also to the homes that surround us in this compound, to the bodies that inhabit this city. When I see population graphs, the country seems like a heaving mess, numbers skewed to the young and the hungry, and I imagine them all just outside, climbing over one another until they find their way through an open window, a hatch or even a crack, and they are all in here with me, or nearby, advancing, sweating, crying out, bleating, neighing, sometimes a sea of white, sometimes of colour, and I feel the menace at the back of my neck even as Dilip and I continue our quarrel about what kind of furniture will fit in the studio.
At the department store, we look at a single bed with a red Sale tag blown up and draped across the frame like a sheet. The bed will do for my mother and won’t take up much space in the room, but Dilip wonders if we will regret not buying a bigger bed in the future. ‘Why would we regret it?’ I ask, though I can already think of several reasons, and we decide on taking the small bed for now, postponing remorse for the future instead of managing it in the moment because, after all, who knows how long we will live in this apartment. Dilip adds to this: Who knows how long we will need a space to make art, or how long we will live in India, or how long we will live at all? And while he sees these questions as heartening and comical, they fill me with irritation. We stand in a queue to pay for our new bed, and I imagine myself living far away from the only home I have known, dying in a foreign land, until the salesman who rings up our purchase asks if the bed is for our child.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s for my mother.’
*
‘I won’t be able to sleep in this cupboard,’ my mother says, looking around at the books and drawers and the boxes in t
he corner stacked one on top of the other. I wrap the pale, thin curtains around themselves in a knot and they swing gently. The window of my studio overlooks a swimming pool that no one in the building seems to use. Feathers and decomposing leaves merge into a landmass on the surface of the water, and everything looks more unwashed than usual.
‘I can move everything out of the room,’ I say, still looking outside.
‘No, no. No need.’
She doesn’t say more, but I sense she is thinking, I won’t be here for long. We haven’t discussed whether this is a trial run for an impending event or an adult slumber party, and I think it might be better that both of us continue with our separate illusions. But when the small canvas bag she has brought with her gapes open and we discover that she has forgotten her toothbrush, medicine, underwear and nightgown, I realize that one of us at least must be clear-headed and perhaps the time for my illusions is past.
I am alone in the car on the way back to Ma’s flat to pick up her things, and I am caught like a ribbon in a cassette, stuck on how to prepare her to say goodbye and the best way to do it. Because we have to comprehend the finality of this end as much as she does, even though it might be difficult to register since she will still be there when we return the next day, not looking or acting different from the day before. This is a long and drawn-out loss, where a little bit goes missing at a time. Perhaps, then, there is no other way besides waiting, waiting until she is no longer there inside her shell, and the mourning can happen afterwards, a mourning filled with regret because we never truly had closure.
The inside of her apartment verges on disaster, kept at bay by the half-hearted attempts Kashta makes at cleaning, but she, too, knows that her employer is unwell, and takes liberties when she can. I wonder how I will love Ma when she is at the end. How will I be able to look after her when the woman I know as my mother is no longer residing in her body? When she no longer has a complete consciousness of who she is and who I am, will it be possible for me to care for her the way I do now, or will I be negligent, the way we are with children who are not our own, or voiceless animals, or the mute, blind and deaf, believing we will get away with it, because decency is something we enact in public, with someone to witness and rate our actions, and if there is no fear of blame, what would the point of it be?
The tattered and mended bras are in a drawer with her underwear. I scoop them all out.
‘What are you doing?’
I turn. Kashta is standing in the doorway, scratching her scalp with her middle finger.
‘These are torn. I want to throw them away.’
Kashta shifts weight. ‘I can take them.’
I had planned on throwing away the lot of them, along with a pile of magazines I feel certain Ma won’t remember. But Kashta watches me and the exposed underwire in my hands. I give the bras over and the secret is safe. I expect this exchange will go unnoticed, unless Ma begins to suspect Kashta is stealing from her. Maybe she will be relieved that those wretched things she couldn’t get rid of are finally gone.
‘Don’t keep them in the house,’ I tell Kashta as I leave.
By the time I get home, the mood has shifted with the help of dusk and whisky. Ma takes healthy sips from a cold glass. Rings of condensation are on every surface. Dilip looks up when I come in.
‘Will you have anything?’ he asks, holding up his own glass so the ice cubes bang against each other.
I shake my head.
Ma has changed into a dress that I realize is mine. The cotton block-print fabric strains against her heavy torso, turning her breasts into a single unit. The sleeves cut into her underarms. She is beginning to sweat. The buttons at the back of the dress barely cling to their holes, and when I sit next to her on the sofa I can see creamy patches of flesh that have never seen the sun.
‘Ma, why are you wearing my dress?’
She looks at me and then at Dilip. He blinks and my mother begins laughing, still looking at him. ‘It’s my dress,’ she says.
‘No. It’s not. It doesn’t fit you.’
She shrugs as best she can in the confines of my clothes. ‘I have the same one.’
Dilip is peering into his glass, avoiding eye contact with us, even though we both seem to be watching him, perhaps hoping he will play referee. He must be wondering if this is how we will be before long, if this is how every evening will pass. What can he be looking for in his glass? Maybe a way out.
