Tilo had forgotten that she remembered. Shakespeare came back to her not as a feat of memory so much as music, as an old tune remembered. She was taken aback by her mother’s condition, but the doctors were pleased and said the fact that her mother had recognized her was a remarkable improvement. That day they moved her to a private room with a window that overlooked the saltwater lagoon and the Coconut trees that bent into it and the monsoon storms that blew across it.
The improvement didn’t last. In the days that followed the old lady drifted in and out of lucidity and didn’t always recognize Tilo. Each day was an unpredictable new chapter in the course her illness took. She developed new quirks and irrational preoccupations. The hospital staff, the doctors, nurses and even the attendants were kind, and seemed not to take anything she said to heart. They too called her Ammachi, sponged her, changed her nappies and combed her hair with no sign of annoyance or rancor. In fact, the more havoc she created, the more they seemed to love her.
A few days after Tilo arrived, her mother developed a weird fixation. She turned into a sort of caste-inquisitor. She began to insist on knowing the caste and subcaste and sub-subcaste of everybody who attended to her. It wasn’t enough if they said they were “Syrian Christian”—she had to know whether they were Marthoma, Yacoba, Church of South India or C’naah. If they were “Hindu,” it wasn’t enough if they said Ezhava, she had to know if they were Theeyas or Chekavars. If they said “Scheduled Caste,” she had to know if they were Parayas, Pulayas, Paravans, Ulladans. Were they originally of the coconut-picker caste? Or were their ancestors designated corpse-carriers, shit-cleaners, clothes-washers or rat-catchers? She insisted on specifics and only once she knew would she permit herself to be handled by them. If they were Syrian Christian, then what was their family name? Whose nephew was married to whose sister-in-law’s niece? Whose grandfather had been married to whose great-grandfather’s sister’s daughter?
“COPD,” the smiling nurses said to Tilo when they saw the expression on her face. “Don’t worry. It happens like this always.” She looked it up. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The nurses told Tilo it was a disease that could give harmless old grandmothers the manners of brothel-owners and make bishops swear like drunks. It was best not to take anything personally. They were fabulous girls, those nurses, precise and professional. Each of them was waiting for a job that would take her to a Gulf country, or to England or the US, where they would join that elite community of Malayali nurses. Until then, they fluttered around the patients in Lakeview Hospital like butterfly healers. They became friends with Tilo and exchanged phone numbers and email addresses. For years after that she’d receive WhatsApp Christmas greetings and round-robin Malayali nurse jokes from them.
As her illness intensified, the old lady became restless and almost impossible to manage. Sleep forsook her and she stayed awake, night after night, her pupils dilated, her eyes terrified, talking continuously to herself and to anybody who would listen. It was as though she thought she could outsmart death by remaining constantly vigilant. So she talked continuously, sometimes belligerent, sometimes pleasant and amusing. She sang snatches of old songs, hymns, Christmas carols, Onam boat-race songs. She recited Shakespeare in her impeccable convent-school English. When she got upset she insulted everybody around her in a hard-core dialect of guttersnipe Malayalam that nobody could work out how (and from where) in the world a woman of her class and breeding had picked up. As the days wore on, she grew more and more aggressive. Her appetite increased dramatically and she downed soft-boiled eggs and pineapple upside-down pastries with the urgency of a convict on parole. She tapped into reserves of physical strength that were nothing short of superhuman for a woman of her age. She fought off nurses and doctors, pulled ports and syringes out of her veins. She could not be sedated because sedatives suppressed lung function. Finally she was moved back to the ICU.
That made her furious and pushed her further into psychosis. Her eyes turned sly and hunted and she constantly plotted her escape. She offered bribes to nurses and attendants. She promised a young doctor that she would sign over her school and its grounds to him if he would help her to get out. Twice she made it all the way down the corridor in her hospital gown. After that episode two nurses had to keep constant vigil, and occasionally even hold her down in her bed. When she had exhausted everybody around her the doctors said the hospital could not afford to give her round-the-clock nursing care and that she would need to be physically restrained, strapped to her bed. They asked Tilo, as her next of kin, to sign the forms that gave them permission to do so. Tilo asked them for one last chance to try to calm her mother down. The doctors agreed, if a little reluctantly.
The last time she called Naga from the hospital, Tilo told him that she had been given special permission to stay by her mother’s side in the ICU because she had finally found a way of soothing her. He thought he detected a hint of laughter and even affection in her voice. She said she had found a simple, workable solution. She sat on a chair by her mother’s bed with a notebook and her mother dictated endless notes to her. Sometimes they were letters: Dear Parent comma next line…it has been brought to my notice that…did you put a comma after Dear Parent? Mostly they were pure gibberish. Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.
Naga had no idea what Tilo was talking about and told her she sounded a little delirious herself. She laughed and said he’d understand when he saw the notes. He remembered wondering at the time what kind of person it was that got on best with her mother when she was hallucinating on her deathbed in an ICU while she, the daughter, masqueraded as her stenographer.
Eventually, though, things didn’t turn out well in Lakeview Hospital. Tilo returned after her mother’s funeral, gaunt and more uncommunicative than ever. Her description of her mother’s passing was brief and almost clinical. Within weeks of returning to Delhi she began her restless wandering.
Naga never did see the notes.
THAT MORNING, as he leafed aimlessly through the medical file in Tilo’s cupboard, he found some of them. They were in Tilo’s writing, on ruled pages torn out of a notebook, folded up and tucked between hospital bills, medicine prescriptions, oxygen-saturation charts and blood-gas test results. As he read them, Naga realized how little he knew about the woman he had married. And how little he would ever know:
9/7/2009
Take care of the potted plants they may fall.
And that fold—the crumple in the blanket—I might have to trump them all.
What does that say about you Madam Ambassador Master Builder Paraya Girl?
Those people in blue, they handle the shit. Are they your relatives?
As far as I know Paulose doesn’t get on with the orchids, he’s killing them. It could be a Paraya problem.
Ask Biju or Reju to take over.
Have you heard the dogs at night? They come to take away the legs from the diabetes people that are cut off and thrown away. I can hear them howling and they run off with people’s arms and legs. Nobody tells them not to.
Are they your dogs? Are they boys or girls? They seem to like sweet things.
Can you get me a good-quality jujube?
The blue people must stop hanging around us.
We must be very careful, you and I. You know that, don’t you?
They have measured my tears and they are OK in terms of salt and water. I have dry eyes and must keep bathing them and eating sardines to make tears. Sardines are full of tears.
This girl in checks will do stunning deeds with the lottery.
Let’s go.
Ask Reju to get the car. I just can’t. I don’t want to.
Hello! How nice to meet you! This is my granddaughter. She cannot be controlled. Please see that this place is cleaned out.
As soon as Reju comes let’s take the car and make a run for it. Carry the potty. Leave the shit.
You come here now. Give me a whisper. I’m in a jam. Are you in a jam too?