I just manage to nod. I don’t meet his eyes. I can’t explain the sheer impossibility of staying, the emptiness of it all. Ammuma not being Ammuma, Ammuma not being anything but a jumble of wrong names and missed memories, of sponge-baths and stains on the mattress and the hiss of water in the toilet pan at 3 a.m. while I wait outside the door.
Even though I don’t say anything, he still listens. We sit there in silence, and my breath is loud and shaking, and he watches me across the chipboard table. He’s seen a hundred Ammumas – a thousand Mrs Selvas – and he’s heard it all before. Promises to visit, to ring; tiny, niggling betrayals and efforts destined to fall short. He’s heard everything, here in this glassy room.
After a few minutes he gets up and puts an arm round my shoulders. He feels like a coat-hanger, as though there’s nothing under his white coat but bones and simplicity. He stays there a moment, and then the pager on his belt buzzes. He takes it up, looks at it and then sucks in his breath.
‘Wait here a second. I need to –’ And he’s gone, out of the door fast as a thrown stick.
I’m alone in the room, with the air billowing about me. I get up and close the door, leaning my forehead against it as it latches. I’ll come back and see Ammuma every weekend, I resolve. I’ve got the car. I can get back here from KL in just a few hours, even on a weekday evening. The road’s good, I chatter to myself, it’s really really good; it’s so quick to get back here, I mean anyone can do it in just a few hours; it isn’t really like being gone at all. And then I look up through the glass door and meet the gaze of the dry-haired receptionist. She gives me a sympathetic smile.
I don’t know how long I wait in there. I want to go up and see Ammuma, but I don’t know where to find her and I’m scared of leaving this room. Inside here, all I have to deal with are four plain walls and the gentle hum of the air-conditioner. These white-gloss walls won’t tell me bad news and that chipboard meeting table won’t blame me. We’re getting along, this furniture and I.
‘Dr Panikkar?’
But now there’s someone on the other side of the door. A gentle knocking vibrates against my forehead, where I’m still leaning against the wood. I pull the door open slowly and look straight into Dr Rao’s eyes.
‘Durga.’ He takes my hand, edging past me into the room. ‘Please sit down.’
He’s shutting the door, taking a long time about it and carefully clicking the latch into position. He doesn’t want to turn round, I think, he doesn’t want to say what’s in his mouth. And then I know what it is.
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you. Your grandmother just passed away.’
It’s an hour later. I’m sitting on a more comfortable chair in a quiet green room. There’s a box of tissues on the low table in front of me, and pictures of waterlilies on the wall. Dr Rao’s led me away from my chipboard table and into this room on the fourth floor. It’s the room for grief, I suppose. Room for grief, which is something Ammuma never had.
Tom’s sitting opposite me. He’s found a blue plastic chair from somewhere, but it’s child-sized and makes him look gigantic and cumbersome. He is grieving, he really is; his eyes are reddened with exhaustion and his lips are tight. He’s brim-full, heavy and slow with sadness. She’s meant something to him; they’ve watched out for each other in those fragile silences I wasn’t here for. He’s the grandchild she wished she had, if only she hadn’t.
‘Do you want to see her now?’ he asks.
I don’t answer. Behind my eyes there’s an image of a woman, but it isn’t Ammuma. It’s an old woman, propped up on a wedged pillow. Mrs Selva, I think vaguely. Her lungs failed her once too, she’s trying to tell me; her family did the same. She knew what was coming, that doughty little woman in her tangle of tubes.
I look across at Tom. I don’t know why I’m not crying. Ammuma’s gone, but my mind won’t hold on to it. Instead, I find myself thinking that Karthika never did sweep those outside drains clean. I’ll have to remind her before they overflow again. Ammuma does so hate a mess.
Tom pushes his tiny chair away, coming over to me. He holds my elbow and gets me up tenderly.
‘Let’s go to her.’
He opens the door and we walk out into one of the hospital’s long corridors. Nobody’s in sight, and at the end is a stairway. I let him walk me all the way to it, and then I slide my arm away from him. I know where I need to go from here.
‘Durga!’
I take a step down, and then another, lowering myself carefully from foot to foot. He scampers after me.
‘Stop, she’s upstairs. The floor above.’
One more step down, and then another. Tom follows me all the way to the ground floor, where we had our coffee a lifetime ago.
‘Durga,’ he says again, and this time I do look back. I have to think very carefully what I should say to him, I realize, because this might be the last thing ever. So I choose my words scrupulously, like a mathematician. What matters, after all, is the telling. The telling, and where it all began.
‘I used my fireworks at Diwali,’ I say. ‘Not yours.’
‘Sorry?’
‘They were my fireworks, the ones that started the fire.’
Tom looks at me, opens his mouth and closes it again. ‘But …’
And then I leave him there, with all his beginnings, just inside the hospital doors. This is how last resorts happen, I think, they happen in hot milky sunlight under yellow angsana
