‘You mean you want to drug her?’ I interrupt. ‘Send her to sleep?’
‘No, no. Not to sleep. Just to relax her. Slow her breath down.’
Ammuma gulps down the tiny white tablets he gives her and rejects the glass of water he brings over.
‘Too chilling, eh, to take cold water in the morning. Need heating only, you didn’t learn this?’
I sit back down by her bed, feeling that beige chair mould itself to my thighs again. Her hand’s dry when I reach for it, and I can feel her muscles twitching in long streaks over the bones. The burn on her forearm looks redder and rawer than it usually does. She stares at it for a minute, as though she’s never seen it before. Dr Rao moves on to the other patients, recording medications and checking their charts. Ammuma and I drop into a deep silence, then she suddenly jerks upright.
‘Francesca?’ she asks. She grabs the blanket, then lets it go. ‘Where’s Francesca?’
Dr Rao doesn’t turn. He doesn’t want to be bothered with her, I think angrily. He only wants to know about her body, about the machinery of her blood and breath. He’s not interested in anything else; not Francesca or the Emergency, or the fact that Ammuma’s never eaten eggs for breakfast, or that she keeps her water-glass on the other side of the bed, not where this officious nurse has put it, or –
‘Durga?’ I look up. Everything’s vivid, clear and glassy in the light from the window. A nurse has come in, and she’s twisting the blinds open. Sunlight bounces off Dr Rao’s gleaming hair and into my eyes.
‘Durga,’ he says again. ‘You need to go home. Have some sleep, change your clothes. She’ll be discharged on Sunday at 1 p.m. Please don’t worry,’ he adds. ‘She’ll be just fine here.’
I know I should stay, but I’m more tired than I thought possible. My head’s starting to ache and my eyes feel raw, loose-boiled in my skull. I stand up and give Ammuma a kiss, but she doesn’t move. Her forehead’s warm and she smells of soap and smoke. She looks at me, though, whispers something that I can’t quite make out as her eyelids droop and finally close. Perhaps she does see Francesca, I think, from under those swags of skin. Perhaps my mother’s been here all along, waiting for me in Pahang. She’s an imaginary number, a limit, an infinite sum. She’s here all right, we just can’t get our hands on her.
Half an hour later I’m waiting at the hospital bus stop. A few stray dogs hang around begging for food. A decade ago they wouldn’t have bothered me, but now I eye them nervously. They’re mangy things with anxious eyes and teeth on show, and I know how they feel. When the bus arrives some people settle for the long haul, bringing food and hot drinks out of carrier bags. Somebody pulls out a gold-dusted packet of laddoo and for a second I’m taken aback. I’d almost forgotten it was Diwali.
It’s a half-hour drive back home. When I step out at the top of our road the smell hits me again, a wet stink of rot and ripped vegetation. It’s the banyan swamp, which stretches out for miles all the way from Kampung Ulu. Four days here and I’m still not used to it. When the wind’s in the right direction, everything smells like the day Peony died.
I push the gate open and see the churned-up mud left by the ambulance last night. The sides of the yard are filled with glittering puddles of rain, and under the raised verandah there’s a slop of water as wide as the house. When we were small Peony swore she’d seen a catfish living under the school verandah, a monster that had been stranded there years before in a flood. ‘Fooled you!’ she’d told me after I’d crawled under to find it.
As I walk up the steps the banyan swamp smell fades, to be replaced by the stink of smoke. I shiver. I’m lucky the fire didn’t spread; I’m lucky there’s even a house to come back to. But that doesn’t stop Ammuma’s rattan chair with its worn-out seat from staring accusingly at me.
I turn away from that chair and start to pace the verandah. I’m exhausted, but far too much on edge to sleep. I need to reorient myself, like the pendulum equations I used to teach to first years. Back and forth I go, without ever finding home.
Every time I pass in front of the low verandah table, I catch sight of Tom’s bag of fireworks underneath. On the third time I stoop down to pick it up, looping the string handles around my wrist. I don’t want to see it, not right now when my mind’s full of should-have-known-better. I walk quickly through the front room and the hall, still dim and tight-shuttered from last night, and drop the bag on the dining table. Karthika hasn’t arrived to clean yet, and everything’s still gritty with ash. The smell of smoke is so strong it feels like I could grab the air in two hands and wring it out. I go back out into the hall, tracing my finger along the grimy wall. At the bottom of the stairs I take a deep breath. It won’t be as bad as you think, I tell myself.
And I’m right, it isn’t. The smoke settles in my nose and on my skin, and I stop noticing it so much. The stairs creak just like they always did and for a second it almost feels normal. I pass the door that leads into one of those winding, looping wings that Ammuma closed off years ago. Karthika’s paraffin-polished floors would have smouldered and caught in there, and who knows what sort of state it’s in. But out here the bathroom’s untouched, and so is my bedroom and the roofless little box room next to the attic
