We’ll sit on the potty and make a jump for it.
I’ll have a Johnnie Walker. Is he up there on top of us?
I’ll just take two sheets. But what should our legs do?
Will there be a horse?
A great war has started between me and the butterflies.
Will you get out as soon as possible with Princey, Nicey and friends? Take the brass vase, the violin and the stitches. Leave the shit and darkglasses and forget about the broken chairs, they’re always hanging around, they come and go.
She’ll help you with your shit this girl in checks. Her father is going to be here soon to take out the rubbish. I don’t want him to be caught with you. I think we should just clear out.
When you look out behind those curtains, do you feel there’s a crowd of people? I feel there is. There’s definitely a smell. A crowd smell. A bit rotten, like the sea.
I think you should leave your poems and all your plans with Alicekutty. She is hideously ugly. I’d like a photograph of her for me to laugh at. That’s how nasty I am.
The bishop will want to see me in my coffin. It’s quite a relief because it’s for my funeral. I never thought I’d get there. Is it raining, is it shining, is it dark is it day is it night? Can’t somebody please tell me?
Now BUNK.
And get these horses out.
I think it’s mean to take this girl and empty out her everything.
Get up!!!
I’m going out. You can do what you want. You’ll get such a thrashing.
Most shameful you are to stand around saying you are Tilottama Ipe when you are not. I won’t tell you anything about myself or yourself either.
I’m just going to stand here and say, “Do this and do that.” And you’ll jolly well do it. No salary for you from tomorrow. Have you written that? I’ll fine you every time.
Go and tell everybody that “This is my mother, Ms Maryam Ipe, and she’s one hundred and fifty years old.”
Do they have medicine for all the horses?
Have you noticed how people look like horses when they yawn?
Look after your teeth viciously and don’t let anyone take them out.
Sometimes they offer you a discount and that’s stupid.
Check everything and let’s go.
And then there’s Hannah. I owe her money and I have to jump over all the children with catheters.
There are so many catheters and everybody was rather pleased that Mrs. Ipe was getting her onions. But she’s been so good this child. You didn’t remove my catheter. She did. She’s a proper Paraya. You’ve forgotten how to be one.
Somebody came up and then somebody and somebody.
The shock of it all is that YOU are giving your rules to everybody. But I expect people to obey me.
But I AM in charge. It is very difficult to get out of charge as you will no doubt find. Annamma is the quietest creature in our community.
Who is the Annamma who plays Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes? She does both with grace. She was my head teacher who died so beautifully. She went home and brought me a cough.
Hello Doctor this is my daughter who is homeschooled. She’s pretty nasty. She was awful today at the races. But I was pretty awful too. We gave everybody a kicking.
I spent my life doing ridiculous things. I produced a baby. Her.
And that boy with dirty clothes and a dirty catheter and I sat for hours in the dirty river.
I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?
Music…what’s wrong with it? I just can’t remember any more.
Listen to that…it’s oxygen. Bubbling to its death. I am running out of oxygen. But I don’t care whether I’m running out or running in.
I want to sleep. I’d love to die. Wrap my feet in warm water.
I’d like to go to sleep. I’m not asking for permission.
It’s like hpsf hpsf hpsf…CUK! CUK! CUK!
This is my engine.
When you die you can hook on to a cloud and we can have all your information. Then they give you your bill.
WHERE’S MY MONEY?
The arterial port is Jesus Christ’s screw. It doesn’t hurt.
I’m just a wee mannequin.
I like my bum. I don’t know why Dr. Verghese wants to cut it out of the picture.
The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases.
Did you hear the sound of the white flower?
What Naga found was just a sampling. The compiled notes, if they hadn’t gone out with the hospital waste, would have made up several volumes.
ONE MORNING, after a week of non-stop stenography, Tilo, worn out, was standing by her mother’s bedside, leaning her arms on the back of the chair she usually sat in. It was the busiest time of the day in the ICU, doctors were on their rounds, the nurses and attendants were busy, the ward was being cleaned. Maryam Ipe was having a particularly vile morning. Her face was flushed and her eyes had a feverish glitter. She had pulled up her hospital gown and lay in her nappy, her legs ramrod straight and splayed apart. When she shouted, her voice was deep enough to be a man’s.
“Tell the Parayas that it’s time to clean my shit!”
Tilo’s blood left the highway and steamed along mad forest paths. Without warning, the chair she had been leaning on picked itself up and smashed itself down. The sound of splintering wood echoed through the ward. Needles jumped out of veins. Medicine bottles rattled in their trays. Weak hearts missed a beat. Tilo watched the sound travel through her mother’s body, from her feet upwards, like a shroud being pulled over a corpse.
She had no idea how long she continued to stand there or who took her to Dr. Verghese’s office.
—
Dr. Jacob Verghese, Head of the Department of Critical Care, had, until four years ago, been a medic with the US Army. He was second-in-command of critical care in his unit in the Kuwait war and had returned to Kerala when his tenure ended. Even though he had lived most of his life abroad, his speech did not bear even a trace of an American accent, which was remarkable, because in Kerala people joked that applying for a US visa was enough for people to affect an American accent. Nothing about Dr. Verghese suggested that he was anything other than an absolutely local Syrian Christian who had lived in Kerala all his life. He smiled at Tilo kindly and ordered coffee. He came from the same town as Maryam Ipe and was probably well aware of all the old rumors and whispers. The air conditioning in his office was being serviced and the clatter of that took away the awkwardness in the room. Tilo watched the mechanic carefully, as though her life depended on it. Men and women in green tunics and trousers, wearing surgical masks, floated around soundlessly in the corridor in operation-theater slippers. Some of them had blood on their surgeons’ gloves. Dr. Verghese looked at Tilo over his reading glasses, studying her as though he was trying to make a diagnosis. Perhaps he was. In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning. There wasn’t much left of it to comfort. After his coffee had been drunk and hers left untouched, he suggested they go back to the ICU and that she apologize to her mother.
“Your mother is a remarkable woman. You must understand that it isn’t she who is uttering those ugly words.”
“Oh. Who is it, then?”
“Someone else. Her illness. Her blood. Her suffering. Our conditioning, our prejudices, our history…”
“So to whom will I be apologizing? To prejudice? Or to history?”
But she was already following him down the corridor, back to the ICU.
By the time they arrived her mother had slipped into a coma. She was beyond hearing, beyond history, beyond prejudice, beyond apology. Tilo curled up on the bed and put her face on her mother’s feet until they went cold. The broken chair watched over them like a melancholy angel. Tilo wondered how her mother had known what the chair would do. How could she have known?
Forget about the broken chairs, they’re always hanging around.