Just the Way You Are (10 page)

It had been several years that I had spent some good time with her. So it was difficult to see her face contorted. She was beautiful, my mother. I had spent several evenings with her telling me stories of how she had carried me from one house to the other while I was in her womb. Dad, back then, was struggling with his job and they had to change a number of houses because rents were going up. My brother was on the verge of completing his tenth grade and my mother had to look after him as well. It was a difficult period for her. Yet, back then, everything felt better when she told me that the joy of having a second child was even greater than the first and that, when she saw my face, all her pain and suffering left her. I felt all these memories coming back in a sharp daze, making me feel vulnerable.

‘Mom,' I said. My heart pounded. But to my relief, she opened her eyes slowly and a smile spread across her face automatically, on seeing me. She appeared too weak to react to anything. She saw murmured my name and touched my face.

Her face was dull and pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. She was sick and I had kept myself away from her. I felt a deep pang of guilt and cursed myself for not having asked her even once how she was and if she needed anything. In fact, I hadn't even talked to her, fretting over silly familial disputes. I shouldn't have abandoned my mother like this. She seemed to have been sick a long time. She must have been suffering and no one was there to take care of her. She had tried countless times to reach out to me. She had almost pleaded with me to talk to her. It was I who had turned a deaf ear to her and her love. I could never understand her. The only thing I did was to ignore her. I thought, what possibly could have happened if I had talked to her once? Maybe this situation wouldn't have ever come up in the first place. Why does a person breed bitterness inside just to make things worse? I was not the kind of person who would allow such darkness to fill up his heart, and that too against my mother. I had been seeking love, but when I couldn't reciprocate properly to my mother's love, how on earth would I find or, rather, understand love at all? I felt strangled with guilt and remorse. I felt a strange force tearing my heart into bits. I was in a cloud of regret and gloom and could no longer hold back my tears.

Her eyes used to sparkle with her children around her. We were the stars and moons of her universe. Being young, it was in her eyes that we found comfort and the same eyes grew wise and red when we tended to break a rule or commit some nuisance. I could imagine her smiling at me when I told her how I had managed to get a seat in engineering. She couldn't understand much, nor could she compliment me like Dad, but in her eyes I did see the hope and satisfaction that her son had done something good which was worth being proud of. Now I could see the same eyes sunken beneath greying wrinkles. Her lips were bloodless. Like dry stitches on a wound, they were chapped. I took her hand between my palms and rubbed it, as if trying to compensate for all my past lovelessness. I felt grown up at that moment, as if cradling a daughter and not my mother. My soul condensed and thickened, and I was unable to move. In the process of growing up from a boy to a man, I had forgotten that my parents too had grown old. I had assumed, and that too blindly, that she could never be the perfect mother. Maybe because I never let her understand me. I was always indifferent and didn't bother to explain how I felt. I had acted in ways which were more than just imperfect. But I had to act soon. This wasn't the right time to brood. I had called for an ambulance and waited for it to arrive.

The ambulance arrived. I rushed outside, carrying her in my arms. She had again closed her eyes, her breaths long and shallow. I sat beside her till we reached the hospital, murmuring empty nothings to her. I placed one hand on her forehead and with the other I covered my own mouth, to prevent my gasping sobs from turning into ugly howls. I felt helpless and a zillion thoughts raced through my mind—bad thoughts, crippling thoughts, thoughts that forced me back to the time before things went wrong and ugly, before everything became a huge mass of despair.

‘I am not your enemy. Talk to me.' I remembered her words, when she couldn't respond to me all the way to the hospital. I silently prayed that she would become fine and then I would do every single thing that I had not done for her in so many years.

She was admitted into the hospital. The doctor took his time checking her and I grew impatient with every passing second. I paced up and down the corridors of the dimly lit hospital and was on the verge of losing my patience.

After some time, I saw him coming out of her ward. I stumbled towards him.

‘Doctor, is everything fine?'

‘Yes, everything is fine. I think she fell down because of the heat and weakness. I have given her an IV of glucose but we cannot at this time detect if there are any more anomalies, or if she has had multiple deficiencies over a long period. We will have to do some tests and only after looking at the reports will I be able to tell you what exactly is her condition and how would we should approach it.'

