People in the market talk about her. On the news, in Marathi TV shows they mention her. Every time people talk about how aggressive and violent Delhi people are, they are talking about her. When my dadi says something about the vamp in her tv show, it is about her. Everything negative said and done is about her, to her. It has strained her small spirit too far.
She says she can’t take the hate any longer, the anguish it all causes. She is scared. Papa is conspiring to make this happen she is convinced. She can’t take it anymore she says, holding her head in her hands like she is trying to block screams from tearing her eardrum. Fear fills my head, renders me useless for a while. Fear. I am familiar with fear, yet each time I feel it, it is never the same as the other times, as though it comes in different flavors and colors. She wants me to kill her. I wish I could. I call her doctor instead. It makes her mad, she cries harder. Curses at me. Her cries make my insides feel like liquid fire. She says she is going to be alone, in a hospital, at the end of her life, with Alzheimer’s.
The doctor prescribes medicine. It should calm her, he says. Papa stays away, hoping it would help. I hold her hand. R lay next to her. She has her own variety of toughness. I look away so she would not see the tears on my face and so I would not see the tears on hers. Mummy is helpless, she can’t escape this Truman show of a life. Papa is tired, he can’t make her schizophrenia go. I am desperate, my triggered PTS makes it all about me. I hold my world tight, unwilling to let it shift so that I am no longer the center of it. Here, in the end, in my study, my diary, and this post, it is about me. Her pain, his helplessness is mine, to lament, to hold close and stare at, to feel angry about, to deny.
I try to work. On a work call, I start crying. My colleague notices, and says he will take my workload today, I should rest. Embarrassed, I call a friend. She calms me down with her frivolous talk about college politics. I love it because talking to anyone normal is an invitation to the world of ordinary people who have ordinary woes and worries: money, sex, sin, and real estate, that sort of thing. They were not, or so I imagine, people with ambivalences about their mothers or fears about their own acceptability. We laugh about bad roommates. At night D calls, he has had an important interview. A sends his daily joke. S checks in. They embrace me like a plaster over a fractured wrist, tightly holding me together. I read a beautiful book, medicine puts mummy to sleep.
I try to let the calm seep into me. I take my medicines early. I stop thinking of her. And when I am not thinking of her, the vacancy in my head is like the space left by a newly pulled tooth still conscious of the rottenness that had once filled it. I put on my blanket and try to sleep, in a disagreeable mood, in a disagreeable world, I say to myself in an older woman’s voice “You have been underfed and overtaxed. You have spent yourself. There’s nothing more to spend. Lie down, and rest. Lie down like the rivers frozen in the valleys in winter. Lie still. Wait.
