9. Aisha Paul

My mother was diagnosed with the kidney disorder when I was all of eleven years old, waiting for my period and my bust, and all the guidance my mother could offer when I needed her. She was a bit like superglue. She made the rest of the family stick together and a little whiff of her maternal superpower got us high. I always thought some day she would whip off her saree and show us her Wonder Woman costume. She was my answer to the question, 'What would you want to be when you grow up?' I wanted a husband, a kitchen, two kids and a dog. My mother would laugh so hard listening to my answer from harrowed class teachers. 'It's just a phase,' she would tell them, and then tell me, 'I was married when I was eighteen and although I love your father and you and your brother, I still wish I had a few years to myself when I was young.'

  'But—'

  'You have to be more than me, Aisha,' she used to say, her eyes twinkling with innocent hope. 'And you will have boyfriends and a career and you will make stupid decisions.' Clearly introducing her to the joy of Bridget Jones movies wasn't one of my brightest ideas.

  'I want you to be more than what I was and will ever be,' she would say.

  'But all I want is to be you,' I would snap and she would smile at my naivety.

  And then it all came crashing down.

  All these years, she had been slowly withering away inside. My mother was diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease. While it is not an uncommon disease, fatal only in a small percentage of people, it is an extremely expensive ailment. You would be surprised how easily people say, at least she will live, and not realize how things will never be the same again.

  'Will you die?' I had asked my mother.

  'Of course not!' my father had said and pulled me close to him. My mother laughed and brought us some pakodas she had been frying. Sarthak continued to play Fury on his computer like nothing had happened.

But slowly my mother's appearance began to deteriorate—her eyes were constantly puffy, her skin lost its lustre and she was always tired. And though her smile never faded, an unmistakeable exhaustion had crept into it. For the first few months, she spent more time in hospitals than in her beloved kitchen, undergoing a battery of tests. Father broke FDs, encashed LTAs and put it all into doctors and hospitals, flying her from Delhi to Bangalore to Mumbai to Chennai for a second, third and a fourth opinion. The answer was pretty simple—regular dialysis for the rest of her life and prayers that her kidneys don't give up.

  After that we all resumed our lives, getting used to living with and loving an older, MS DOS version of our mother. Then the first cracks began to appear. Regular dialysis meant an additional expense of 8 lakhs a year (in addition to the visits to many doctors), which meant all my parents' savings were gone within the first two and half years. We moved into a tiny, one-bedroom apartment. Sarthak and I would sleep in the bedroom and my mother would sleep on the sofa in the living room.

  My father started working overtime and still wouldn't earn anything to save for a rainy day, so we just hoped there wouldn't be any. My mother's illness, no matter how hard she tried, wasn't only hers to carry. It was ours as well.

  My shoes were worn out, Sarthak's bag was torn and tattered, and my father's shirts kept ripping off from where my mother had darned them.

  Sometimes late into the night I would watch my mother staring at her medical reports and bills, crying, drinking bottle after bottle of water because the doctors had told her it helps the kidneys. She would sit in front of the TV, out of habit, but not switch it on. She would lie sweating beneath the still fan to save on the electricity bill. My father would flick newspapers from colleagues' desks after they were done and read it in the night. Unnecessary furniture was sold off. My parents even went off tea for an entire year. We never ate out. No picnics. No fetes. There was a sadness but we were never unhappy.

  Days passed and things never looked up financially. There was never enough to go around. Sarthak and I garnered whatever scholarships, cash prizes, and the like we could get to help with the expenses. We would scribble on newspapers to save paper, slyly eat out of other's lunches to keep from eating a lot at home, and steal from the library. Sarthak even got a scholarship to a boarding school and left for a few months, leaving us richer but quite miserable without him. But he didn't last long and came scampering back.

  My mother, my beautiful, smiling mother started to break down, one smile at a time and one day, when I was just fifteen, I found her in the bathroom, naked and in a pool of blood. My mother had tried to kill herself. She was still conscious when I found her. I had shouted and pulled her away from the shower, and dragged her limp body on to the sofa in the bedroom.

  She had turned on the shower so that I didn't have to clean up later, she told me afterwards.

  I called the doctors who stitched my mom up (she refused to go to any hospitals so they made our bedroom into a makeshift hospital bed), and called me brave and whatnot. Sarthak and my father were visiting relatives in Raipur.

  She made me promised not to tell my brother and father about the little incident. It's our secret, she told me.

  'Why did you do it?' I asked, crying, thinking of what my life would be like if she had died in the shower. The thought was unbearable, it was like a physical pain, like someone had reached down my throat and was clawing at my internal organs. I howled.

  'I . . . I didn't want to be a burden any more, Aisha . . .'

  'You're not a burden!' I shouted and hit my mother repeatedly. I thought of her being dead, burnt, ashes, nowhere, nothingness. I would be so lost.

  'Yes, I am, Aisha. You could have such a better life without me. You would be fine without me,' she said.

  I wanted to slap my mother really hard, like really hard. How would my life make sense if I couldn't share it with my beautiful mother? She was my only friend! How could she say that? Was she insane? I wiped my tears on the end of her saree and said in as serious a voice as I could muster, 'If you ever try this again, I swear on you, no, not on you—that wouldn't work—I swear on my father I will kill myself.' And with that I jerked the cannula off my mother's hand and jammed it into my wrist. God! That hurt!

  My mother gasped and pulled the needle out, little puddles of tears in her eyes, as she rubbed the blood off my wrist and asked me if it was paining.

  'Do I make myself clear, Mom?' I asked, trying not to wince since I was making a strong point here.

  My mother tearfully nodded. She cleaned up the wound on my wrist and covered it with a Band-Aid.

  'But Aisha, promise me something?'

  'What?'

  'You will not grow up to be like me.'

  Now that was confusing. 'Who should I grow up to be like then?'

  'Find that out yourself. Find out what kind of woman you would want to be. Just don't be me.'

  'Why?'

  'Didn't I almost leave you alone in this world? Didn't I just fail?'

  That she had. Her selfless act was pretty selfish after all. Her love for me and for us was flawed after all, and beneath the saree there was no shield, and no star-spangled Wonder Woman costume.

  'But I love you,' I said and hugged my mother.

  Since that day, following my mother's instructions, I started my search to find a different me, one different from Mom.

  I had to be someone better. I had to become my own woman.

  It was three months after the incident that my father's overtimes resulted in a promotion that loosened the noose around our necks but by then I knew I didn't want to be my mother any more.