The nurse had taken Mom's blood sample and the report would be coming in an hour or two. I could do nothing except wait.

She opened her eyes after an hour and the doctor let me talk to her. She asked in a low voice, ‘How many days will you be here?'

I knew why she had asked this. For the last four years, I had made brief trips home, only once staying for seven days.

‘I will be here for two months. And will only go after I'm sure you are healthy.'

I chatted with her for a few minutes, and then assured her that I would come back after collecting the reports.

As I turned towards the door, she called out my name. I stopped and looked back at her. She raised her head and mumbled, ‘I am not your enemy. Please talk to me always.'

Tears rolled down my cheeks. There was a tight knot within me. Before it could uncoil into a storm, I turned my face away and left the room.

All the reports were normal except for the blood test and iron test. The doctor raised his brows when he noted her iron and haemoglobin levels. He asked how come I hadn't noticed the symptoms and chided me for getting Mom to the hospital at such a late stage. I felt guilty for being careless though I hand't been living at home. Dad and Bhaiya too had been away, so nothing could have been done. My sister was too young to know anything. So, I chose to stay quiet in front of the doctor.

He gave me a prescription with a list of medicines and asked me to take good care of Mom. He also made a list of foods that she needed to eaten regularly to regain her strength and stressed on fruit. While leaving, he patted my back. He had sensed my anxiety and told me not to worry. She would be fine soon.

The next day, I took Mom back home. She was still weak. Dad and Bhaiya had both arrived. I narrated the whole incident to them and informed them about what the doctor had advised. Dad said me that he was proud of the sensible way in which I had acted. But they both had to leave that very day both and I had to take on the entire responsibility of the house as well as Mom. I wasn't worried. Maybe I wanted it. This was necessary for us to re-forge our bond.

As a child, I had toyed with the idea of being disowned by my mother. I didn't know if it was love, protection, or her sense of misunderstanding her own child. Or maybe I had misinterpreted her actions. Whenever I went to the neighbouring aunty's place to watch a serial or
Chitrahaar
, Mom not only rebuked me but also cribbed about me in public. ‘Don't tell me, Sunita, all day he just plays around and does nothing and then sneaks off to your place to watch TV. Someday I'm going to peel his skin off. I don't have any hope left for him.' The entire neighbourhood was familiar with this harangue. I wondered who would say such things about her own son. While I was growing up, there were similar instances which filled me with bitterness against my mother. She always had something bad to say about me. But when I passed tenth grade with flying colours, she stopped. She did realize her mistake which, in fact, was a by-product of her own cultural upbringing. She didn't know much about encouragement or inspiration. In her view, only gaalis and mindless reprimands sufficed and would do the necessary. Later, when she turned soft and her attitude towards me began to change, I was the one who became cold and unapproachable. I could see her pine for me even when I left home for college, but I didn't feel anything for her. I avoided her calls and never wrote to her. The bitterness of past memories was now in full bloom, consuming me with its malice and arrogance. Even when Dad called, I made it clear that I would keep my communication limited to him and not bother with Mom. I became a stone and considered never going back to her or ever listening, until the worst happened. I was wracked with guilt. However, I was fortunate that I had caught hold of the dwindling thread between our hearts in time.

A month passed by. Things became calmer. Mom and I bonded and her health improved. She was cheerful once again, both in body and spirit. I felt relaxed and as if time had turned back its wheel and mended every single wound, though I did feel a pang of longing for the lost days.

Dad was back and was happy to see mom hale and hearty. He had come home for my cousin's wedding. He insisted on taking Mom along with him, now that she was fine; she had not been out of the house for a long time. That night, I had my dinner early and went to bed as I felt weak and spent, though I had not done anything tiring at home. But sleep eluded me. I felt the temperature rising and my skin burning. I was feverish and my head felt heavy. I decided to call up a doctor friend of mine and he asked me if I had paracetamol at home. I had a tablet and my fever subsided over the next one hour. Yet, I still couldn't sleep. I was instead reminded of another such day three years back, when I had been suffering from a similar bout of fever. Slowly my mind drifted into the void of the night and faded into the past. How long would it haunt me?

