by Amita Basu

All afternoon, I sit outside the O.T., listening to the bone saw buzzing through Ma’s bones. The thigh bone is the strongest bone in a woman’s body—it was a tour guide showing Ma and me around the cremation ghats at Benaras who told us this years ago. Is it true? I’ve never looked it up. It’s one of ten thousand curiosities that’ve scuttled across my mind, made me glance up, then slunk away to rot on life’s growing rubbish heap. Between Ma and me now stand two doors and a set of steel-blue hospital curtains. Still, my nostrils sniff the bleach-purged air for the scent of blood.

It must be by the backway that they wheel Ma out—I hear the bone saw quieten, then nothing. I’m peeping between the curtains when the nurse comes to say Ma’s in the recovery room. She leads me to the door and waddles away.

I lean against the door surveying the white-sheeted trolley beds. Somewhere outside, a dog snarls and growls. One bed is less flat than the others. I tiptoe across the empty room. Beside every bed is a chair. I stay standing. I won’t be here long.

The nurse says Ma didn’t need a transfusion, didn’t lose too much blood during her knee replacement surgery. Maybe they were wrong: Ma looks bloodless. In contrast, her skin’s pleasant yellowness has deepened: she looks like someone dying of jaundice. People say it’s melanin, but now I see it’s blood that gives skin most of its colour.

I’ve no scruples anymore about looking at someone who can’t look back. It’s Ma’s fault that I’m the only one left to look. Forty years she’s lived like this, with two busted knees, refusing surgery and praying aloud for death, pain her constant companion, twisting her face ugly, teasing her voice shrill, whetting her words into rapiers that hissed at everybody and swore that their lives, too, would end in a rubbish heap of bad choices, failure, and pain.

Pain, they say, sows the seeds of compassion. Maybe if the seeds fall in the right soil.

I’m leaving Ma, too. All these years, I’ve been waiting for the right moment.

I stare down at her. How long has she been shivering? She looks shrunken, small, and flat in the sheets: no wonder it took me a second to spot her. Gingerly, I take her hand, the left hand, free of the cannula. Her veins, bulging from forty years of housework, have flattened into her yellow skin. The flesh of her fingers has shrunk, making the knobby, arthritic joints look enormous. Her hand is cold, too cold for the hand of a sleeper.

Now that Ma’s become bedridden, she’s finally consented to surgery. Left knee now, right knee next year. The right moment to leave somebody—who’s repelled your love year after year, who’s made you, too, snap when somebody else tries to love you, who’s cut into pieces with a few casual words everything you hold dear—is after you’ve won the war, when they finally admit they need you. I’ve won now. I wait for triumph to surge through my unflattened veins.

Rage comes instead, clutching my throat, choking me. Still, I’m rubbing Ma’s cold hand. How soft her skin is at sixty-five, softer than mine; what care she’s taken of her skin. Unthinkingly, I bend down and sniff. There’s no trace of her Pond’s cold cream. I rub her hand harder, trying to rub out the hospital smells.

I ring for the nurse. She adjusts the anaesthetic and antibiotic drips, turns off the ceiling fan, and says everything’s fine. I run out of questions for her. She leaves.

Why should I be here when Ma awakens? Through all the crises of my life, Ma was never there. If she did somehow discover I was in trouble, she flung out a dagger or two, condemning every choice I’d ever made—me, with all my freedom, squandering it—and set her lips and hobbled on.

Soon she’ll awaken. Her doctors will drop by. The nurses will sit her up, feed her soup to break her long fast, and warm her up. Why should I be here? I’ve sacrificed my workday. I deserve my evening back home with Bingo, who loves me, the only creature who ever will. Still massaging, unthinkingly, I look out the window.

A vast raintree shades the courtyard. Powderpuff flowers, pink-and-white and drooping with yellow seed, speckle the rustling bright-green canopy. Mynahs scold. Squirrels cheep. In the abandoned lot behind the hospital, amidst lantana and rubbish heaps, preteen boys, shouting and laughing, play cricket with a cracked bat and a tennis ball cello-taped to make it spin. The dog, which I still can’t see, is snarling, hoarse and desperate now.

Unbidden, images of another childhood throng my mind. Ma didn’t grow up poor, not like these undergrown suntanned boys. Well, after Partition’s uprooting, everybody was poor. Ma considered it no deprivation then to share a bedroom, a study table, and Sunday’s one-egg omelette with her two brothers. But she fought her way into a PhD programme while still giving tuitions morning and evening to help out at home. Halfway through, she was married off, forced to drop out and devote herself to Pa, my brother, and me.

The raintree shivers in the breeze. I look down. How long have the tears been running down Ma’s cheeks? Her eyelids flutter. How long has she been having nightmares? I’m looking down steadily. It’s the world that blurs.

Furiously, I wipe my eyes. Finally, I find the growling dog: a mutt, chained across the playground, the chain cutting into its flesh, making around its throat a collar of pink scars and raw pink flesh. Ceaselessly, it snarls at the children playing cricket.

I discover your face only convulses if you fight your tears. Stop fighting, let your tears flow, and it doesn’t hurt as much. I raise Ma’s hand to wipe away my tears as if I were two again and life stretching before us endlessly like a cat.

Amita Basu is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose fiction appears in over seventy venues, including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge Press, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and Funicular Magazine. She’s a reader at The Metaworker, sustainability columnist and interviews editor at MeanPepperVine, and contributing editor for Fairfield Scribes – ScribesMICRO. Her short story collection At Play and Other Stories is due out with Bridge House Press in 2025. She lives in Bangalore, works at a climate action think tank, and blogs at amitabasu.com.