Even now, old enough to know better, I still tell it
the same way. My grandmother had never lost a thing in her life, I say, not
till the day I turned thirteen.
The rest of this is what I don’t say.
Because Ammuma didn’t really own much by then, of course;
just one pair of ruby earrings and some white cotton saris which she stretched
out to dry from a string across the bathroom. When I was tiny she would scoop
me damp and soapy from the bath each night, resting me on her hip as her one
gold tooth crunched down on some mint-soaked cloves. Together we’d watch
streetlights crackle through the frosted glass and we’d pick at paint bubbles
around the rackety sash window. The street curved away beneath us, mapped by
swerving dabs of cigarettes and lonely fluorescent bus shelters.
“I haven’t lost anything, Sita,” Ammuma would whisper as my
skin began to chill into gooseflesh. “I’ve left it behind, that’s all.”
“Amah!”
It was black outside, a mud-bellied, gritty dawn that banged
its teeth against the windows. Through my bedroom doorway I could see the hall
clock looming solid and certain; six o’clock exactly, with a make-no-mistake
air about its hands. It was my birthday, I was thirteen now, and in the
bathroom Ammuma was calling for her mother.
“Amah!”
I scrambled out of bed,
pressing my face between the splintered banisters. My mother was already there,
swooping downstairs in her faded flannel nightgown. That was no surprise; she
had eyes in her spectacles case and ears in her discarded slippers, she slept
in catnaps and would shake me awake from nightmares before they’d even come. I
saw her pause, peer through the rainy drape of vests and tights, and then sweep
them down into puddled clots on the floor. Ammuma crouched behind them, tipped
over the greenish sink with a single red earring gleaming in the nest of her
hair. She looked confused, with a queasy sort of misery that settled deeper at
the sight of my mother’s sleepless eyes and lemon-juice mouth.
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