The Weight of It

“My mother called me in New York from Kerala in India to tell me my 90-year-old grandmother, Laxmi, had fallen on her way to the bathroom. By New Year’s Eve my grandmother wasn’t eating or talking. To my increasingly panicked questions about why she hadn’t been admitted to a hospital yet, I got vague answers. “What can they do for her? We can look after her here. Anyway, she’s afraid of hospitals,” my mother said into the telephone when I nagged her. I had moved to America in 1997 and missed the deaths of everyone I loved. A penniless grad student, I had lived the immigrant nightmare — first my father, then my grandfather had died without me beside them. Their passing had been reported to me from 8,000 miles away, over the phone.

This time around, I was determined to be there. On the flight over I thought of the ritual we had. Every time I came back to what my grandmother liked to grandly call “our ancestral house,” I would drop my bags on the hot concrete of the courtyard and shout “Ammamma.” She would answer from inside, her voice clear and calm, as if I had never been gone. I always felt as if she had been waiting in that precise spot for the years it had taken me to come back. But when I arrived at the house after 26 hours of travel, my grandmother stared up at me from her bed as if she’d never seen me before. Her pupils hardly moved. That’s when I realized that she could slip out of the world without ever knowing that I had come back to be with her.

I had ordered the rickety ambulance that brought my grandmother to the hospital. “Let her be,” my mother said, but I overrode her objections. As I watched the ants scatter, I wondered at my own motives. Was I hoping that the doctors would revive her enough so that she would know I had come? That I loved her enough to fly halfway across the world? Had my guilt at missing those other deaths led me to make such drastic amends? I had no answers. At least she didn’t know where she was. She would have been mortified. I had never seen my grandmother appear in public in anything other than a cotton voile sari in her favorite pale blue or lavender, her knee-length hair in a soft bun. She had the classical beauty one saw in the faces of the goddesses in the vivid calendars that hang in Indian stores. In the hospital they had her in a cheap nightie, purple with garish pink flowers, its neckline gaping.

“The next 12 hours are crucial,” the doctor had said, pointing to a smudge on the CT scans of my grandmother’s brain. Her fall had made a vein burst deep inside. What he was really saying was that it was possible that she would never open her eyes again, never see my face again. When we complained about the ants, the nurse shrugged. She nodded toward the cloth screen that divided our narrow room. There was a family on the other side of the partition. Their patient was an eight-month-old baby with meningitis. The relatives who came to see him brought food in giant tiered stainless steel tiffins. We were assailed at all hours by the smell of chicken curry or the sound of a visiting cousin crunching potato chips. “Blame them,” the nurse said.

My grandmother had kept house for her headmaster husband in small villages until they had retired to our remote farm. I had always thought of her as pure, someone apart from our world, untouched by our chaos. Growing up, she had played hostess for her famous father who worked for the British Raj. She had mastered tennis in long skirts, played the violin for guests. She had an old-fashioned notion of hospitality; I couldn’t be rude to people who shared the room with her. The baby screamed through the day and night. His mother, barely 17 years old, stuck her nipple despairingly into his mouth. When he turned his head violently away she broke down sobbing. “You are lucky to get even this room,” the ward matron said, smug and indifferent behind the Plexiglas of the nurses’ station when I begged for a private room, insisted we could pay.

I imagined my grandmother falling out of the world, her leaving accompanied only by the endless wail of the child. It was a version of purgatory, a very specific karmic punishment devised by a witty god who liked contrasts and paradoxes, the old being sent off by babes in arms. I stood beside my grandmother’s bed and willed her to wake up. I am sorry, I said, hoping she would hear. This was a mistake and we would go home soon, to her room on the farm, with its murmuring radio and the cool green light from the trees in the courtyard pouring in through the windows. Through all the commotion in the hospital room, my grandmother continued unconscious, alone, hidden deep. The bottles of saline and blood, the expensive injections didn’t pull her out. Outside the window, the red dust of the parking lot sifted over the car that would take me to the airport. I had five days before I had to leave to start teaching my semester at New York University. “Pray,” my mother said.

The doctors recommended an operation to relieve the pressure on my grandmother’s brain. They called my mother in to take possession of my grandmother’s dentures. Without them, her chin was longer and more prominent; her mouth fallen in. It was unsettling: Suddenly, my grandmother was an old woman. Hours after the operation and with 16 hours to go before my flight, my grandmother defied the auguries and woke up. The baby’s relatives from the other side of the screen joined us as we circled her bed. My grandmother looked up at us as the baby’s mother, swept up in the general jubilation, patted my grandmother’s shoulder. So nice of you to visit, my grandmother assured the girl. Tell your mother I asked after her, she said.

When my grandmother finally turned to look at me, she gave me her brand-new toothless-baby grin. “When did you come from America?” she said, lucid for a moment. Then she sailed off again: “Child, ask your grandfather to come downstairs,” she said of her husband who had been dead for 14 years. “Tell him dinner is ready.” If only that was the happy ending to this story. After her brief flare, my grandmother slipped back into the dark. Bedridden, unable to move her hands or legs, barely sentient, she lived on for another year. My mother nursed her day and night at home, spooning water into her mouth. Once I got back to New York, I couldn’t find another $1,500 to visit her again.

So I called instead, every day. I made my mother tell me every painful detail about my grandmother’s condition. Unable to swallow anything but rice and vegetables ground into a mush, her skin flaking from dehydration, her bent limbs curling into themselves, her end was relayed to me inch by suffering inch. I had been upset when the doctors removed her dentures, but now everything that made her familiar was gone. Her soft glowing skin, her love of Cadbury chocolate, her keen interest in news stories of gruesome murders — everything fell away. I never brought it up with my mother, but I kept circling back to the same question: What if I hadn’t insisted we take her to the hospital? She could have died whole, intact, still the person she was. I had prolonged her suffering and my mother’s pain with my stubborn belief in the power of medicine to fix things.

My grandmother died last January, more than a year after I had said goodbye in that hospital room. I felt a terrible grief and then relief. It was over. For all of us. It was only later, thinking about that day when I had seen my grandmother for the last time, I remembered how I had walked to the bed and bent down to touch her feet in the traditional Hindu way. We touch the feet of our elders on important life occasions like a wedding day or at the beginning of long journeys. Even in her muddled state, she had remembered the gesture she had used all her life. Her hand had rested on my head for an instant. I can still feel the weight of it. She must have forgotten the ritual benediction, “Long life.” Instead she said, “Come back soon. Tell everyone in America I asked after them.” I have my guilt and regret, but I also have this. Her last touch, to take into the years with me. I like to think she knew, somewhere deep inside, that I had come back.”

~ Meera Nair was born in India and grew up in five different states before moving to the US in 1997. Her first collection, Video (NY: Pantheon 2003) won the Sixth Annual Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize. She wrote her middle-grade children's book, "Maya Saves the Day" because when she was growing up, children's books in India didn't feature any children from India.

A recipient of fellowships from the NY Times, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Council for the Arts and MacDowell Colony, her work has appeared on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, the Washington Post, the New York Times magazine and The Hindu among other places. To find out more visit:
www.meeranair.net