Rai had entered her marriage a sylph-like twenty-one-year-old, but unlike many of her peers, who’d eventually allowed time and happiness to soften their edges, gently pad their bodies, my mother had clung to her youthful shape with a kind of feral obsession.
“Control, Ari,” she’d said to me more than once when she skipped a meal or replaced it with black coffee. “It’s about control.”
I’d often been a surprise to those who didn’t know the family. Strangers would compliment her on her cute younger brother, only for her to shock them by claiming me as her son.
“But you’re so young!” they’d inevitably exclaimed. “And your waist is so tiny!”
She’d been so proud of that waist, so proud that she could still fit into the clothes she’d brought from India all those years ago.
Not that she’d ever worn those clothes in the years following her determined embrace of her new life. Yet she’d kept them. A talisman to remind her of the poverty-stricken village from which she’d come?
Perhaps.
I’d seen her sitting on her bed once, a pale blue top in her hands, her fingers running over the stitches. “Amma made me this,” she’d said when I came closer. “A ‘fancy embroidered’ top for my fancy new life. ‘So lucky, meri Nina. Marrying such a dhanee man. Wah! You’ll wear diamonds and silk. The gods are smiling on you!’”
She’d laughed then, the sound a shard of broken glass edged with blood.
Handling a woman that slender, that small, wouldn’t have been difficult for an athletic sixteen-year-old boy who had several inches on her. After all, I’d done it many times by then, sweet cocktail fumes thickening the air around me as I carried my mother to the sofa or the bed.
“My son.” Her hand against my cheek, the points of her long nails pressing into my skin. “My pride. Mere dil ka tukda.”
Laughter again. It grated, nails on a chalkboard, even after all these years.
Because if I’d been a piece of her heart, it was a piece she’d alternately adored and resented. I’d been the weight that held her to her toxic marriage. My father would’ve discarded her without a backward look should she have pushed for a divorce. But his son and heir? Never. Ishaan Rai would’ve battled to the bitter end to keep hold of me.
A burst of dazzling white against the green. It was a scene-of-crime officer. A second SOCO became visible in a small gap between the trees the next instant, his overalls the same crisp white except where they were streaked with dirt and crushed green.
Ironic, that she’d have all this attention now, my mother, who’d craved it her entire life.
“Here.” Constable Neri returned with a bright orange plastic crate. “You’re probably not meant to stand for long.”
Once, I might’ve been embarrassed at being treated like an invalid. Today, I didn’t care. “Thanks.” Politeness is a good thing; it works to keep people onside, keep them talking—and keep them from looking too deep. People tell me all kinds of things because I’m polite and empathic.
Dr. Jitrnicka tells me it’s a controlling tactic because I do it with so much self-awareness.
I waited to sit until after Constable Neri had turned away. It was an ungainly process, but I finally got myself down, the moon boot stuck out in front of me, and my crutches laid down neatly on one side. Face flushed from the maneuver, I reached inside one of the pockets of my sweatpants—which were slit open on one side to accommodate the boot—to pull out the strip of tablets I kept in there.
“These are for the migraines,” Dr. Binchy had said as he wrote out the prescription. “Use them with thought, but don’t hold off if you feel one building up. They work better if you get in early. Let it dissolve on your tongue, then swallow.”
The dull throbbing in my temples heralded the onset of one of the fuckers that had haunted me since the accident. Still, I hesitated. The medication worked but, for me, led to an inevitable wave of exhaustion in the hours following. Take one now and I’d be in bed after lunch for at least two hours.
The throbbing increased, nausea churning in my gut.
“Shit.” Removing one of the tablets, I placed it on my tongue, let the pharmaceuticals work their magic.
“Drugs will eat your brain, Ari, leave you with an empty khopdi.” My mother, standing in the doorway to my room with a cut-glass tumbler in hand, her black dress a fine wool