It was during the days when I about to complete my MBA. The academic pressure had lightened and I was taken as an intern at Citadel Steel Plant. I had by then achieved several of my career plans and was on the verge of living a happy life. To add to my happiness, I had befriended a girl on Facebook who seemed to be enamoured of me.

I was contemplating the lonely nights that had passed without my noticing in all these years and concluded that there are some nights when the soul seems to wander infinitely, searching for places, people, and lost memories, and seeks a future out of a silent storm. Then there are these nocturnal sufferers who cannot help but lie awake awaiting the dawn. I awaited a dawn in my life too, for I knew that every night, even the darkest one, is followed by the dawn. Light is victorious over darkness, the only thing being that darkness lasts longer. And it did that night, as I lay wide awake like an insect on its back, writhing in the heat, within and without. The fever was unbearable. The smog of the city, the concrete parapets, the humid, stale air—all of it added to the noxious atmosphere. My body felt roasted. I gasped at intervals for some fresh air, craning my neck desperately towards the window but the air was still and heavy. How would I pass this night? I turned back, thinking that the power of imagination is perhaps stronger than memory. For you believe what you want to believe and remember most what you would have given up, forgetting. Otherwise why do most people not like to talk or at times think of their past? There was nothing to do! I put my palm on my forehead and tried to gauge the temperature. How on earth would I feel anything? So let us imagine that since I didn't feel anything, I was perhaps troubled by something else and not fever. The weather, I suppose. The festive season, maybe. Everyone, including my roommate, had left for Holi. The morning would be full of colour. There would be happy faces marked with red, blue, and green. And I, wrapped in my sombre yellow bed sheet, would lurk around, trying to avoid phone calls from my parents and siblings. I had failed to get a ticket for home that year. A colourless year, rather. There was no excuse left to give either. What would I tell them? Should I complain about the ever-growing population of India proliferating like a tumour or should I tell them that such festivals were just useless in a country where people die like ants on the street? The fever was trying to get inside my imagination now, trying to force itself inside as memory does and make me believe that it was rising. I had no other tool to fight it except imagination itself. But heat makes the mind act like a thermos flask. It traps the mind and makes it vaporous and unclear. I got up fighting that aching realization and sat up like the Buddha, wrapping that bed sheet all around my body. The roof was the tree and heat compensated for the sun overhead. I opened my laptop and started browsing through Facebook. A usual, mundane activity. Bored more than ever, I flipped to the page where they post funny pictures, making a joke out of almost everything, and laughed to myself. I laughed to smash the fever out of my body. I laughed for it was the only medicine at hand with me now, but I wasn't successful. Suddenly, I saw a message blinking in my chat box. It was from her. She would often leave a small, brief message asking when I'd be free to talk. Like all memories registering faintly in the periphery of fame, I had remembered her words of praise but failed to remember her many messages. She might have sensed it then itself, so this time when she pinged me her only query was: Do you remember what I had written to you last? I told her what I remembered. Actually, I was confused. She was quiet for a while and then asked how I was. I just typed F-E-V-E-R. The brief, anxious letters spurted like bees out of a hive. She started enquiring about my food habits, lifestyle, what I had eaten last, if I had had too much junk food. I was surprised at the concern she showed. I whispered to myself, Is she a doc or what? I rushed to click on her blinking icon. Yes, she was a medical student. By the time I returned to my chat box, she had concluded all her advice on what medicine to take and what to eat, what not to as well. She was caring and I felt very good with her benign affection towards me. I couldn't say anything except, ‘Thanks. So sweet of you'. I then asked her a few questions about herself and she started telling me several things as if we were old, close friends meeting after many years. I started thinking that this was fortuitous as the chat continued and felt relieved after chatting with her for nearly fifteen minutes. But I then had to stop as I started feeling uncomfortable with the fever. When I shut down the laptop, a faint, wistful smile lightened my brooding mind and her chat and care soothed my burning body. The night would pass.