‘Will come again,’ she says. ‘Soon, don’t you worry. You’ll stay here?’
It’s her secret worry, that Fran will up and leave one day. She has form, after all. She moves on, leaving destruction in her wake.
And then there’s a noise. Perhaps it’s real, perhaps it’s all in Mary’s head. Hard to say, and Mary never will. It’s the sound of a car door slamming, back near the swamp. It’s the sound of a fifty-fat-and-fragile woman crawling into the back seat of a car left abandoned by a doctor who’s breaking his irrelevant heart just twenty metres away. It’s a pencil scratching on paper covered in pastel angels; a picture when writing words is out of the question. It’s Francesca, saying hello to her little girl.
‘You’re a good girl, Fran,’ Mary says into the warm, listening silence. And then – because old habits die hard, and here in Pahang nothing really dies at all – she squats back down on the bed, and pulls her dupatta over her head. Ready or not, living or dead, your daughter’s your daughter all your life.
‘Listen, my baby one,’ she says. ‘There was once a tiger-prince. And a warrior princess, who challenged him to a duel …’
Mary’s good at bedtime stories; spins them out of nothing but leprosy and logic, till they grow big enough to swallow themselves. Those stories have minds of their own, running in the family like a splash of kerosene. Her own mother told them. Karthika still does. Anil would have told them if he’d only had the words, and Francesca might still find a way. She’s resourceful, Fran, with her autograph books and pencils. Cleverer than her daughter, thinks Mary. Mary loves her granddaughter, but she got the measure of Durga years ago. Swap out numbers for words, put in a few categories and count on your fingers; Durga’s no better than the rest of them.
29. Wednesday, midday
After this, everyone takes Ammuma more seriously. Tom, in fact, takes her so seriously that he calls up Dr Rao and dumps the whole problem in his heron-like lap.
‘This confusion, it could be very serious,’ we hear him explain out in the corridor, sounding professional to the very ends of his teeth. And then, ‘She’s like family to me.’
Ammuma rolls her eyes. It might have taken her seventy years to figure it out, but she knows her family.
‘Fran drew them for you, Durga,’ she insists in a dry, rasping voice. ‘Your bedtime story.’
Ammuma and I are sitting tight-together in her bed. Over the past few hours she’s been taken away and then brought back, stuck all over with words and labels that don’t seem to have anything to do with her. She’s had a bleed on the brain, Dr Rao explained after one of these tests. A trickle, a lovely and poisonous flood of red exactly where it shouldn’t be. Who would have thought the old woman had so much blood in her?
She’s still Ammuma, despite it all. Tetchy, unforgiving. Calling her brain bleed a ‘burst heart’ and refusing to hear a word of contradiction. ‘Same same,’ she said when Dr Rao corrected her, but different. To Ammuma, her heart and her mind have always been identical.
She’s been talking constantly about Francesca, too. Each time she says her daughter’s name she forgets a little more detail, sending memories spinning with glorious sky-high tosses. There’s a kind of relief shining through her, budding and blooming where the X-rays can’t reach. She’s letting go, and glad of an end to it all.
‘You find Francesca,’ she tells me in a sliding, vague voice, and I agree. I hold her hand and agree with everything she says while Dr Rao mutters at the foot of her bed. He draws up some clear liquid into a drip bag. Ammuma talks urgently while he slides a thin, flexing needle into her arm. She tells me to go to Kampung Ulu. She tells me to search for ghosts and girls and real-and-fleshy women. Her body shakes as the drip pumps its liquid in, and then she tells me to feed the kitchen cats and post her letters before it gets dark. Are you listening, Durga? she says at first. And then her eyelids are drooping, and my name’s starting to slip away. Are you there, Fran? ‘Yes,’ I’m saying. ‘Yes, I’m here.’ Anil? she’s asking. Cecelia? Rajan? Amma? and I’m holding her hand and I’m answering yes.
Later, Dr Rao takes me down to the hospital lobby. My eyes feel scratched and exhausted and my skin’s raw from the air-conditioning. My hair still smells faintly of Ammuma’s Nivea cream.
The hospital lobby looks different in daylight. No more quiet desperation; people stalk right up to the reception desk and rap on it impatiently. We don’t meet each other’s eyes, we daylight survivors in our suits and our get-it-done frames of mind.
‘She must have had high blood pressure for years, Dr Panikkar.’ Dr Rao ushers me into a little closed-off room with a glass door. It’s hot in here, smelling of day-old sweat and baked-in worry. ‘When she choked on the oxygen tube it was the last straw. She burst a blood vessel on the surface of her brain.’
He has a plan of attack, he explains. This medication, that therapy. Fall-back options and alternatives and last resorts. He has so many last resorts. Ammuma’s confusion isn’t the worst he’s seen after a brain haemorrhage, he tells me. He talks about patients who thought they could fly, who thought their bed was a coffin, who lost their language and thought nothing at all. He tells me all these things – which are all worse, which are all much worse – and none of them make it any better.
‘We’ll put her in long-term care here,’ he says. ‘If you’re going
