Suman peed herself a little while laughing at something that wasn’t even funny. Anya looked proud, though. She had managed to make her mother laugh. The ant-elephant jokes she had learnt at school and been repeating for days had finally landed, but before she could even boast about it, Suman was teary-eyed again.
“Mamma, please, you promised you won’t cry now.”
“I am not crying,” Suman said, snuffling. “Nani is in a better place,” she repeated to Anya, even though she was the one who needed to hear it the most.
Suman’s mother, Lalita, had died of an unknown ailment two weeks ago. She was fifty-seven. Suman hadn’t seen her for a year, but they video-called every other day. The fact that Suman had tried to avoid these calls haunted her now. Although Lalita—who had a knack for noticing and commenting on the smallest of things—always insisted and got her way.
“Come on video na beta, I want to see you,” she would say and immediately switch to video before Suman could think of a better excuse. Suman wearing a black bindi instead of a red one was Lalita’s most common complaint; there were others too. The one that annoyed Suman the most was when Lalita mentioned how short Anya’s hair was and how pretty Anya would look if Suman let it grow a bit. Suman’s response to these well-intentioned comments ranged from giving her mother a plastic smile to snapping at her, depending on where she was in her menstrual cycle.
The strongest memory of Suman’s childhood smelled of mustard oil. Every Saturday, before bed, Lalita sat on the cane sofa with folded legs, nudged Suman to sit on the floor, and picked apart strands of Suman’s hair, oiling and caressing them with care. Lalita wore the compliments on her daughter’s thick, waist-length hair like a badge of honor, a reminder of how good she was at being a mother. The fact that Suman hated her hair was dismissed as a streak of rebellion in a child who did not know what was good for her yet.
The day Suman woke in the middle of the night, puked out of an indescribable fear, and then lied to her parents about having a nightmare so they would let her sleep in their room was also a Saturday. Her body reeked of mustard oil. Suman and Lalita had bickered earlier about the hair and Suman had gone to bed with a sullen face only to wake up with large hands on her chest. Her body had frozen, and after what felt like a moment and a lifetime, she had left her room. She had managed to escape in time. She did not know then that she would—with age and anxiety—lose her thick hair, but the smell of mustard oil and that night would continue to torment her.
Suman had sent Anya to school and was having breakfast with Mayank when she got a call from her father. She had hesitated before picking up; no one called her this early. Her father was incoherent, and it was hard to understand the mumbles between his sobs, but she understood. Mayank booked her flight; she packed hurriedly and left. It was decided between them that Mayank would leave a few hours later, after picking Anya from school. Mayank hugged Suman, which, to her, felt more like an obstruction than comfort. All she wanted to do was get out of the house.
“The dishes are in the sink. Call the maid didi. Don’t forget to bring the clothes inside, and shut the balcony door before you leave for the airport. Anya’s lunch is in that blue tiffin; microwave it before serving.” She blurted on autopilot as her cab arrived. The driver was instructed to drive fast.
A three-hour flight later, Suman arrived in Lucknow. Saarth, her five years younger and five inches taller brother, had come to pick her up. Saarth gave her a hug which lasted longer than usual. She rubbed his back, patted it, gave him a peck on the cheek, and sat in the car without saying a word. Their ride was filled with a comfortable silence, punctuated by Jagjit Singh’s ghazals—their mother’s favourite. Suman stared out the window at nothing in particular, then glanced at her brother. His hair looked funny, she thought. At one point, both Suman and Saarth were humming “Chitthi na koi sandes/ Jaane woh kaun sa des/ Jahan tum chale gaye.” They hummed the entire ghazal—like it was something they did every other day—without looking at each other or shedding a tear. Suman was surprised that she had remembered the lyrics—even Saarth did. Their afternoons, after school, had been spent playing carrom while their mother finished her chores. Either Jagjit Singh or Kishore Kumar was always playing in the kitchen.
It took them another four hours to reach Pratapgarh. The next few hours were a big blur—her mother’s unconscious, stiff body; relatives she hadn’t met in a decade but knew almost everything about; her father, who looked even frailer; and the constant demand of chai from men. This isn’t a party, she thought as she poured tea in countless cups for the third time.
The next day, after everything was done and almost everyone had left, Suman asked her father again about what exactly had happened to her mother, only to find out that no doctor in the town could figure out the cause of the death. Her father’s raised voice and repetitions of the numbers on her mother’s blood reports frustrated Suman. Her questions weren’t meant to accuse him, but as the patriarch and provider of the household, that was the only assumption his mind defaulted to.
