‘Ah,’ sighed my great-grandmother, propped up against her pillows, the steel tumbler lifted high over her lips. She was always a dutiful granddaughter-in-law. So she got it and my mother poured out a small glass, tight-lipped and gave it to her without a word. The one with the fizzy noise as you pour it out.’ The kind that bubbles and makes a popping sound when you open the bottle. ‘Get me a glass of that brown drink Ratna bought in the bottle. ‘No, no I don’t want water, I don’t want juice.’ She stopped the moaning and looked at my mother’s patient exasperated face. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she moaned, when my mother asked her if she wanted anything. Her cravings were various and unpredictable. She became a little more adventurous every day. To the deathbed of a Brahmin widow who had never eaten anything but pure home-cooked food for almost a century. I smuggled cakes and ice-cream, biscuits and samosas, made by non-Brahmin hands, into a vegetarian invalid’s room. So we began a strange partnership, my great-grandmother and I. ‘Will you,’ and her eyes narrowed with cunning, ‘will you get one for me?’ ‘Those small cakes you got from the Christian shop that day. ‘Of course you do.’ She was surprised, a little annoyed. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it,’ I said quickly. ‘Tell me something, Ratna,’ she began in a wheedling voice. She held my hand and kissed each finger, her half-closed eyes almost flirtatious. I went, my heart quaking at the thought of telling her. Why worry her?’īut when I went into her room that night, my great-grandmother had a sly look on her face. My mother, practical as always, broke the silence and said, ‘Let’s not tell her anything. When the doctor left, we looked at each other, the three of us, like shifty accomplices. But I suppose it’s better to let her die at home.’ ‘Let me know when you want me to admit her in my nursing home. How could he, a 14-year-old boy, take the responsibility?’ And she was already a widow then, my father was the head of the household. All the relatives came over to scare her, advise her with horror stories. But you know what they thought in those days. There was supposed to have been an operation, I think. ‘The neck,’ the doctor said, more gently. Wiping his forehead, he mumbled: ‘You know how these old women are. My father pulled out the small towel he uses in place of a handkerchief. He has a nine-to-five accountant’s job in a government-owned company, the kind that never fires its employees. He keeps a big jar of antacids on his office desk.
He is a cadaverous-looking man, prone to nervousness and sweating. My father shifted uneasily in his cane chair. ‘How long has she had that lump on her neck? Have you had it checked?’ ‘She will need all kinds of tests,’ he announced. My father begged him to sit down and drink a cup of coffee. The young doctor came out of her room, his face puzzled and angry. She had been lying in bed for close to two months, ignoring concern, advice, scolding and then she suddenly gave up. But she was also undeniably old, and so it was not a great surprise to us when she suddenly took to lying in bed all day a few weeks before her ninetieth birthday.
She could fart exactly like a train whistling its way out of the stations and it gave her as much joy as a child would get when she saw, or heard, a train. The tears would flow down her cheeks and finally, catching her breath, still weak with laughter, she would confess. This, I knew, would send her into uncontrollable peals. But some uninitiated friend would be unable to resist and would ask her why she was laughing. I knew better than to ask her why I was a teenager by then. She would sit in her corner, her round plump face reddening, giggling like a little girl. That she, an ignorant village-bred woman who signed the papers my father brought her with a thumbprint, should survive while they, city-bred, ambitious, should collapse of weak hearts and arthritic knees at the first sign of old age. I don’t know how she felt then, but later she seemed to find something slightly hilarious about it all. She was 90 when she died last month, outliving by 10 years her only son and daughter-in-law. We were not exactly room-mates, but we shared two rooms, one corner of the old ancestral house, all my 20-year-old life. The room now smells like a pressed, faded rose. Not as she did when she was dying, an overripe smell that clung to everything that had touched her, sheets, saris, hands. Rukmini, aged 90, did not behave quite as you would expectĪn old Brahmin widow to behave in the twilight of her life.
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