‘All right, all right,’ Mary laughs, holding up her hands, and gets up to make room for her daughter. Her cough’s been worrying her lately, and if Anil truly doesn’t mind this puppy-love of Francesca’s then she’s quite happy to leave them to it.
She walks into the kitchen, cool and dim after the brightness of the garden. She coughs again, chokes, then picks up the bottle of cod-liver oil kept on the kitchen almirah for Anil. She takes a cautious gulp. Disgusting, that taste, but it’s done wonders to cure Anil. Already his eyes are so bright and his skin so clear that you’d hardly know he’d had leprosy at all. Perhaps, Mary thinks, it’ll do the same for her cough.
What Mary doesn’t know, not yet, is that she’s the one they should be worried about. Anil’s doctor in Sungai Buloh was conscientious through and through, a Chinese collaborator who poured his heart and his bank account into making amends. There’s no doubt: Anil’s perfectly safe to be around. But Mary, though, Mary’s a different matter. She’s leaving a slime of TB bacilli wherever she goes – when she wipes blood from her fingers or coughs on Anil, when she gulps from his cod-liver oil bottle or offers him a morsel of meat from her own plate.
In a few months Anil will begin to cough, too. His veins – already weakened from leprosy and unsafe doses of cod-liver oil – will strain and begin to leak. He’ll bleed under his skin and from his lungs, coughing up fluid until his tongue starts to swell and his fingers curl. He’ll die within a few weeks of falling ill, on a quiet afternoon with the breeze rustling the durian trees and the chickens pecking up dirt. By then he’ll be so frail that Mary, holding his head on her lap on that cramped garden seat, won’t even notice he’s gone. Not until she hears Francesca wail. No, Francesca will scream from her hiding-place in the annexe where she’s been watching the whole thing. No.
But it’s yes. It’s a yes that will tinge the rest of their lives with regret and if-only. It’s a yes that’ll bury itself and come out years after in the stories they tell and the lies they hold under their tongues. It’s a yes, quite frankly, that Francesca and her mother have no say in at all.
27. Wednesday, 10 a.m.
‘I thought Anil-Uncle died in the war,’ I say. Ammuma’s been plaiting and replaiting my hair all this time, and my eyes feel tight with headache. Mrs Selva watches us from her bed. She’s rippling her fingers like waterweed, imitating Ammuma as she combs.
‘Because of, ar.’ Ammuma snaps the hair-tie around the end of my plait and lets it fall against my back. ‘Because of the war.’
It’s true that she’s always been vague about Anil. She sometimes says he died from wounds, or shock, or old age and even – when she’s not in the mood for questions – that he never died at all.
‘So what happened after he died?’ I’m humouring her just a little. I can’t quite bring myself to believe in that TB. ‘To you, I mean, you and Francesca?’
‘Difficult,’ she says promptly. ‘So much fuss, forms to sign, got certificates and letters.’
‘But what did you do?’
‘Agnes some help, but flighty only. Cannot focus, not so clever for a schoolteacher.’
‘Ammuma –’
‘So much fuss also from her, wrong colour of book it is for her to write, wrong pen. No thinking –’
‘Did you put Francesca in the San?’ I interrupt.
Ammuma stops mid-sentence. She turns away with a heartbreaking, offended dignity.
‘Ammuma?’
She scrutinizes the wall clock, refusing to look at me. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mrs Selva turn over too. Her arms are weighted down with tubes and needles, but her hands still tug away at nothing. Plaiting invisible hair. Soothing invisible ghosts.
After a few minutes Ammuma’s voice comes quiet, cracked as a split cashew nut. Everything inside spilling out, whether you want it or not.
‘Had to, ar. Even my own daughter. So sick, after Anil died. Not her body, Durga. Her insides, her being. She wasn’t safe –’
‘She’d have been a lot less safe in the San!’
Ammuma shakes her head. She doesn’t even scold me for interrupting.
‘She wasn’t safe,’ she says again slowly, ‘to be near.’
She’s facing away from me, limp under the heap of her stiff cotton gown. She turns, with effort, and pushes the gown sleeves up above her elbows. Her burn scar is there, keloided and rope-like, puckering the skin beneath.
‘Always lighting fires. Lighting the stove, making coffee. Trying to bring back Anil-Uncle.’ She rubs at her scar reflectively.
‘When that didn’t work, lighting more fires. Kitchen. Bathroom. Bedrooms. Like you, Durga, last week,’ she adds with a trace of her old sharpness. ‘Always to burn down the house. Get it from your mother.’
I can’t quite catch my breath. ‘Did she – is that how you got that scar?’
Dr Rao asked me about that scar when I brought Ammuma in the first time. Wondering whether I’d done it, though he didn’t ask straight out. No, I should have said. No. You’ve got the wrong generation in your sights.
‘Not so bad, Durga, when she lit fires only in the house. But she ran away. Eight months pregnant, and setting fires in the jungle. Maybe hurting someone, getting hurt.’
Ammuma stops talking then. There’s a hum and clatter from outside as a stretcher wheels past the door. A