Her father told her that he had tried his best to save her mother. How best was your best, Suman thought. Her aunt kept reassuring her that it was good that her mother went peacefully in her sleep without any pain. She wanted to ask, good for whom? But didn’t. Mayank made himself scarce during these conversations and took care of Anya, which Suman was grateful for. Anya wanted to get back to Mumbai and made it abundantly clear to everyone who tried to persuade her otherwise.
Mayank had left with Anya on the fourth day. The post-death rituals took thirteen days to complete. Suman had to fly back to Mumbai on the fourteenth day, while Saarth decided to stay a bit longer. He had the luxury to. A seven-year-old, a clueless but well-meaning husband, and a messy household—one that didn’t wait for anyone’s grief to ease—were not waiting for him on the other side. Suman loved Saarth, but that never stopped her from measuring her life against his—an instinct as old as their childhood. She always knew, though, that it was not her baby brother’s doing that things came easier to him.
On the nineteenth day, or maybe twentieth, Anya, fed up with Suman’s sobs, asked her to take it light and began practising the ant-elephant jokes on her.
“Don’t lie, Mamma. I am not a kid. I can see you are crying again,” Anya repeated while Suman nudged her to brush her teeth and go to bed. Mayank was in bed already, fiddling with his phone. He gave Suman a reassuring nod and got up to make Anya’s bed, which was adjusted on the side of their bed for the summer. Suman tucked her in. Mayank gave her the AC remote and switched on the night lamp. They kissed her goodnight and stepped out into the hall. Anya would have insisted on a bedtime story, but she was old enough to understand that her mother was tired.
“You don’t have to go to the wedding; I am sure Prateek and Disha will understand,” Mayank told Suman for the third time since she had returned from Pratapgarh. Prateek and Disha, their common friends from college, were getting married in Goa. Both Mayank and Suman had been excited to attend the wedding for months. It was a legitimate excuse to leave a child to meet friends—and they had been looking for one. Suman’s mother, Lalita, had happily agreed to come to Mumbai for a week to stay with Anya.
“I am always looking for excuses to stay with my Aanu,” Lalita had said.
Suman couldn’t fathom that her mother was not in the world anymore, but their plans were still intact, and there was still a wedding to attend. It hadn’t even been a month, and she was expected to wake up every morning and make sure Anya got to school. She had to buy groceries, feed herself and the family, do laundry, show up at work, socialise, and somehow continue to exist in the world while her mother was simply gone. Suman never really believed that she was close to her mother, and yet she felt incredibly alone. She didn’t know how to make peace with this feeling of not being on solid ground.
“Papa called,” Mayank said.
“Who? Oh. He called you? Why?” Suman asked.
“He has been worried about you. You aren’t picking up his calls.”
Suman took a loud breath. Mayank assured her that he knew she was fine and only needed some space. Suman forced a smile. He hugged her. Her eyes welled up again. Kindness always made her cry. He rubbed her back while she sobbed into his chest.
“Your mother lived a full life, Suman.”
She wanted to ask him if he was sure of that, if he was sure that her mother had actually lived a full life, but instead she hugged him tightly and sobbed some more.
***
“Meeting friends might be a good break for you. We could leave Anya with my dad for the wedding?” Mayank suggested. “I think he’d be delighted to have her over.”
Mayank’s father lived two hours away, in Thane, with a full-time helper. He turned seventy last year. After Mayank’s mother passed away three years ago, he had politely declined Mayank’s persistent requests to move in with them. He didn’t travel anymore because of his knees, but was fairly independent for a seventy-year-old. Suman would have happily welcomed her father-in-law had he decided to move in. But she was relieved he didn’t.
“Yes, let’s think about it,” Suman said, hastily, shoving another bite into Anya’s mouth while she struggled to tie her shoelaces. Mayank looked at Anya, as if asking her what she thought about living at Baba’s place for a week. The school bus honked again, and Suman rushed to the kitchen to fetch Anya’s water bottle while Mayank helped her with the shoelaces.
After Anya left, Suman and Mayank had breakfast silently—looking at their phones—and then retreated to their separate rooms to log in for the day. Suman was still on leave, but Mayank didn’t know that. She hadn’t mentioned. A lie of omission was hardly a lie, she comforted herself. The plan was to bolt the room under the guise of work meetings and lie in bed all day. Her phone had several missed calls from her father, and she knew she would have to call him back soon. Later, she thought.
Consecutive unanswered calls from her mother would have led to a string of frantic text messages, demanding to explain where she had been and why she was not answering. It had taken many years—and becoming a mother herself—for Suman to realize that her mother wasn’t yelling or humiliating her, and her messages were born out of worry more than anger. Suman spiralled sometimes just like her mother—she had the vocabulary for it, though; her mother didn’t.
