MATCHBOX

We hardly go to the rooms upstairs where Amma spends all her time though nobody has ever told us not to. Sometimes Amma comes wandering down the steps on her own and comes into our little room. She sits on our bed and stares at us, she smiles and mumbles things, sometimes reaches out to touch us on our arms and then pulls her hand away as if that hurt her, till Lakshmi Akka comes running for her and we watch her go back up slowly. I have never tried to follow her. At least she’s talking now, Aniyathi says, even if we can’t make out anything. Of course, Moley, she is getting better, I tell her. See how she looks, she must be getting better, Aniyathi tells me too. Yes, yes, see how pretty our Amma looks now, I say to her.

I hate it, though. The expression on Amma’s face now, the way her hair is tied into a tight bun with jasmine flowers wound into it, the big red bindi Lakshmi Akka sticks on her forehead every day and the stiff pleats of the many saris she has now. Sometimes I try putting my arms around her waist that is getting plumper and Aniyathi puts her head on her lap. Her skin smells new and clean now. I loosen my grip when I feel her squirming inside that circle of our bodies. We sit there like that for a few minutes, as if posing on the stage in a performance at school so that the school photographer can quickly take a picture, before Amma starts to mutter again, squirming harder and moving as if something was hurting her skin. She starts to look uneasy then, as if she has not even a faint memory of who we are and how much we still love her, as if she is now afraid of us or simply afraid of everything even more than she used to be.

I shiver thinking of how odd she feels to touch, how like a stranger smelling of the scented soap she bathes with, of the perfumed oil in her hair, the shiny talcum powder on her cheeks, and something else — something sharp and medicinal, nothing like how our mother used to smell or feel. How she used to like me to sit next to her some evenings when I was studying and how easy it used to be to comb the tangles out of her hair and loosely braid it or calm her down when she started crying, most of the time.

This is worse than the nightmares where I see my dead father with his dead eyes popping out of his fleshy purple face, worse for me because my younger sister can cry quietly into my shoulder and I can pat her back to sleep afterwards, stay awake beside her till she is fast asleep and in the morning smile back at her when she wakes up because she is like that, a baby butterfly gliding out of her cocoon every morning, but I can’t bear it.

I know we have lost our mother too.

(Excerpted from the permission of the author as well as Red River Story Series edited by Sucharita Datta-Asane)