My father’s mother died before I was born. Nynamma refers to the mother of your father and also to your mother’s grandmother on the paternal side. This doubling conflates two people in my mind who differ, but it is hard to keep them apart, to maintain their distinction. My nynamma, not my mother’s, I never met. She, like the other, exists in pictures, now on my parents’ kitchen wall. Looking at them you can see they have colored her cheeks rose, and behind her they added a glow, an aura.
When you gave birth to your daughter, Jhanse atta, you were reborn yourself, the third child pushing your thoughts further apart, and your husband took you to the hospital, where you lived for seven years. You wrote instability into each one of us.
Through cracks in your veins.
The electricity of your voice.
The dried salt under your eyes.
I am walking through the long hall of my home. My son is at school, my daughter has grown seven years without me. When I leave, this hall will be filled with pesticides and seeds, bags of fertilizer for the farmers, my husband’s customers with white cloth around their hair and their loins, their hands and arms wiry from working the earth. He is with his mistress, and the hall with its blue walls that will be covered with dust, and years of dirt, ends at the well. I will haul up today’s water like yesterday and tomorrow.
Knowing you died not by taking your own life but by an accident, the misfortunate choice of where you decided to put your foot, bare, on the nail. The stars many of us have, like my mother on her arm, is the mark of the polio, tetanus or smallpox vaccination. If you had had it the tetanus bacteria wouldn’t have grown in your foot, sending poison to your jaw, spreading down to your nerves and spine. Your body, like stiff wood, convulsed, broke.
Do I know my son, my daughter? What do I know but the hands of these doctors? My family can’t speak about the filth on the walls of the hospital. From my cot on the roof I stare at the stars. The monkeys have come to crouch. He is with her or he is here. It is so hot, the mosquitoes hum outside the nets wall, the house shakes when the last truck passes by.
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Aug 4, 03:47 PM