With her eyes closed, she tried to think of her. It was strange that the first image her mind had been conjuring up was of her mother standing in front of a dressing table, wearing a saree with the pallu over her head and a long braid peeking out. The dressing table was still alive in her childhood home—old but alive. Her mother was not. All Suman could think about was their last phone conversation, when Suman had been impatient with her. Both her parents tested Suman’s limits, but Suman could only lose it with her mother because she let her. Only her mother allowed her that space, which was now lost.
Anya needed a little brother, Lalita had said. Not for the first time, though. Suman had been used to hearing this and more. But for some reason, that day, Lalita was especially persistent, and Suman particularly impatient. On any other day, Suman could have ignored it, but that day, she couldn’t. If Anya had been a male child, would you still be so desperate for a second one, she had asked, and her mother had hung up. There was no goodbye. The last sentence Suman had spoken to her mother was now frozen in time, and so was the fact that her mother had hung up on her.
If she could, she would give up anything to go back and redo that conversation. Suman knew her mother was not perfect. But it was not lost on her that, over the years, her mother had done everything to grow with her, and it was unfair that the one stupid thing she said—negating all the efforts her mother had put in—could be the last thing she had told her. She hated herself. She was mad at Mayank for never knowing how to help her. And Anya for driving her nuts with her incessant chatter. And at work and life that just went on and on.
***
“If I decide not to go to the wedding, could you go on your own?” Suman asked Mayank, while taking small sips of chai, hoping he would say yes.
“But it wouldn’t look good, Suman, would it? I mean, you are unwell and grieving. It really wouldn’t look nice if I went on my own, leaving you and Anya alone here. Why can’t we let Anya stay at my father’s? It’s only a matter of one week.”
“No, no, there is no problem, I was just asking.”
Mayank took Suman’s hand and patted it gently. She forced a rehearsed smile. Satisfied, he got up and went inside to finish some more office work while she sat on the windowsill staring at nothing. She had been trying to remember what her mother looked like the last time she saw her. A deep red saree, almost inappropriate for her age, Suman had thought. Her mother had loved bright colours and always assumed that light-coloured clothes were old and worn out. Suman distinctly remembered her hands; the skin that had suddenly and noticeably gotten loose and soft, hanging onto her like pleats.
Their bond had just begun to transcend the boundaries of a typical mother-daughter relationship. In the past few years, they had grown closer and started to communicate—sharing trade secrets about what it takes to be a woman in a world that would take everything from you if you allowed it to. For so long, Suman had spent an unfair amount of time blaming her mother for not doing enough, and often for doing it wrong. It was only after Anya was born that she realised that, on most days, motherhood felt like swimming against the flow, each movement bruising the body. She had spent so much time despising her mother that now there was none left to love her. The vibration of the phone broke her reverie; this time, she chose to pick it up.
“Hello, Sumu, beta Suman.” Her father sounded impatient, and her eyes welled up when she heard the pet name only her parents used for her.
“How have you been? Are you mad at me? You haven’t been taking my calls, beta.”
“I am not mad, Papa; I just needed some time. By myself.”
“I am worried about you, Sumu. I get worried.”
She exhaled, couldn’t help but feel irritated, yet held herself back. She consoled her father, reassured him, tried to make him feel seen and heard, all the while craving that someone would do the same for her. She didn’t want to be ignorant or insensitive to her only living parent. How could she? No, she would never do that. Never again. When she disconnected the call, she was surprised they had spoken for twenty minutes. The longest ever, perhaps.
Suman sat at the windowsill for some more time, watching the sun go down, the sky turning to her favourite shade of purple, and birds flying back home. For the first time in a long while, she felt herself smile. Her phone buzzed again, and this time it was a text from Disha.
just checking if you are alright. don’t take any sort of pressure to attend the wedding. there is no formality between us; i hope you know that. you know that right?
Her throat tightened, and a lump rose. She was tired of weeping like a baby at the tiniest occurrences of kindness as if she had been starving for them.
***
“Let’s book our tickets. We can drop Anya at Dad’s place, as you had suggested,” she told Mayank. His chewing paused for a moment, but he didn’t look at her.
“I am serious. Maybe a break will do me some good.” Mayank watched her as if measuring his words before he spoke.
“You can be happy, you know. I won’t mind,” she reassured him.
He responded with long, detailed plans for their travel. It seemed as though someone had suddenly loosened the leash and set him free, and he was finally allowed to express some joy and relief. He said he had been worried about her, and he would have hated going alone, but he really wanted to go. He said that this was the best decision for all of them. She told him she agreed.
“What changed?” he asked, nibbling at his omelette.
“As in?”
“You’ve been so indecisive about leaving Anya with my dad and… I am just asking, how did you finally make up your mind?”
“I don’t know. I spoke to Anya yesterday; she said she was okay with this arrangement.”