I reach into the bag I came in with and pull out a housecoat. Ma ignores it when I hold it out to her and picks up a magazine from the coffee table with her free hand. She flips a few pages without looking at me, then scoffs.
‘Look at this,’ she says. Her voice is withering. Dilip leans forward.
‘Little marks, here and everywhere. What is this, a leg?’
She has found a small passage in the text that I have marked up, a doodle that is somehow so offensive she cannot let it pass. ‘Does it even look like a leg?’ she asks Dilip. ‘This is her habit from childhood, you know. She draws on everything. She can’t leave anything as it is. This was one of the biggest complaints about her when she went to boarding school. I think it is really the reason they threw her out. What did that nun say? Your daughter defaces everything she gets her hands on. Can you believe it? They threw her out of school for this.’
Dilip’s gaze finds me and travels down to the small scar on my hand. He clears his throat. ‘She has a talent for it,’ he says, continuing to speak as though I am not there. ‘It was her calling, think of it that way.’
Ma throws herself forward and laughs, and her forehead almost touches the glass. Hair falls in front of her eyes as she turns to look at me. ‘Her calling is being strange. She did odd things as a child and now as a woman also. What kind of strange art do you make? The same face, day in and day out. What kind of a person does such a stupid thing?’
‘Mom,’ Dilip begins, ‘I think we should –’
‘I have to explain when people ask me, and I don’t know what to say. I feel ashamed.’
‘That is what you feel ashamed of?’ I cry. My mouth trembles. This person, who never did a worthwhile deed in her life, thinks I am an embarrassment?
‘Why don’t you just tell me who it is? Who is the person in the picture?’ Her face shrinks and her eyes are troubled.
‘I’ve told you a million times,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘The person is whoever you see – and everyone sees someone different. The original picture doesn’t matter any more. It was a picture of a stranger and now I’ve lost it.’
Ma holds the side of her face. Her hand migrates to her forehead and her eyes close.
Dilip clears his throat and finishes what’s left in his glass. ‘Mom, are you ready for dinner?’ he asks.
She opens her eyes and looks at him, her mouth set into a hard line, and then she rises to her feet, slowly, drifting, so that for a moment we are unsure if she is standing or falling. With composure, she shakes her head. ‘I want to lie down for some time.’
I watch her leave the room, glass in hand, and I feel I cannot breathe. Every part of me wants to do physical harm to her, to tear my clothes off her back and humiliate her. I bury my face in my hands, and when I finally feel I can bear the light I turn to Dilip. He is watching me, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. I know what he is going to say. How can she live with us? How can we let this hideous creature poison our home?
‘Those drawings really bother her,’ he says.
I feel my eyebrows draw down. I swallow and attempt a shrug.
‘You still want to continue it,’ he says, ‘when it bothers her so much?’
I hear my pulse in my ears. Folding my hands, I look at my lap. ‘Haven’t I spent enough time making decisions based on her?’
I move quietly around the bedroom, even though I feel wild inside, a mad rollicking horse, as the evening opens up before me like I’m living it again, first her words, her crazed laughter, her disgusting body oozing from my
clothes. And then Dilip’s input, which might be worse because it came from behind me like a treacherous knife. Wasn’t he the one who didn’t want her to live with us? Didn’t he say I was too close, that I needed some distance from her madness? And now he thinks I should stop my work because it distresses her? Why, why should everything be about her all the time? I feel his body adjust itself on the bed and listen for the rhythm of his breath as I imagine turning around and fastening my hands on his throat while he sleeps.
I sit up when a sharp sound cuts through the room. It is coming from the studio.
I open the door and see the glittering shards of a glass of water I had left for my mother catching light on the floor, while she sits like a witch, mesmerized by a small fire in the wastepaper bin. Where did she get a lighter or matches? I feel Dilip appear next to me, and together we watch her throwing balled paper into the flame, waiting for each one to be consumed before she adds another. She is methodical and doesn’t seem to see us, and I barely notice the pile of my notebooks that she has disembowelled, the fragments of images that lie on the floor. I sit paralysed, in awe of the light in the dark room, this whole scene which must be a dream.
In the flame, I begin to see a body, the beginning of some dancing deity, and a primordial terror rises in me. Ma laughs and pours the contents of a glass in the basket, and the fire erupts, rushing out, rising like a lit column to the ceiling. I turn my face as the warmth hits me like an open hand. Paper, flaming and disintegrating, jumps out of the basket in particles of white and ash before falling like embers to the floor. Ma hovers close, and the edge of her dress is alight but she doesn’t notice, and we both start when the lights go on and a bucket of water comes down over her and the flame.
My mother blinks, burnt and wet. The cotton turns sheer with water, and I see the angry blisters on her hands. She shivers and wraps her arms around herself.
How long have I been here? The acrylic flooring that looked like wood has melted down into a fuming plastic puddle. I cough and Dilip throws open the window. I look up at him from my place on the floor. From here, his shoulders look heroic.