By Ragini Gupta
Winter 2020 Kaplan Award Winner
I was thirteen when I realized that I was a murderer.
I was born into a home that housed my parents, sister and my father’s mother, Ma.
Ma was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer when I was twelve years old.
A few months before her death sentence, I fell sick during the swine flu breakout in India. I remember being terrified while a needle sucked in vials full of blood to confirm the results. My dread made Ma’s face so red as she pained for me that I forgot about the needle in my arm, scared her high blood pressure would cause her to burst like a forgotten tomato heating up in the oven.
I tested positive and was highly contagious, but that didn’t prevent Ma from staying by my side day and night. My swine flu and I were quarantined to her room and my inhabitant faded away, overpowered by the dominance of her comfort.
In turn, my response to her noninfectious, fatal disease was a fear that her metastatic tumor could contaminate me with the realization that I would have to exist without her.
Unlike my swine flu, her tumor and I couldn’t exist in the same space with her.
I had months to prepare for her death but instead I distanced myself from her, thinking that if I didn’t face reality, the real would be made unreal.
Losing a grandparent might be a natural part of childhood, but Ma’s role in raising me was no less than my mother’s. She greatly influenced the foundation of the person I was for the first twelve years of my life. My response to her cancer has been dedicated by the rest.
Before she fell sick, I slept in her room – my mother said if I didn’t, Ma would be lonely. My grandfather had died shortly after my parents were married, and Ma spent every morning praying at the mini temple in her room, where she kept his portrait.
There were nights I insisted that I sleep in my parents’ bed instead. Those times Ma would stand outside my parents’ room and beg me to come sleep with her, her body tilted, mainly supported by her good leg – the other had been significantly weakened by a stroke.
But I would refuse, and my mother would wait for me to fall asleep so that my she could carry me back to Ma’s room, who was awake, meditating in wait for me.
Ma smelt of tobacco and poetry. I say that not to sound romantic but because I’ve smelt tobacco that wasn’t mixed with her and it doesn’t smell like home would.
After her morning prayers, she would drink tea with me before I left for school, and would then call her three remaining daughters – one died in a plane crash.
She sometimes spent hours on her desk, writing poems, but she hardly told me stories about herself – instead she would tell me stories about god, so I became religious.
I don’t know if it was because I loved god or because she made him sound so real that I felt the need to love him the way she did.
But when she died, she took my belief in the gods she worshipped with her. I wondered if the hours spent on the marble floor in front of her temple weren’t out of devotion but rather out of her desire to be with her husband and daughter.
Maybe it was because she stayed by my side and didn’t catch the flu that I thought she could never fall sick apart from her scattered asthma attacks. Maybe it was because she was so integrated into my life that I couldn’t imagine that it was possible for us to not be alive at the same time.
Because I didn’t believe she would die even though she was dying every day, screaming in the hospital bed in her room which no longer felt like hers even though her cancer had imprisoned her to it – after serving her time she was carried out as a corpse.
It took me three years to move out from my sister’s room and into Ma’s, and I still don’t think it ever really became mine.
I think one of the anxieties that comes with going back home is going to that room. Everything that was Ma about it has been stripped out.
It feels less like mine than it did when she was there. It holds so much of me that being there is exhausting – I am most at home but also with the parts I hate most about myself.
I still think that a lot of how I perceive myself is an ongoing response to her cancer.
I read an article about how one can die of a broken heart and figured I was important enough to be so loved by her that I killed her by not giving enough love back.
I’ve often wondered if holding onto this idea of being a murderer is something I use as an escape for situations where I can’t perform up to my expectations. There is something about hating oneself that is so rewarding.
Now I smoke cigarettes over her bathroom sink.
The ash falls down the drain that swallowed droplets of blood, which forced their way out of her throat – the first sign of her lung cancer.
My parents are going to renovate the house because it’s being attacked by termites. The only thing that’s left of Ma are the lights. She would leave them on while she prepared for bed because I was scared of the dark. If the light was on, I knew she was coming back.
I know she isn’t anymore, even worse, I don’t know if I want her to because we would both have a hard time recognizing who I’ve become.
But I’m not ready to let go of the lights.