“But she had always been okay, Suman.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it. I am happy we are going”
“Okay, good then! I will go and start packing.”
***
“I will pick you up from school today,” Suman told Anya while combing her hair. She had been tying and re-tying it for the last ten minutes because Anya wasn’t satisfied with the tautness of her braid. It was either too tight or too loose, and somehow Suman was not getting it just right. She was having a hard time holding back from scolding Anya, but they were leaving that night for the wedding, and she couldn’t afford to upset her now.
“Why, Mamma? The bus will pick me up?”
“I will pick you up, and then we will go directly to Baba’s house. Papa and I are leaving tonight for the wedding, remember?”
“Oui, yes, I remember, Mamma.”
“Finish your breakfast quickly now; I am going to check your school bag.” The bus honked, and like every other day, they had to rush again to catch it. Anya and Mayank were good at making games out of these silly, little, hurried moments. Suman wasn’t.
Once the morning chaos had settled a bit, she checked her phone and realised there were two missed calls from her father and a few texts from Disha telling her how happy and excited she was to know that they were coming. She was typing a message to Disha when her phone rang again, and she accidentally picked it up on the first ring.
“Hello, Suman. Are you there?”
“Yes, yes, Papa. Sorry, I am here. I was just texting Disha when you called.”
“Okay, okay. Mayank told me you are going to the wedding, beta. Are you sure you want to?”
“I think I am. A break would be good for me,” she repeated—the same words she had said to more than a handful of people over the past few days.
“I don’t think you should go, Suman. It’s not a good idea.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because people tire you out, Suman, and you are already exhausted. A wedding would not feel like a break, beta. Not to you, at least. In fact, it would be the opposite, I am worried.”
“I want you to stop worrying about me, Papa. Can you please do that for me? I am tired of worrying about your worry. I am actually so tired of both you and Ma constantly worrying about me. I am not a child. Not anymore. You should have worried years ago, when I was living in the room beside yours. Not now, please, not now.” Suman’s voice cracked; it was sharp and louder than she had intended. She disconnected the call. The silence around her engulfed her as she became aware of the echo of her own words. She immediately called him back. He picked up but didn’t say anything.
“Sorry, Papa. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have talked to you like that.” She forced the words out.
“No, Suman, I am sorry, beta. It’s a struggle for me to live every day knowing that you didn’t feel safe in your own home. That your mother and I, despite being in the adjacent room, couldn’t protect you.”
“No no no, stop, let’s not get into all of it again. I am not mad at you or Ma. Really. I couldn’t have asked for better parents. So please. You have nothing to feel guilty about. Okay?”
“Okay, Papa? Are you there?”
“Yes, yes, beta. I am here.”
“Okay, please relax and don’t worry about me. I am good. I have to go now. There is a lot to do before we leave tonight. I will call you once we reach Goa.”
***
“How was school, Anya?”
“It was good, Mamma. It is good every day. But can you please stop fiddling with your phone while driving? Deepa Ma’am says that we shouldn’t multitask while doing important things.”
“Sorry, beta. I was just texting Papa. I will stop immediately. And your Deepa Ma’am is absolutely right.”
“Mamma, can you give me your phone? I can play some games because I am not driving.”
“You smarty pants,” Suman laughed, and Anya giggled.
“Are you excited about living with Baba?”
“I am. He always gives me his phone, and Sarita Aaji cooks the best food.”
“But not better than you, Mamma,” Anya added after a moment, hoping to make her mother smile—and succeeding.
“Okay, tell me what else are you excited about?” Suman asked, buying herself a little more time to find the right words before she broached the topic. She had considered and weighed everything the night before, but she still felt hesitant. She knew she would have to start talking soon, despite the hesitation.
“Listen, Anya, I wanted to ask you something,” Suman said, stopping Anya’s rambling mid-sentence.
“I have finished my tiffin, Mamma.”
“No, Anya, I know that. What I wanted to ask you was.” She swallowed and took a pause. “I wanted to ask if you know what a good touch and bad touch is,” Suman asked, staring ahead at the road.
“Obviously, I know, Mamma, don’t you?”
Her stomach dropped, and her eyes widened as she took in what Anya had just said. Anya didn’t seem to notice and went on to explain in great detail, using multiple examples, what a good touch is and what a bad touch can entail.
“Did Deepa Ma’am teach you all this?” Suman asked, struggling to hide her confusion.
“No, Mamma. Nani taught me this.”
“What? When? When did she teach you?”
“During the summer vacations last year. Didn’t she teach you this, Mamma?”
“Mamma, didn’t she teach you this?”
Suman didn’t know how to answer that. She kept her eyes on the road, even though she knew Anya was looking at her. Her eyes stung, and the world around her blurred as she fought to hold everything in.
