The rays of the sun were appearing in the distant sky, like a flower opening up its petals, that floated through the doorway, as I opened the latch. I held the glass of water in my hand, while the beam reflected off, creating a rainbow through the doorway, but it stopped up to the bed where she lay. The sounds of her breathing grew heavier and heavier as it echoed into the street. I wiped a tear from my face.
She laying there with her eyes closed and her body was as stiff as ice.
‘Bibi-Ji pani’ (mother water) I said. I tried to make her sip some drops of water and
stroked her hair. She looked so tired, and frail as I held her hand. I clutched it tight like a child watching her dense exhale.
The door rattled and I saw two ladies standing at the doorway. They were both wearing Indian suits and had their dupattas covering their heads. The clothes they wore were dirty and tattered from the labour of work.
‘Sat sri akal beti’ (God is the Ultimate Truth) they said and asked me how she was. I let go of her hand slowly and watched them come inside to sit with her.
‘God whose evil eye has caste this on your mother?’ one of the women asked.
‘I cannot believe how frail she looks, she used to be as strong as an ox, and do you remember when she carried her own mother-in-law during partition?’ the
other women said.
As I made the tea in the kitchen I remembered my mother telling me the story of her journey from Pakistan to India before I got married. When the partition happened. My parents had to leave their home with all their possessions on a cart. My grandmother was travelling with them was blind and had been injured as a result of the transition. My mother had told me that she had carried her frail mother- in-law across the treacherous paths.
She told me that it been a difficult journey they had lost many of their property leaving their home and going to India. It had been traumatising as many people were injured, killed and it was chaotic time in their lives.
I brought the tea for the ladies and they asked me how the family was doing, I wanted to tell them that I missed my family back in England, and that I hated the heat beating down on my head, I felt hot, and that every time a plane would cross the sky my heart would think of home.
Looking round my mother’s home in India, Kartarpur, brought memories of my childhood, of how myself and my two sisters used to play as children and run down the street and pick apples from the tree. My dad would often come home after making furniture such as tables and chairs and we would run up to him shouting ‘papaji’(father) and hug him. I missed him so much, I was devastated when he died as I had missed out on attending his funeral. I was so close to him.
My dad was a handsome man who was training to be a professional hockey player, he told me when he was alive that he was injured when a car hit him on the leg.
I could see the disappointment on his eyes as he used to sew clothes and take measurements of the locals around the village so that we could go to school. I wished he was here with me now so that I could talk to him and hear his voice. I looked at my mother as she lay there and she did look frail like a small baby
on the munga (bed) I had called a doctor who had told me that there were nothing that he could do to save her, and I felt so hopeless.
I had called my sisters to visit, but my elder one wasn’t speaking to the middle one, I was always stuck as the youngest. I felt their jealousy, not that they admitted to it, that I had married and I had a more stable life when they were living in poverty. I had paid for the doctors and my mother’s medicine, which I knew they couldn’t afford to do. But this meant that I was alone in our old home as they couldn’t travel .
I was unassisted and watching my mother slip away from me.
I didn’t know what to say to her as she lay there, we had hardly been that close, I felt that she hadn’t really loved me as I wanted her to. I could always talk to my dad but not with her.
She never displayed affection to me when I was young, I was like a boy always climbing trees and getting filthy and she felt that she disapproved of me. I felt that I was not pretty as my other sisters, as I was too skinny and tall and I was told by her on a daily basis and she worried whether I would be ever be married.
She seemed to blame me for that, while my two sisters had married at a younger age, I remember her cursing and looking towards the heavens and then at me. I wanted to study, but my father could not afford to after his accident. He had always wanted me to go to college and finish my education but I knew that was a dream. My mother didn’t understand that, she wanted me to get married and didn’t encourage me with studying. I had to watch her cook endlessly on a daily basis.
‘Who’s going to marry you, if you cannot cook? ‘ she would ask.
‘You have to make your husband happy, that is what matters. He is the most important person in the world.’ Or ‘Why don’t you try to make more effort on how you look?, I don’t know how you are going to marry or who is going to marry you?’
Those words rang in my ears, they stung like a snake.
‘Take care of yourself’. Those had been her only words to me, when I accepted the proposal to marry Baljit. I was twenty one, he was a shopkeeper in Wolverhampton which was a different place for me. I was trembling and my heart was beating. I felt anxiety over travelling so far away from my family and home that familiarity. My dad was gleaming with pride over the marriage, but with my mother it was just pressure off her. ‘ Thank god’ she would say.
I used to telephone her on a regular basis when I left but she really didn’t say anything to me like I miss you or asked how I was. Only my dad would ask me to come back and visit. I wiped a tear from my cheek and my heart was aching with pain as I missed him so much. I held the necklace in my hand he had given me the only treasured article he had before I left.
‘Cough Cough…..Gulpreet…’ She said. She was asking for my dad. That was
his name. She lay helpless like an animal trapped in a cage and all I could do but watch. I held her hand again.
But it just slipped through like ice and lay firm on the end of the bed.
‘Bibi-JI’ I screamed. My voice echoed all around the house like a ball bouncing off as it disappeared with no one to hear it. All that remained was her body with me as she lay peaceful as though she was sleeping.
I can see the ocean slowly disappearing like smoke from a fire as the plane lifts into the sky. I am coming back home. I wanted to say so much to her,
I wanted her to hug me, kiss me but there was nothing at the end. Just meand her and emptiness between us. I had scattered her aches at Kiratpur as shewould have wanted but my heart is desolate. As I look out at the window to take a look outside the plane, I see a strange beautiful bird with colours of red, green and blue as it flies almost side by side as I am leaving India. I feel as though it is making sure that I leave safely. But it is silly to think that? Isn’t it I tell myself.
The swing is creaking back and forth and I sit in the garden back home. I haven’t cried. Baljit is worried about me. But thinks that I have accepted how relations were between myself and my mother. The sun is glowing from out from the between the clouds and going towards the fence. I sit with my eyes downwards and hear a ‘cheep’ cheep’ and I look at the fence where the sun is gleaming towards and there it is the same mysterious bird.
I am startled as I look at it again, it has the identical colours of red, green and blue. It looks at me and and flaps its wings and spreads them out to keep the sunlight at bay and shades me from its beam.
The tears start to roll down from my eyes and Baljit run’s out of the kitchen towards me.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes……. I am’, as I wipe the tears of joy, ‘I know that mum really cared for me and is always here watching over me’.
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