She’s gotten terribly heavy around the middle.
Father says that wasn’t always the case, a fact corroborated by her every chance she got. She hadn’t been middle-heavy before, just now when the times were finally catching up. One could see how her bone structure wasn’t built to carry all that bulk, chicken legs bent under strain and a limp evident in one leg when she pushed up from a long time sitting. First one side, then the other, she would waddle across the room, a comical figure. It wasn’t funny anymore.
Lying with her eyes closed, she looks at peace, in a deep sleep where she sees things of beauty the heavens jealously protect and show only the good. And she was good, so very good. Born the year Pakistan and India split in two, traversing a long distance to come to a new country and a new beginning in the womb of her tired mother who survived a fall and a wagon wheel on her chest, she’d perfected the art of taking life as it came, quietly, sweetly, patiently. I cannot remember a time when she lost her cool.
The red roses are bright against the white scarf around her head. It brings out the pale tinge of her face and the dark hollows under her eyes, but her skin looks better than it had in days. Soft, beautiful skin, clear and without a mark. The wrinkles were heavy on the jowls now, but I can imagine them pulled tight across high cheekbones and a firm jaw. Color like that of baked sand in a desert far from civilization—unadulterated by human influence—and a soul to match.
Everybody is speaking at the same time. Most are loud, for apparently, that’s the accepted way to show emotion. I don’t want to be loud, yet in my quietness and individuality, I cannot bring extend a hand to touch that cheek one last time. I want to, but my breath is like a rock in my chest, every shove from the throbbing crowd seeming to lodge it deeper up my throat. I can’t speak.
They want to take her away now. The time has come, they say. I push myself to my feet. I’m strangely in control and for a moment I hate myself. How come I am not howling? How come the tears are not rushing down my cheeks and sobs wracking my body raw?
I feel curiously lightheaded, a floating balloon in danger of being carried away if not anchored by a caring hand. I cannot follow. They’ve lifted her up and the doors of her house are wide open. They take her out, out onto the street she walked more times than I can count, out amongst the people she wanted to come back to. But now she has left again. A betrayal, I say. She’s left again for the last time, now going to sleep beneath dust and rocks, in a cold, dark, unfamiliar grave that I cannot reach.